Just a Thought or 2…

The problem with dress up games is the same problem that has hit the literature publishing business, and will only get worse.

Before, decisions about games were largely left to game designers, just like novels were left to writers. The creative force behind games was largely left alone to design the game, without input from marketing and focus group results and current pop culture trends, with some notable exceptions, all of which suffered some serious problems.

The consumer was viewed as someone who had to be lured in, who had to be appealed to and convinced to part with their money. Additionally, the consumer had to be convinced to stay with the company, and fostering brand/company loyalty in the consumer was seen as a priority.

Then the good ol’ Harvard Business MBA guys started getting involved.

Now, fashion games aren’t looked at as "Let’s make something fun that will blow everyone’s socks off and rake us in a ton of cash" or even "fashion games are hot, lets make one of the those!" but rather…

"According to the paradigm, the first person shooter genre makes 35% more profit for 25% less investment than games from other genres. Additionally, by dealing with the distributors and creating ‘exclusive content’ we can control which distributor gets more sales for the games as well as control preorder copies to prevent us from overproducing. Since the highest earning games contain X, Y, and Z content, and focus groups have shown that too many variables confuse the casual gamer, who quickly gets bored and wants to move on to the next game, include X & Y and make Z slated for additional microtransaction in dress up games that is exciting, but contains as little new content and original coding as possible to hold down production costs and development time as well as allows us to reap maximum profits in the short shelf-life that the games have, and ensure that user created content ability is kept to a minimum to ensure our monopoly on additional content to keep microtransaction profits up."

So you have people that look at video games like limited life products, combined with the lemon laws that constrict a lot of other businesses and products not present which allows them to get away with problems that would get a product recalled in other product line, in charge of game development, release dates, and which games get greenlighted and which ones get turned down.

I believe it was the guy in charge of the company that released Guitar Hero who went on record in several interviews stating that he hated video games and couldn’t care less about them except where the revenue stream was concerned.

You’re going to see more and more of rehashing of the same old things, sticking to things that "make money" due to the insistence of people who don’t really understand what makes a video game successful. You can expect to see 4 or 5 more CoD:MW version before you see anything innovative in any other video game genre for the simple fact that FPS’s make money, and the "microtransactions" fit them best.

What does this have to do with the literature field? Simple…

Ever notice that in the past 15 years or so as soon as a popular series comes out the shelves fill with nothing but knockoffs of those books? Even authors who were in the middle of producing other series are often diverted to those popular series?

It’s due to the whole jump on the bandwagon bit with the publishers. Add in the steadily sliding editing in books (Lets face it, the editing in more than a few high end books was sad and laughable lately) as well as rising costs of printing, and you get what we have today.

Now, considering that the same type of people who have done their damnedest to sink publishing by not understanding what makes a best seller and what makes another assembly line novel are now getting into the video game industry, and you’re going to see a lot of the same problems come across.

You’ll be seeing more and more games hit the shelves with only a little bit of alpha-testing done (Beta testing takes awhile, and costs money, where the consumer can be told that the fault lies with their hardware, not the fashion games) and since there is no fair return policy, if you buy it, you’re just out of luck.

You’ll be seeing the same crap come out over and over, with very little to distinguish one game from another.

Game story lines will get worse and worse (The nice thing about FPS games like CoD:MW is the story is pretty easy to pump out there) as writers cost money and after all, focus group results have shown that people are easily confused and we don’t want the gamer to feel stupid, so cut Act II Sec 3 so that nobody feels sad or stupid.