Remodelling the Games Industry

An article/manifesto/announcement here on Greg Costikyan's blog - he's actually following up on his previous games industry rants and trying to set up his own company to combat the insidious effect of EA on gaming innovation. I thought I babble a bit, but he goes on at great length about the problems of the games industry as it stands, and proposes a solution in his two-part article, "Death to the Game Industry: Long Live Games" at The Escapist. Part 1 is here and is his very lengthy description of the problem, complete with diagrams that are the equivalent of business buzzwords. Part 2 is here and is his proposed solution. I shall summarise the main points of Part 1 eventually, but his proposed solution is:

1. Developers fund the games themselves (with what? venture capitalism I assume)
   
2. Blow up retailers (Huh? Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm pretty sure he means "get rid of the current publishers-to-retailers model and have developers distribute the games themselves")
3. Change consumer perception of downloaded games vs. solid media. (i.e. that downloaded games are scary/unreliable and solid media is the only way)
   

Now I'm not going to go through the points of his whole screed just yet coz it's late and I'm already sleep-deprived... but is it just me or is this exactly the direction Valve are going, but without the big song-and-dance? They have Steam to distribute their product, which they are also licensing out as a distribution platform - thus supplementing their Half-Life 2 and other games sales income with something more steady and presumably providing them with a source for funding any future game development, nicely removing the need to pitch their games to venture capitalists instead of publishers...

Fair play to both of them, I say. Enough with FIFA and Championship Manager 200x already.

One point I have to make about changing consumer perception - I have no personal experience with Steam so I don't know how they resolve this issue - I do have a very healthy and justified mistrust of hard drives and their ability to choke and die, losing all my data. It's nice to know that I have a DVD kicking about in a drawer that I can just reinstall from instead of having to sit online for days to re-download all the software. That kind of thing eats up my bittorrent bandwidth! I hear you can burn the games to DVD once you have them - how exactly does that work? Would I be able to reinstall and reactivate it without an internet connection? The Steam website doesn't really tell you anything other than to install their client, and I'm not doing that until I know what it does. Well, that and I don't want their games coz I'm rubbish at FPS. I might get it soon for Rag Doll Kung Fu though...


Tagged: games