🚀 go-pugleaf

Ross Ridge wrote: 
>More likely though is this is just going to be further evidence supporting
>something I've long suspected to be true: the games industry as a whole
>destroys more wealth than it creates.

Zaghadka  <zagh...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Well, they're always reinvesting profits into the next new shiny, and
>eventually the next new shiny will fail, it is speculation after all, so
>the money gets thrown into the fire at some point.

If it were all just companies like that in the game industry then
I might be inclined to believe that the industry is (somehow) a net
creator of wealth.  It's all the wannabe game development companies
making games that will never make a profit that has me thinking that
wealth is being destroyed overall.  In particular all the VR games on
Steam are pursuing an extreamly small slice of the pie.  According to
the Steam Hardware Survey only about 0.38% of users have a VR headset.
More people are using MacOS (2.95%), Linux (0.72%) and Windows XP (0.76%).
More people have 1024x768 monitors (1.27%) and 33.6 Kbps modems (1.64%).

These aren't games that can get away with cheap 2D pixel art either, so
they're not cheapest of games to make.  It's hard to see how any VR game
can be making any money, whether professionally produced or some cheap
shovelware that somehow manages to go viral.  Maybe the PlayStation VR
(with over 1 million sold) is allowing a few of the most successful VR
games to make a profit, but otherwise VR just seems to be a dark hole
people are throwing their money into.

>We frequently criticize the games industry for being too conservative and
>not embracing innovation in gameplay and game concepts. The antidote to
>what you're describing is more conservatism in that arena.

Well, the benefit to all these wannabe game developers is that you do
get a lot more variety.   If you want different than you can find all
sort of different from small indie developers.  Of course it's really
hard to tell the good from the bad.  Sometimes a good game will get
noticed and become popular, but there must be lots of good indie games
not getting any attention.  Even only 1% of all indie games spewing out
on Steam these days qualify as good, that's still one every week or two.

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //