Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Game Trailer
Enabling squib and muggle gamers to partake in the elusive practices of magic, EA has provided us with a new glimpse of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince game. Arriving alongside the book-inspired movie of the same name, the game b
Arriving alongside the book-inspired movie of the same name, the game brings the tragedy of Page 596 to PC, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, DS and PSP this summer.
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Rice-Rocketeer
replyI bet these games must be ridiculously popular.
I wonder if we, as hardcore gamers, have no idea what the popular audience plays, or if the hardcore and the popular have blended together, and there is no dichotomy of "hardcore" or "populist" gaming.
(Versus the dichotomy of "high" and "low" art.)-
We know what people play but they are wrong and stupid and don't anything about video games they are disgusting how could anyone debase themselves like that and believe it was fun aren't they vile?
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Awful wretches.
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I think the border is very fluid, perhaps more now than it ever was before for guys like us, but there still remain those gamers in 'deep territory' so to speak who will never change one way or another.
There's no question that these days guys like us play games far more popular in circles not at all like our own than we did before. Examples being Doom Quake and Duke3D in comparison to Call of Duty 4 and Grand Theft Auto. Those games are at a level of popularity that makes them regular props on TV shows and movies, that was never true for fucken X-Com or whatever it was we might have played in the 1990's.
So in that sense yes, there's synergy (lol) -- but that's not the whole picture. First of all I think us as hardcore gamers can have fun with just about any game, I know I can, so that doesn't really prove a point about people in general becoming more hardcore about gaming the way we are, or us becoming more casual (perhaps both is true in some cases but neither is a big trend that I can see).
Instead, I think a lot of the developers we follow (especially the devs that switched from PC to console as their primary platform) are thinking about serving the 'popular" side of gaming rather than us hardcore guys more and more, and that there'll be a growing number of people annoyed and frustrated with the kind of games that provides--for example the folks who got annoyed with the godmode in Prince of Persia--which will then probably prompt some developers to make small scale games specifically catering to that audience. In fact that's kind of happening already, definitely happened with the adventure game subculture after that genre fell out of the mainstream, definitely happening with Stardock and the kind of strategy games they produce... who knows in a few years time there might be a vibrant community of devs making all sorts of games for that smaller more devoted audience.-
The challenge of course is going to be budgets. Genres like adventure games can get away with it because of the severe drought of games that proceeded the recent renascence. It let devs reenter the market without requiring huge budgets.
The same thing with strategy games - the space game niche wasn't tapped which opened up space for Sins. If blizzard had been making games in that space, I'm willing to wager that Sins wouldn't have been noticed - or would have been ridiculed for being behind the times when it came out. That isn't a slap at the devs. They were smart in finding a place where they could succeed without requiring a huge budget.
The only ways I see this happening with FPSs:
- Some thing changes that allows content to be generated very cheaply. This is where most of the dev cost goes these days.
- The genre exhausts itself; games that get gamer attention require budgets so high that no one can compete. The top tier games are so costly that despite huge sales, they lose money and put kills any futher games (ie similar to what happened with flight sims). After a lull, an indie/small game market emerges.
Frankly, I don't see either of those happening. Content is still getting more expensive to make, not cheaper. Action games are such a big genre that publishers will probably continue to fund them gambling on their chances to be the next break out hit.
That said, I think subgenres within shooters/action games may go through some of this. Story based single player non-sandbox action games are on the ropes right now. They are expensive to make relative to the sales they get. Games like GTA have increased gamers expectations about replayability, etc. The shift to consoles and the associated rentals/game resales have bitten into games without extended replayability.
That definitely opens up the drought possibility.-
Yeah, I agree, I don't think there's a point in a Stardock type dev just making a straight FPS - it would be a colossal up hill struggle for very little reward, instead I imagine that anyone making a first person game would simply forgo having presentation that competes with any AAA release and just work really hard on being interesting and fresh from a gameplay perspective to try and grab attention that way. There's the Penumbra games, they're something like that, though I'd like to see a game approached from that direction, but with actual shooting.
A lot of us are also getting older, there might be a good angle in low-budget non-sandbox single player games which sell themselves as "okay maybe you're kind of tired of this as a hobby, come try something a bit more grown up, maybe not as good looking as your 360 favourites but still a lot of fun" and then sell those games over the internet, make it easy to get at with online distribution, cheap of course, and undemanding of hardware (which would neatly tie into avoiding large amounts of asset production).
Dunno if there's actually enough money in that to support a whole stable community of developers though...
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