The Games Industry in 2010

Well, that's it. Video games are officially serious business.

Last year, the film industry made approximately $10,800,428,340 dollars in box office revenue. The interactive entertainment industry made fifty-seven billion. At the same time, economies are struggling or outright collapsing worldwide. I firmly believe that we are all experiencing a unique moment in the industry’s history, one of those turning points that will be looked back upon if not fondly, then at least reverently in the future.

Individual genres within the medium have stopped standing head-and-shoulders above their predecessors’ accomplishments, and current hardware has ceased to shame any and all comers before it. A time is near when (and this may have already come to pass for many) the average gaming enthusiast won’t give a damn how many processors you can shove into a box.
 
So where do you go when you can’t go up?
 

We play games in a time when they’re refining themselves, when they’ve stopped searching for the “next big thing” and have started exploring previously established concepts, breaking them down to their base components, examining and reevaluating them.
 

An excellent example of this is the recently released Darksiders, a game that, while doing nothing terribly exciting with its narrative or characters, handily incorporates key elements from two extremely marriageable genres: puzzle platformers and combo-based hack-and-slash.
 

The two titles that are often mentioned in conjunction with Vigil Games’ latest are The Legend of Zelda series and the God of War series, and with good reason. Still, I feel like anything that can be said about the correlations between those games has been said already and probably by someone who said it better than I could, so I’ll just let that dog lie. My point in all of this is that, while it does very little to incorporate anything new into games, Darksiders still contributes to the medium via its experimentation with game play archetypes.

 
On the other end of the innovation spectrum we have Mass Effect 2. I don’t think I have to argue that the main draw to ME2 is the narrative: whether it lived up to expectations or not, it is undeniable that there was an almost hysterical sensitivity to spoilers around the forums during the weeks leading up to its release. It wasn’t just on Giant Bomb, either (though we certainly had our share); Kotaku and Demonoid both saw a strange mix of giddily excited threads and threads who’s only purpose was to rage incoherently about the number of spoilers the thread starter had been inadvertently “exposed to."
 

 
In the same way that Darksiders chooses the interactive side of the medium to focus on and excel at, Mass Effect 2 pursues the cinematic route. While the character development, story progression and pacing are all pretty spot-on and Bioware continues to expand upon their dialogue systems with the new interrupt feature, when talking about Mass Effect 2 in purely mechanical terms, it does little if anything that hasn’t been seen or done better in another game previously.
 
And that’s okay.
 

See, games have gotten to the point where I feel that the pressure to be “bigger, better and more badass” isn’t really present anymore, or at least not in the same way. Flavor and personality seem to be attaching themselves more and more to a title’s success both critically and commercially, as seen with the recently launched Star Trek Online. Jeff Gerstmann himself said that the game isn’t technically impressive and that it doesn’t do anything that he hasn’t seen in the MMO genre before, but that he’s willing to continue playing just so that it will continue to replicate the lights, sounds and feel of the Star Trek universe.
 

It’s no longer about being the best, most mechanically sound game, but the most interesting. No longer about originating ideas, but implementing them in a polished, sleek way. No longer about being the best third-person shooter out there, but about having that mechanic serve as a girder to support the stronger aspects of your game. No longer about doing what every MMO has done before you and more, but about the presentation of those familiar concepts and the context that they’re placed in.
 

It may not be 1998, but 2010 promises to be an interesting year for video games as they explore more and more of their potential. I for one am happy to be here to see it.
 
Thanks for reading,

End_Boss.

Well, that's it. Video games are officially serious business.

Last year, the film industry made approximately $10,800,428,340 dollars in box office revenue. The interactive entertainment industry made fifty-seven billion. At the same time, economies are struggling or outright collapsing worldwide. I firmly believe that we are all experiencing a unique moment in the industry’s history, one of those turning points that will be looked back upon if not fondly, then at least reverently in the future.

Individual genres within the medium have stopped standing head-and-shoulders above their predecessors’ accomplishments, and current hardware has ceased to shame any and all comers before it. A time is near when (and this may have already come to pass for many) the average gaming enthusiast won’t give a damn how many processors you can shove into a box.
 
So where do you go when you can’t go up?
 

We play games in a time when they’re refining themselves, when they’ve stopped searching for the “next big thing” and have started exploring previously established concepts, breaking them down to their base components, examining and reevaluating them.
 

An excellent example of this is the recently released Darksiders, a game that, while doing nothing terribly exciting with its narrative or characters, handily incorporates key elements from two extremely marriageable genres: puzzle platformers and combo-based hack-and-slash.
 

The two titles that are often mentioned in conjunction with Vigil Games’ latest are The Legend of Zelda series and the God of War series, and with good reason. Still, I feel like anything that can be said about the correlations between those games has been said already and probably by someone who said it better than I could, so I’ll just let that dog lie. My point in all of this is that, while it does very little to incorporate anything new into games, Darksiders still contributes to the medium via its experimentation with game play archetypes.

 
On the other end of the innovation spectrum we have Mass Effect 2. I don’t think I have to argue that the main draw to ME2 is the narrative: whether it lived up to expectations or not, it is undeniable that there was an almost hysterical sensitivity to spoilers around the forums during the weeks leading up to its release. It wasn’t just on Giant Bomb, either (though we certainly had our share); Kotaku and Demonoid both saw a strange mix of giddily excited threads and threads who’s only purpose was to rage incoherently about the number of spoilers the thread starter had been inadvertently “exposed to."
 

 
In the same way that Darksiders chooses the interactive side of the medium to focus on and excel at, Mass Effect 2 pursues the cinematic route. While the character development, story progression and pacing are all pretty spot-on and Bioware continues to expand upon their dialogue systems with the new interrupt feature, when talking about Mass Effect 2 in purely mechanical terms, it does little if anything that hasn’t been seen or done better in another game previously.
 
And that’s okay.
 

See, games have gotten to the point where I feel that the pressure to be “bigger, better and more badass” isn’t really present anymore, or at least not in the same way. Flavor and personality seem to be attaching themselves more and more to a title’s success both critically and commercially, as seen with the recently launched Star Trek Online. Jeff Gerstmann himself said that the game isn’t technically impressive and that it doesn’t do anything that he hasn’t seen in the MMO genre before, but that he’s willing to continue playing just so that it will continue to replicate the lights, sounds and feel of the Star Trek universe.
 

It’s no longer about being the best, most mechanically sound game, but the most interesting. No longer about originating ideas, but implementing them in a polished, sleek way. No longer about being the best third-person shooter out there, but about having that mechanic serve as a girder to support the stronger aspects of your game. No longer about doing what every MMO has done before you and more, but about the presentation of those familiar concepts and the context that they’re placed in.
 

It may not be 1998, but 2010 promises to be an interesting year for video games as they explore more and more of their potential. I for one am happy to be here to see it.
 
Thanks for reading,

End_Boss.

Actually, the cinematic part of Mass Effect 2 is the part I like the least. It seems like a step backwards, since it's being advertised and presented almost exactly like a movie. Go ahead, watch the commercial in 2 minutes. Not a single moment of gameplay. *sigh*

So now video games are like those crappy hollywood movies that can do nothing but borrow concepts from other movies?  
 
Yay.

That was a great read man. Especially considering I'm going into the game industry. I am currently in college for it and plan on becoming a level designer. So my job will be to make things look pretty but also be very interactive, non-linear, and, most importantly, interesting. I mean, how else would people still play WoW? I do and I'll admit that the games graphics aren't great at all. Yes, they are from 2004 so I shouldn't have high expectations but I will still play the game. Why? Because it's fun, addictive, and interesting. 
 
But like I said, great read End_Boss. Keep it up.