Sunday Thoughts: A Bleak Future?

Seeing Call Of Duty and FIFA’s recent record breaking sales success you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s boom time in the world of gaming, a time where all a development studio or publisher needs to do is release a AAA game and then sit back watching the millions roll in.

Unfortunately the sound of champagne corks popping at post-launch parties can be something of a rarity these days, with new IP (intellectual property) and established franchises bombing in recent sales charts. This in itself isn’t a huge surprise because anyone who has seen any of the end of year financials in 2008/09 will know the videogame market is declining. This was made worse by even further declines in 2009/10, a decline on top of a decline is never a good thing.

Here’s a few games which came out this year to critical but not sales success; Vanquish, Enslaved, Alan Wake, Blur, Split/Second, Singularity and if we’re being hyper-critical then we could include Heavy Rain; although it sold to the PS3 install-base extremely well, it failed to make the mainstream breakthrough that David Cage eluded that the innovative control scheme would do, during the pre-release chatter. These titles represent the biggest of the new IP to be released on console this year and with the exception of Heavy Rain they all pretty much bombed. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the majority of new IP games didn’t pay off this year.

Faced with this unsustainable problem, what is a publisher going to do; keep plugging away and hope for the best, or change tactics and force the growth that they need to survive? It seems that the largest of publishers have already mind their mind up and it might not make great reading for people who consider themselves core gamers.

Activision is currently the king of the hill and has the stated desire to only focus on strong brands. Of course this can leave them open to criticism from some quarters, people who would perhaps like to see greater risk from the worlds largest publisher. Equally its hard to argue that Activision is heading down the wrong path as their revenues and profits prove that they are heading down a path which is working out very well for them.

EA also like to focus on their mega franchises with new FIFA/Madden/NHL/NBA licensed games a certainty, along with the established franchises like The Sims, Medal Of Honor and of course Battlefield with its multitude of spinoffs. Ubisoft and THQ have both stated in recent times that they want to focus on their established franchises, with this being the case where are all our new gaming experiences going to come from.

If we look to the Far East we see CAPCOM controversially changing their output to suit Western tastes, the end result of which could be that they offer nothing different from what we’re already getting elsewhere. On to SEGA who have just released one of the best games of the year in the form of Vanquish, which barely troubled the sales charts. After the sales figures were released SEGA announced they would need to adapt for an audience whose expanding demand is for social network based games.

If the industry heavyweights are essentially all focusing almost entirely on their core franchises what does this mean for the future, are gamers destined to be playing the same thing with incremental upgrades over and over again?

Disney Interactive hinted at where their future growth is going to come from with the recent acquisition of Playdom, a company which makes games for social networks and has over 42m players regularly playing its products; well over double the 18m gamers who are predicted to be buying Call Of Duty: Black Ops.

Disney aren’t going it alone in the world of social network gaming as EA has made a major land-grab by snapping up Slingshot Media, Hands-On Mobile, ThreeSF and J2Play in the past couple of years, these acquisitions have been bolstered by the $400m purchase of Playfish, and the $20m Chillingo, publishers of Angry Birds and other hit iPhone games. It’s not hard to see where their corporate focus is going to be for the next few years as they look to leverage these investments.

Given the fact that the majority of publishers have stated they are going to focus on their core franchises and their money-men are busy tying up deals for social network gaming companies, does the future look bleak for the once mighty core gamer? Will we be faced with incremental upgrades and HD remakes for the foreseeable future, are we destined to only be able to play games whilst being poked on Facebook, or is there a silver lining on the horizon? Let us know what you think in the comments below.