5 Reasons the Video Game Industry Is About To Crash

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#5. We Put People Who Don't Know Gaming in Charge

So if you look at the CEOs and executives of game studios today, you won't find many that actually have professional experience working as game designers. And that would be fine, except for the fact that, due to the way games are made, these guys wind up making the creative decisions. It's similar to the problem with big movie studios, only much worse.

#4. Budgets Have Gone Insane, and That's Making Innovation Almost Impossible

Well, in the world of game development, this change from small-scale projects to massive productions happened overnight -- the average game costs freaking 30 times as much as it did in the days of the original Sony PlayStation. Back then, the average game could be made for $800,000 on the low end, but by the PlayStation 3 era, the number had ballooned to $28 million. With the new consoles, that's going to go up again. At this point, it'd be cheaper to just create real zombies to chase people around.


#3. Publishers Are Gaming the Review System

Raise your hand if you've paid $60 for a heavily promoted game that got near-perfect review scores, only to find it to be a frustrating, cookie-cutter mess that had you doing a mental inventory of all of the things you could have bought with the cash instead ("three remote control flying sharks!). Do the critics, like, get a different version or something? No, the system is set up so that big games rarely get the scores they deserve.


#2. You're Always Flying Blind

Every gamer has had the experience of seeing some amazing preview trailer for a game set to come out a year or so later, only to have the game arrive and look nothing like that preview (although some are worse than others)......Well, in the world of video games, it's the hardware that's changing under our feet -- beyond having new consoles every few years, new video cards for PCs are arriving constantly. To use each feature on a given video card, you write render code, and sometimes you're writing render code for hardware that isn't even out yet. Remember, it can take several years to make a game, and in that time the available hardware is going to change multiple times. You can be pretty far along in the process and still be unsure of how the graphics are going to look ... in an industry where the main selling point is graphics.

#1. The Industry Is Extremely Exploitative, and It's Driving Away Talent

I'm not exaggerating when I say that, for the vast majority of studios in the game industry, working conditions are awful, and the burnout rate is pandemic. The frantic period before a game releases is called crunch time, and it's marked by 60- to 80-hour weeks. And "crunch time" can last up to a year. No, it's not as bad a job as that guy who has to crawl up the constipated elephant's butt at the zoo, but it's bad enough that it's hurting the games. The best and brightest veterans get driven away.

Read more: https://www.cracked.com/article_20727_5-reasons-video-game-industry-about-to-crash_p2.html#ixzz2nCdHTmLB

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