Re: The current state of CRPGs is a failure of the free mark
kingcomrade said:
The current state of cRPGs is that devs are making the games that most of the market is willing to pay for using the means (hype, advertising, media whoring) that are most cost effective to providing huge sales. That might suck for the small minority looking for challenging and interesting games, but the free market doesn't exist to provide everyone with everything they want. It would be like saying that you go to a tourist gift shop in Colorado and you can't find any with Chinese names, just John, Jason, Ashley, and Jessica, and thus the free market is a failure.
For starters your example is flawed: Cultural dominance is a direct consequence of free market economy, which in turns destroys local culture and we have been seeing this over and over again for the last century or so and that would be a fair analogy. So in the case of your example it would be more accurate to point out how more and more people in Asian countries gravitate towards western culture, starting from the bourgeois and petit bourgeois but quickly going down to even the proletarian as Free Trade Agreements ( like the one proposed to an overly westernized country South Korea ) make it easy to introduce western products to all sections of their civilization.
Your example merely points out a completely and unrelated situation which is immigration and minorities beign excluded. While many of the causes of immigration could also be theoretically be tied to free market economies it is beyond the scope of the current discussion.
Other than that in your argument you clearly say that free market does not need a quality product to be competitive because the added value from areas that are 100% independent from the actual creative process ( media, marketing, hype, etc. ) can wield more profits at a more cost effective rate than making an original, entertaining, quality product.
The simple nature of the CRPG genre of old ( focusing on quality of gameplay ) its less cost effective than the modern "rpg" ( Bethesda, Bioware, etc. ). And it works right down to the basis of the genre: 3D graphics are not necessarily of better image quality than 2D images, but is more cost effective to do math calculations and add textures than to hand draw backgrounds. Voice acting is a more cost effective way of captivating an audience than talented writers taking a long time to do vasts amounts of dialogue lines all of top notch quality. Interesting a player with instant gratification like items, combat and endless rewards is far more cost effective than interesting a player with a deep, complex character generation system, captivating stories, interesting quests, etc.
Does that means that a truly great CRPG with incredible quality would not be successful today? Quite simply no, it would be tremendously successful. So much so that it would easily return the same amount of profits than a run-of-the-mill-diablo-clone would and even more. It just requires a bigger degree of commitment from the developers and producers. That is not acceptable in a free market economy: taking a low risk, quick and sure revenue with moderate sales maximizing profit margins by cutting costs is more successful ( hence the success of monsters like EA ).
The fact that free market directly impacts quality is reason enough to say the decline in quality of games, including the current state of CRPG is a direct consequence of the free market economy. Is not a "minority" that wants quality product, everybody wants a quality product. The fact that one is not easily available is because the profit margins are riskier and none of the infamous "suits" want to take those risks.
