Right now it seems that our beloved games industry is in trouble. Publishers and game developers within the mass market "AAA" games space have become bloated behemoths who spend absurd amounts of money on game development, oftentimes resorting to firing their CEOs, closing long-running studios and posting financial results in the red even after having games that top the charts and sell 3 million units in a fiscal quarter. We've seen entire companies go under and others consolidate and contract, all while homogenizing their products to imitate the top franchises in their chosen genres and creating an environment where most major $60 games all feature the same modes, the same mechanics, the same character and plot archetypes, the same features and the same dependence on pitiful pre-order DLC bonuses and gimmicky downloadable garbage which one would expect to see from a free PC game modding community.
The worst we've seen is the stale and bloated corporate industry masters, unable to grasp what it is their audiences want, flail around wildly at every strawman they can to find something, anything, to blame their performance and management woes on. Piracy, used games, Gamestop, game rentals, negative reviews and all manner of other excuses have been made, and the industry has marched ever onward with badly implemented and sleazy digital rights management schemes to try and curb behavior they disapprove of. Oftentimes these schemes result in trampling on consumers' expected rights to use products they purchase in the manner they choose and burdening paying customers with barriers to their gaming while doing almost nothing to curb things like internet piracy.
With the Nintendo Wii U currently bombing at trainwreck-spectacle levels in the market and the upcoming Xbox One console implementing system-wide DRM measures that penalize those who might wish to trade or borrow games, use Gamefly or Redbox or allow someone to use their disc on their own account, it's become clear that the gamer backlash against Nintendo's hardheaded insistence on ignoring their own market and Microsoft shitting all over theirs outright has become a very, very noticeable trend that should cause the industry to shake in fear. Out of the "Big Three" who have dominated living room gaming for the past few decades, two of them are seeing an outright revolt, with one dying on the vine from apathy and one facing the collective wrath of the entire gaming community before their product even enters the market.
This leaves us with one last contender to the next-generation throne, Sony, and their upcoming Playstation 4 console. Sony is at the crossroads now, and the decisions they make before launch I believe will determine whether we go back to a PS2 era situation where one console takes 80+% of the market and offers a viable outlet for developers and publishers to succeed and expand even as the competing platforms struggle to gain significant marketshare, or if we see a collapse of the industry to levels more reminiscent of the late 80's and early 90's.
If Sony follows Microsoft in restricting the rights of paying customers then I predict there's a good chance that console gaming as we know it will become an irrelevant niche, suitable only for the most sycophantic of corporate cockmunchers who will willingly part with their money to buy an expensive pseudo-computer with $60+ software that will be unusable once those who grant us permission to use the products we buy decide to axe their services.
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth"
The above quote is from the famous poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, and is a perfect description of the state of the industry. As low budget consumable titles ascend and high budget behemoth games fall like stacked dominoes it seems that everyone in the corporate offices of the platform holders and publishers face a choice. They can either double-down on the losing strategies they've employed so far or change to control their costs and serve the end-consumer better. Unfortunately it seems the early outlook has seen many of the big players continue on their path of self annihilation. As this current generation of hardware rapidly reaches it's end, time is running out for the industry players to reverse course and stop a self-inflicted implosion. Will they take the road less traveled and succeed at expanding the gaming business again, or will they end up putting the gun to their head once and for all and squeezing the trigger?
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