[Tyrien]

The internet and blockbuster releases have ruined what the games market used to be. It's not about trying to make a great game or doing something different. It's about "box office" releases and ensuring you gain back the now massive development investment.

Gaming as a business has become an emulation of stock market battling and is now reflected as good and bad investments. It's really ruining gaming genres. Takes First Person Shooters for example in the west, it's a popular genre. In turn this tells developers if they make an FPS there's a greater chance people will buy it than something like an Action Adventure or RPG.

RPGs are another thing that have seemed to of died this generation.
The once prominent and loved genre by many single-player games has been ruined by the internet and the notion that every game must have multiplayer. On top of that there's no real successfully proven market for RPGs today on consoles. No company has made one in the past 3 years that has been a huge success. This tells developers that it's a risky investment.

Especially with games taking tens of millions of dollars to produce and 2 to 3 year development cycles (take Halo 3, it was announced in 2005. MGS 4 E3 2005.). To some this is even risking a game becoming vaporware, and just being a huge loss for a company. Very few development firms today have the bank to make a game and have it be a total failure and walk away like nothing happened. They just can't afford it.

On top of that the internet has in some ways hurt gaming more than it's helped. With reviews, trailers, and hype becoming the norm it leaves less room for developers to rely on the gamer's true, unbias opinion of a game, or rather their imagination. Once someone has seen a reivew of a game it's not uncommon for people to decide that's the game. To let someone speak for themselves if you will.

This also ties in with the price of games, and how reviews, and the internet hurt even more. It's a given that a game is $50~70 a pop. Most games $60. $60 is something most people would rather not toss away lightly and shrug off if they find it's a bad investment. This high price in games is due to the Movie theater-esque "box office release" money grab. There's excessive advertisement, supplying reviewers comfortably, and most of all the enormous development costs.

Eh... rant.