Huh? Last time I checked there is not a zombie outbreak going on.

To hoard money is not something you would want to do in an economic crisis. Anyways, lets keep on topic.

Speaking of zombie outbreaks, have any of you played Left 4 Dead?

Left 4 Dead is an example of success is these difficult times.

The reason being that it can be played on a WIDE range of hardware. Play your cards right and you can play this on an Intel Atom.

The model works for now. But it depends on more content and eventually letting people make campaigns.

Compare L4D and Resident Evil Outbreak to learn a valuable lesson in making multiplayer games.

Chipping in my two cents here, I think it's a powerful combination of two things...

Our economy is hurting. In these hard times, money is tight for the average family, so laying down $50 or $60 for a game is a bit much, don't you think? Since people aren't buying for that very reason, it hurts the amount of money the gaming market takes in, and producing (let alone making) games is a complicated and expensive process.

And relating back to expenses, games are a hell of a lot more demanding these days. They have all these new graphics cards and CPUs out there that you need to play a lot of the new games decently, and this change was pretty sudden (one minute, I was using a relatively high end 8600 GTS; the next, I found myself getting pushed down by cards like the 9800GX2, which is really little more than an 8800 with a few new features and add-ons; but still, we're going to need 9800GX2s someday...). This requires a lot of frequent updating and ends up becoming quite expensive in a short time.

I find myself playing a lot of older games than new ones, actually. Maybe it's because they still look nice and aren't demanding in requirements... maybe it's because they have some sort of novelty value to me. I don't really know.

I think we're barking up the wrong tree here with "death of gamin zomg" frankly. The industry has shown highs and lows throughout its past. Lately it's in a low, which probably has just as much to do with economic downturn as much as a disappointing season. 2007 was full of good high profile releases while 2008 paled in comparison.

Admittedly, the death of many formerly powerful studios has pleased me greatly. Free Radical for example, was a studio that quite frankly deserved to bite the dust. Ensemble? Good bye, don't come back until you've re-discovered your balls plz kthxbai. These studios have failed to produce a single quality product in years. That has a lot to do with disorganized management and broken demographic conceptions. Like I said, good ridance.

No, crap has always existed, even in the early eighties.
So that's not the reason why video games businesses are failing.
The number one reason is that publishers invest in multi-milion dollar projects, they bet everything on 1 or 2 such blockbuster games and when the games tank at retail the publishers go poof. You have to learn to develop games on a more sustainable basis, for example Stardock finances games that have a well balanced budget. And most of their games are well received, they sell well enough to offset all the costs and still make a nice profit. Unfortunately no other publisher wants to learn the lesson.
Not every videogame has to have a story, right now I'm enjoying a pretty obscure war game called XIII century death or glory. Its pretty amazing stuff, 100% tactical gameplay without the hassle of resource gathering and strategic thinking. Well you know what ? This game has completely passed under the radar. Its such a pity.
Of course another reason people buy less games is because of intrusive DRM. Limited installs on a game I BUY ? No way, publishers aren't getting my money on such a crap product. Publishers are always babbling about piracy etc... but what they fail to mention is that honest customers learn the lesson and walk away from buying DRM infested games (most EA games for instance).

Ya the rate of hardware change is certainly a problem and the cost of trying to keep up has been ramping up steadily for the past 5 years or so. It really got bad when they convinced gamers that they didn't need 1 700$ video card, but 2 or 3 700$ video cards. For me its almost gotten to the point where I'm better off not bothering with the new stuff. Heck I got enough games to last me the rest of my life if I fully played them out. Most of the new games aren't much better then what came before, just usualy prettier (ok some are more detailed in the non graphical sense yes).


Now stardock... I don't you can use them as a fair comparison for the rest of the video game industry. You can't compare a 4x game to any other kind of game other then to another 4x. The needs and demands are totaly different. Thats why you can't apply stardocks development model onto those other game types as it wouldn't work or sell. As virtualy all the other ones need decent 3d graphics in addition to everything else.

Otherwise I agree, developers need to back off the bleeding edge some. I meen look at Crysis, is there a system even now that can run that game maxed out at a reasonable (30fps) framerate? And what is the return for all that power? a game that looks somewhat better then Far Cry... The return for the effort sucks and is getting smaller and smaller imho.

That's what THEY want you to believe.

A few weeks ago, I had this very vivid dream that (EVIIIL CORPORATION MY ROOMMATE HATES) was engineering the saturation of the media with zombie-themed products to prepare us for the coming outbreak. Kinda like that urban legend about the Cabbage Patch dolls.

It seemed to make sense at the time. I need to stop listening to my roommate when he talks politics...

Back to your regular scheduled zombie-free thread.