“Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?”

Dvorak’s recent article about the end of the game industry has sure been raising some ire across forums around the net.
Clearly, he raises some interesting points in the article, but doesn’t he come off more like the stereotypical “old guy” who has lost touch with society? He seems to think that the fact that he is bored with games should extend to the rest of the universe.
I’ve been complaining about how many poorly-produced, uncreative games there are since probably 1996. But what’s clear is that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Because a lot of people are still buying these games, and still enjoying them. In fact the industry continues to grow, year-on-year. Don’t the numbers speak for themselves?
I do get depressed when Beyond Good & Evil and Katamari Damacy do pitiful numbers in the U.S. But then, so do most of the independent movies I enjoy, and jazz players are certainly not raking in the money. So the key really is for us to figure out a business model that allows people making innovative, creative games to survive. And for these games to be able to get out into the marketplace so that people who ARE interested in them are able to find them.
On the PC side this is slowly forming, but on the console side we haven’t had a business model that works well. It’s simply still too expensive to create a console game, the number of games that can ship on each console is limited, and you have to engage a publisher who is willing to put out your title. These are problems we need to address and resolve, quickly.


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2 responses to ““Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?””

  1. Kim Pallister Avatar

    Dvorak has seemed that way long before this article. I think this is one of the many reasons for the decline of PC Mag – an older, out of touch, editorial staff that still thinks they are the shit that they were a decade ago.
    Dvorak is the Andy Rooney of the PC industry.
    K

  2. Jean-Paul Mari Avatar
    Jean-Paul Mari

    Hi,
    Dvorak should have a look at the past and remember mother nature hates the void. Commercial video games are present since 30-35 years, companies come and go but there is always new comers with new products. This industry works also with new generations of gamers but how many of them remember names of developers from the 80