Xorazm
Cipher
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2015
- Messages
- 106
Apologies if this subject has been done to death, but I realize that while it's generally accepted that cRPGs (and, arguably, gaming as a whole) went into a decline starting in the early 2000s, I don't have a very firm understanding of what caused it to happen and what is ultimately driving the recent promise of a turnaround.
One thing in particular that jumps out at me regarding the Kickstarter renaissance is the recurring theme of once-bright devs being stuck in casual/mobile/MMO hell and finally reaching to Kickstarter as a means to escape and return to their passion projects. The problem is that I'm just not really sure if that narrative, which I've seen pop up time and again, is ultimately true and, if so, what fundamental shifts in the marketplace would have led them to being stuck for so long in exile.
A commonly cited culprit would be the encroachment of consoles, but while I don't dispute the influence there I don't quite understand the hows and why of it. Why did the console-ization of the market begin to set in about a decade ago as opposed to any other time? Part of the decline is surely due to the collapse of developing groups like Troika, Looking Glass and Interplay, but is this connected to the same market forces that led to the general trend of console-ization or an entirely separate set of catastrophes? Is there any connection with the peculiar coincidence that, during all of this, Piranha Bytes also managed to squeeze out a couple of classic games before receding into irrelevance despite remaining whole as a company?
The best guess I can come up with, and this is flimsy at best, is that while gaming grew as an industry, the size of the pie occupied by consoles grew to such an extent that the big publishers all turned in that direction as their primary focus, leaving the PC market, already withered due to the mid-2000s rise of torrents, as an afterthought. A number of once-bright PC devs, who had grown accustomed to making games for the PC, simply couldn't quite adjust to language of games demanded by consoles and so therefore their output suffered (Epic Mickey being a good example of this). During this period, it became difficult for PC-focused devs to attract any publisher's attention towards any PC focused products, until Kickstarter came along and demonstrated that there was an untapped market there still willing to pay for quality titles.
That's the best I can come up with based on my own very limited understanding and I'll be the first to admit it's probably significantly flawed. Is there a standard narrative behind this or are we all still grasping at straws?
One thing in particular that jumps out at me regarding the Kickstarter renaissance is the recurring theme of once-bright devs being stuck in casual/mobile/MMO hell and finally reaching to Kickstarter as a means to escape and return to their passion projects. The problem is that I'm just not really sure if that narrative, which I've seen pop up time and again, is ultimately true and, if so, what fundamental shifts in the marketplace would have led them to being stuck for so long in exile.
A commonly cited culprit would be the encroachment of consoles, but while I don't dispute the influence there I don't quite understand the hows and why of it. Why did the console-ization of the market begin to set in about a decade ago as opposed to any other time? Part of the decline is surely due to the collapse of developing groups like Troika, Looking Glass and Interplay, but is this connected to the same market forces that led to the general trend of console-ization or an entirely separate set of catastrophes? Is there any connection with the peculiar coincidence that, during all of this, Piranha Bytes also managed to squeeze out a couple of classic games before receding into irrelevance despite remaining whole as a company?
The best guess I can come up with, and this is flimsy at best, is that while gaming grew as an industry, the size of the pie occupied by consoles grew to such an extent that the big publishers all turned in that direction as their primary focus, leaving the PC market, already withered due to the mid-2000s rise of torrents, as an afterthought. A number of once-bright PC devs, who had grown accustomed to making games for the PC, simply couldn't quite adjust to language of games demanded by consoles and so therefore their output suffered (Epic Mickey being a good example of this). During this period, it became difficult for PC-focused devs to attract any publisher's attention towards any PC focused products, until Kickstarter came along and demonstrated that there was an untapped market there still willing to pay for quality titles.
That's the best I can come up with based on my own very limited understanding and I'll be the first to admit it's probably significantly flawed. Is there a standard narrative behind this or are we all still grasping at straws?