[quote name='Mookyjooky']It all rolls down to this...the Gaming industry is a multi-billion dollar industry now.
You pay $50 (soon to be $60) for a game that took 6-10 million to make (And thats the really, expencive games only! [Halo 2, GT 4, etc]) and the games take 2-3 year development.
You can buy a Movie DVD that costs $20 at release and that movie cost them $100-120 million to make with 3-4 years development time.
Whats that mean to you? That means that when games were set at $50 bucks, no one played them (Except gamers) so they had to be $50 bucks to make any money. But now the industry is making hand over fist in cash, leading the industry to make only sequels and limiting innovation...Here's Mega man 84! and it hasnt been good since Mega man 2!! Why release crap? Because you (the consumer) eats it up. Even for $15 dollars they make profit.
Very rarely do games not "Break even".
So in 5 years enjoy having every EA game cost $70 dollars, when EA signs a contract with Gamestop to only release their games via Gamestop. Dont think it will happen? Maybe not, but if EA and Gamestop LOVE money (And it seems they do), then this is a possible future.
From what I hear, this is the "O" face game companies make when they
you in the ass with games that arent different from the last one and disapointments.
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You're skipping over the little fact that the vast majority of DVD releases have already seen major revenue from previous distribution channels. Even a film that did poorly at the box office is rarely so far in the hole that the DVD release must shoulder the bulk of the production costs
Side note: Interesting article in yesterday's LA Times about the film industry's traditional accounting scams now being part of the DVD business.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-et-dvdmoney17apr17,1,213056.story
(Don't buy that part about an actress getting tens of thousands of dollars in royalties for four lines in 'A Bug's Life.' If things really worked that way some people I know would be millionaires instead of having to do jobs in addition to acting.)
The current structure of game distribution puts the entire burden on one channel. It is very easy for a game to be a money loser. Production costs are only the beginning. Add up the media costs and royalties on every unit and you'll find the sunk costs are very high before a single unit has gone on store shelves. If a publisher order 500,000 units and only ever manages to sell less than 50K of those for full price you can be sure that is costing the publisher dearly. The retailers don't take the loss. The publisher has to make to offer them compensation in forms like writedown credits or they'll find themselves unable to get their later releases into the stores.
I would guarantee turkey's like Charlie's Angels (GC) are in negative revenues. Also, if you look at the charts the Mega Man games do good numbers. They score well with kids, a demographic renown for poor taste. They may crnge a few years later at their earlier enthusiasm but the money is long gone. If it made them happy at the time they cannot really complain. They keep making them because the audience keeps buying them. The series would languish like many other properties if it were otherwise.
The console industry has been a multi-billion dollar business for well over a decade. The whinig about limiting innovation is nonsense. There have been no end of new things attempted over the years. Most of them were miserable failure despite having a tiny audience that loved it. It is no different in any creative field. Certain structure become standards because the audience doesn't want to watch it twice because the first time the narrative structure was so strange to them they couldn't follow the story while trying to make head or tail of it. An artist may take great pride in his personal vision but is likely to starve if none can share it.
A immense portion of video games can be describe as 'shooting stuff' but most would see a vast gulf between Gradius V and Halo 2. I saw an article many years ago that made an argument that there were fewer genres than people realized. One example he offered was that platformers were only a subgenre of maze games. Rather than walls the maze is defined by open falls and gravity. Even so, most people would consider Lady Bug and Donkey Jr. to be extremely different games. It all depends on how the common narrative elements are applied.
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