Sitting in the shadow of a used game brouhaha, the always-online connectivity disconnect, and the all-around dick measuring of June’s E3 press conferences, the actual games coming out with the newest batch of consoles looked like almost an afterthought. Familiarity dominated the crop of next-gen titles on display, as Battlefield 4, and Call of Duty: Ghosts are set to be the biggest sellers for both XboxOne and PS4 upon release. For the longer term, warmed over revivals like Killer Instinct and Mirror’s Edge 2 look to capitalize on gamer nostalgia, a force so powerful in the industry it could move mountains, were it not one of the more active agents responsible for gaming’s reputation as infantilizing. “New” was in surprisingly short supply, given that the birth of a console cycle often gives developers a chance at a fresh start. While original IPs like Knack look to recapture the console mascot glory days of Crash Bandicoot, and Watch Dogs promises to meld the flavors of Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed well enough, the offerings for Generation 8 thus far seem content to mostly riff on, but not revolutionize the industry.
The dogs and ponies of Microsoft and Sony look sharper than ever, and continue to pick up more tablet-compatibility bonuses and peripheral doodads like a multimedia-glomming Katamari ball. But stripped of all the flashy new shaders, and cross-device accouterment, the next generation looks as entrenched in old ways of thinking as the current one is. Instead of using the new tech as an invitation to try something bold and creative, major publishers are relying more and more on the Hollywood golden rule of “go with what works.” Consequently, the biggest games of the medium are retreating further and further into a warm memory quilt the industry comforts itself with, one knit together with squares reading “annualized franchise,” “microtransactions,” and “modern military shooter.” And where innovation is lacking, the only way to differentiate oneself is to be the biggest, most expensive version of oneself possible. By following the commercial film industry’s lead, gaming has entered a financial arms race with itself that, unsurprisingly, has no win state.
Modesty is no longer compatible with the high-definition era: you either go AAA, Master Chief-branded 7-Eleven Slurpee’s and Doritos bags big, or you go indie. Just as film’s bar for success has ballooned from $100 million domestic, to $1 billion global in a few short decades, sales targets in gaming have grown wildly, but over a much shorter timeframe. When a big budget Tomb Raider reboot is branded a failure for selling 3.4 million copies in its first month, the goal line has pretty much cleared the stadium. And with the bets only getting bigger, so too are the losses, for publishers and developers alike. THQ’s most valuable property is the empty developer studio that happens to have the most copper wire hidden in the walls, and once-successful studios like Raven Software have become glorified water boys for Activision’s quarterback with the golden firearms, Call of Duty. Unfortunately for gamers, game developers, and Microsoft and Sony, consoles are not too big to fail. It’ll take more than just the modern military shooter and MMO bubbles bursting, with spectacular failures like Medal of Honor and 38 Studios being just a taste of what’s to come, but the industry is heading deeper into troubled waters.
As the writing on the wall becomes clearer for Nintendo and the Wii U, Microsoft and Sony are increasingly looking like the last ones standing in an industry-wide fight to the death. Their press conferences reflected starkly different means of hatch battening for the approaching perfect storm of exploding development costs, and fracturing markets. Microsoft, with noble commitment, and open disdain for PR, wanted to drag gamers kicking and screaming into an always-online, digital-only future (policies they’ve since bloodied their knees and feet over, thanks to subsequent groveling and backpedaling). Sony, meanwhile, ran a Kingdom Hearts and minds campaign, intending (and largely succeeding) to rally as many to their cause as possible, before the seventh console generation seal is broken, and all hell breaks loose with the eighth. That’s the difference between the two in a nutshell: Microsoft was preparing for the future – Sony was preparing for Armageddon.
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