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Editorials   Commercialization
- By Eric Tajchman

It’s all commercialized. I’m sure many of you out there have already figured out what I mean with that first sentence. Gaming has become too commercialized. A lot of developers and/or publishers are corporations only interested in making money. Many titles produced today are made simply to capitalize on the new mainstream industry and to reap the rewards of being a part of this growing market.

A lot of innovation has gone out the window in favor of copying the few hot ideas that seem to garner the gamer’s dollar. For every hit, innovative game that comes out, twenty half-ass copies are released. I’m sure many of you have played a terrible game or two and wondered, “This game clearly sucks. Why didn’t they make it better?” Some developers purposely create mediocre games so they can save development time and cost and still make a profitable game.

Case in point: One press release I remember seeing was from a major developer/publisher (I won’t mention any names) and the games released on the N64 were . . . horrible to say the least. The press release basically said that the company lost 20% in profits and bad sales on the N64 were responsible, therefore the company was going to stop supporting the N64 altogether. Is it right to blame another person for one’s own mistakes? Neither is it right for a company to blame its poor sales of shoddy games on anything other than itself.

What does this imply? Does the developer know it’s making crappy games? Does it still choose to release such game expecting people to buy them? Or are they just unable to associate crappy games with bad sales?

Brand affiliation is also a major incentive for anybody looking to exploit another’s success. Let’s ponder the enigma that is the Playstation 2. Technically speaking, what hardware advantages does it have over the other consoles? It is the weakest of the three systems, the DVD playback capability is relatively bad, developers gripe about how hard it is to develop for, and it’s still the same price as the more powerful X-Box. For the first 6 months of its release, the PS2 had no hot title or system seller game, yet people bought it simply because of the Playstation name. Developers still supported it with bad titles, expecting the Playstation name alone to sell its software.

To my point: If many of the developing firms continue to simply clone games, or make obviously crappy games, or rely on brand affiliation alone to sell games, the consequences to the gaming industry could be devastating.

Let’s all hop in our Wayback machine and travel back in time to 1983. Atari is the largest provider of its hit game console, the Atari VCS, with over 10 million units sold across America. Game sales had hit an all-time high in 1982, and 1983 was expected to be the raging year for video games and developers were looking in to cash in on this craze. Hundreds of developers set to work to create games for the VCS come next year. 1983 is significant as it signified the downfall of the gaming industry.

1983 is here, and not one game this year has appealed to gamers. Consumers couldn’t handle the hundreds of bad games and lack of good games. 12 million copies of Pac-Man were produced even though there were only 10 million systems sold. The Pac-Man game was so flawed and buggy that consumers asked for refunds and only 7 million games were sold. Pac-Man was only one game out of hundreds that disappointed gamers. In 1983, people just stopped buying video games. Literally, millions of Atari VCS cartridges were destroyed and were poured into concrete. In a single year, the video game industry imploded under the pressure of its mediocrity when just a year before the market was the hottest to date.

As they say, history has a tendency to repeat itself. Anyone can clearly see that the bad titles are the majority. Good games come periodically with a slew of junk games filling the void.

Developers have a certain responsibility, not only to the consumers but to themselves as well, to put forth the effort to create a decent, entertaining game. If too many developers ignore this, they will bring about their own demise.

So is this a prelude to the second Downfall of Video Games? Probably not. Many aspects of today’s market differentiate itself from that of 1983, most important being today’s competitive market. Though Atari did have some slight competition from Coleco’s ColecoVision, Milton Bradley’s Vectrex, and Mattel’s Intellivision, Atari’s control of the market was too substantial for these companies to ever have a chance. Now, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are all vying for people’s dollar and each has potential to lead the industry, whether this generation or next.

However, if this trend continues, we may very well see the same devastating effects. Consumers can only handle so many bad games, and ultimately it is their choice and their dollar that determines the future.