I firmly believe the home console video game market is going to crash hard and it's going to take place with the next gen consoles (PS 4 and XBOX 720). Outside of the COD franchise, most other franchises are struggling, devs are seeing profit losses, studios are closing. The gaming industry as a whole has been seeing sharp declines in profits. The suits and ties who don't understand gamers seem to think it's the economy and used games sales killing them and are getting ready to put harsh restrictions in place on the next gen consoles to combat that but it'll just be further alienating gamers without fixing the real problem. Here's the outline on why the console market will inevitably crash and Sony as well as microsoft have no chance to stop it from happening.
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1) Arrogance- As Sony and Microsoft have grown into console giants, there has been a massive decline in them listening to their consumers feedback. They feel they know what the consumer want more then the consumers themselves. Instead of the consumer preferences dictating what the market is, Sony and Microsoft are trying to force their vision for the market on the consumers. "No, you don't want contollers anymore you want motion controls, thats what the market is now cause we say so", "No, you don't want hardcore games anymore, you want casual games that are more accessible and easy with lots of trophies and unlockables to keep you interested".
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2) Casual Gaming- As popularity rises in app games and social site games such as Zynga games, Sony and Microsoft strive to abandon their directions and try to emulate what those casual games do on consoles. They try to make everything simplistic and sell you a small base game and make you pay for additional content. This is going to be a big part of their undoing. The problem with trying to copy the marketing schemes of these casual social games is that console gaming is expensive. After you buy the system, controllers, headsets, etc. you then are paying 60 dollars for each game. Then they want you to buy bits and pieces of content for it. Instead of stealing some of that casual market they are pushing more people to those cheaper app and social site games. Why should I pay 60 dollars for a low content game and then have to buy add ons when I can play many social site games for free and make out much cheaper even if I do buy some add ons for those games? Trying to compete with those games while charging an arm and a leg for it in comparison is a failed business model. The console market pays a pretty penny to play their games and expect more hardcore complex games with plenty of content then those cheap casual social site games. Your not losing sales to the casual market, your losing sales cause you're not offering anything different then that these days and so people will stick with the cheaper market.
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3) The Broader Audience- When a dev says they are changing a game for a broader audience it's a nice way of saying they are dumbing a game down in hopes those Zynga and app gamers will find it easy enough to play or chasing the market of some other successful game like the COD Modern Warfare series. What this has caused is for a lot of games to be "me too" games rather then being something unique. This marketing strategy just recently destroyed Zipper Interactive studios who started ignoring it's Socom fanbase in search of this broader audience that never came. Despite fans telling them why they were losing sales and their community, they insisted their sequels weren't for the fans but rather a broader audience and all but told the fans to get lost ignoring all requests and basically taking all the Socom right out of Socom. For three straight games they chased a broader audience, and the more the overhauls failed and saw massive sales drops, the more stubborn they became insisting they had to keep changing it for some other audience that wasn't coming. It culminated in their end when Socom 4 basically turned into a cheezy third person COD knock off and destroyed the last remaining bits of their reputation. Arrogance, denial, ignoring the fans. It was an inevitable recipe for disaster which they were to blind to see as they put all their eggs into the casual market basket. You can't keep disposing of your fanbase with each iteration and expecting a new one to take it's place. You have to focus on getting your fans to return first and then build on that gameplay with some enhancement and improvements to make your audience broader.
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4) Release now patch it later- Many games that release these days are often broken, games that would have never made it out of Q&A in the PS 2 and XBOX days. Now releasing broken and incomplete products is the market standard and many gamers are getting tired of it. There are some games that release so broken that it can take some games as long as 6 to 8 months after release to get patched up enough to be reasonably playable. This also will contribute to people wanting to wait to buy games used. If you keep getting bit on the butt buying things at launch that are broken you'll tend to want to start waiting on games to see how they turn out, and if you hear it's a mess you might then wait till they release patches and its worth playing. By that time the game can be found cheap at gamestop. So in many ways these devs and publishers contribute to the used games seeming like the better option. If you take that away next gen and force people to either buy broken launch games or nothing, many may just opt for nothing.
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5) Hardcore games and features need to make a comeback- Developers these days cringe at the thought of having to make a game that doesn't have health regen, perks, unlockables, etc. They all want to repackage the same exact kind of game everyone else is doing and throw it on the shelf with a new name stamped on it. Where's the variety? While it's ok to have a game like COD for that market, you can't make all the games like COD and expect them all to succeed. You have to provide people with options that can't be found in COD. If it's just a COD knockoff people are going to want to just stick with COD. If it offers a completely different experience that can't be had in COD they might give it a look. Too many shooters baby the gamers, they'll have health regen and health packs to revive on top of that. It's a shooter game, it's ok to let people die when they do something stupid and get shot for it. Then instead of focusing on playing as a team and enjoying the game, they never get to appreciate the game for what it is cause they are more concerned with objectives to unlock stuff instead of objectives needed to win the match. It winds up being a hollow experience that becomes obvious when all the weapons are unlocked and gamers lose incentive to play. There's nothing wrong with having the entire arsenal of weapons available on day 1. Let people learn to appreciate playing as a team and communicating instead of lone wolfing with no real goal in mind. Games like COD and BF can co-exist with games more like the classic hardcore Socom games or the early Rainbow Six games. Trying to make games both for the hardcore and casual market in one game doesn't work. When you try to please everyone you often wind up pleasing no one. Stop copying and offer unique and different experiences so that each kind of gamer has something that offers a fully satsifying gaming experience, both casual and hardcore gamers alike.
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6) Disappearance of Backwards Compatibility- One of the big draws to buying new consoles was being able to have an "all in one" unit to clear clutter in your entertainment center. Sony has decided that they can make money by forcing you to pay for games you already have if you want to continue to play them on the new console. By not having BC they think they can make you pay for the same games again. What they don't realize is most people aren't buying the games they already own. They are buying games they either sold, or maybe classics they had heard about that were great but never wound up getting them. Most people who still own old games still own the systems for them so they won't repay for a simple port. Allowing people to play the games they still have while still allowing them to buy old classics they don't have could work just fine together and allow people to keep a neat entertainment system with one console. Sony is worried if you can play your old games on it maybe you won't have as much incentive to go buy the new games for it, but that comes down to their own fault. Stop making redundant "me too" casual games and go back to the kind of variety the PS 2 and XBOX era offered us. If people are playing a lot of old games its because they think your new games and casual direction sucks.
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7) Suits and Ties- Most of the people calling the shots in these companies aren't gamers. They don't understand gamers. They are completely out of touch with gamers. They make their decisions based on graphs and pie charts instead of voices and feedback from consumers. When they see that one game is successful they look at their chart and say "Ok well since this game sells well we need to add features A,B,C and D to our next sequel and according to this chart it will be a success just like that game. No consideration if those features even fit into their game, change is made for the sake of change rather then for the better. No consideration is put into the fact that their fanbase has vastly different tastes then the fanbase of that other game. It's just done because the chart said it will sell that way. So then their fanbase gets upset and leaves and the fans of that other game don't come cause they don't want a cheap knockoff of the game they love, they'll stick to the real thing. That's why the most recent batch of shooters outside of BF and COD sold some of their worst numbers ever cause they tried like hell to add as many features of the big two as they could and alienated their fanbases.
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Unless these companies go back to their roots, go back to delivering solid and complete games that have hardcore elements the console market is going to dig its own grave. Stop trying to focus on making consoles like low quality PCs just so you can say "it does everything". Console gamers are people who were serious about gaming and didn't give a crap about all the side stuff otherwise they could have just stuck to PC gaming. Console gamers who don't play app games or PC games spend hundreds of dollars for a system primarily to play games. When they pay 60 dollars for a game they expect some intense and challenging gameplay. Not just some cheap gimmick game you half pay attention to while posting facebook updates. Start trying to please console gamers again and stop trying to make console games into something they are not if you want to bring console games back. Of course I know they won't cause again the suit and ties don't get any of this. They keep looking at charts telling them games need to be accessible, easy, casual cause thats what facebook games are and thats what gamers like. But those are not console gamers, they aren't the ones spending hundreds of dollars on a system just to play games. They play those games cause many are free to play and just a time killer while they wait for their friends to reply to their status updates, tweets, etc. Focus on the real console market stop trying to get the people who won't pay big bucks to game cause while you're sitting there watching them and waiting for them to come, you console gamers are starting to hang up their controllers and move on.
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