Just Gabriel
11-22-2003, 07:13 PM
Remember the feeling back in the day?
Beating the arcade high score in Pac-Man, pounding "King Koopa" in Super Mario Bros., opening that chistmas present to see that your parents really DID listen to your ranting and bought you Super Metroid. Most gamers who were in the scene back then know the feeling. Gaming was meant to be fun, and it was.
Fast forward ten to twenty years and we see a world where the gaming industry is solely based on profits and numbers. Millions of dollars are poured into software and hardware development these days, as the purpose of video games changes from providing fun for the players to selling copies. A quick look at the credits of almost any video game provides a ton of evidence that gaming has changed from what it once was. Development groups used to be small teams of people, but now, over a hundred people are involved in the making of a single game. All these people work to squeeze as much as they can out of the console to make the game as presentable or "desirable" as they can. What would happen if a game with the graphical appearance of an 8-bit generation game appeared in the lineup of a current generation system? It's not hard to guess that it would be shot down in a second. Why is this? Gaming companies shaped gamers to only accept games that take advantage of the best current technology, and paying for a game that didn't take millions of dollars to make for a new console would be a "waste" of money and power.
Look at Sony Computer Entertainment America. Back in 1999, Capcom decided to release a port of the original Rockman (Megaman) games for the psx, so that the current generation would have a chance to play them. When presented with the games, SCEA rejected them and refused to license them for release in North America. Their reasoning? The graphics were inferior and didn't "deserve" to be in the PSone's lineup.
Games nowadays cost so much money to make, they have to sell a ton of copies to make a profit. Game consoles are tossed out the window for new technology about every 3-4 years now, while systems like the NES sat proudly in the TV stand for much more than twice that long. Gamers now, however, will only settle for the newest and best gaming systems, and only the flashiest games.
But it's hard to make profit when it costs so much to keep technology up to date. Competition between the gaming companies forces them all to release new game systems before theirs is made "obselete" by another one. A console doesn't have much time to build a solid list of good games before it's tossed aside for the next new thing. Raising costs of production is forcing publishers to charge more for games, which makes it harder to convince a gamer to buy a particular game. In the old days, you didn't have to hire a fraction of the employees to make a solid development team, so making games was cheap. Not as much was at stake as there is now in the sales of a single game.
Sure, gaming is still fun, but the current generation of gamers has completely changed from that of the past. It used to be perfectly accepted (even coveted) to play a game with Mario in it, but now, any game that has too many colors, isn't about shooting things or running over pedestrians is seen as "kiddy" and labelled as stupid.
I really feel sorry for the "Second Generation" of gamers; they totally missed the golden age of gaming. You don't often see ten-year-olds crowding around a NES like they used to, but when you do, it's a good feeling to see that some of today's gamers actually get to see what great gaming truly is.
Beating the arcade high score in Pac-Man, pounding "King Koopa" in Super Mario Bros., opening that chistmas present to see that your parents really DID listen to your ranting and bought you Super Metroid. Most gamers who were in the scene back then know the feeling. Gaming was meant to be fun, and it was.
Fast forward ten to twenty years and we see a world where the gaming industry is solely based on profits and numbers. Millions of dollars are poured into software and hardware development these days, as the purpose of video games changes from providing fun for the players to selling copies. A quick look at the credits of almost any video game provides a ton of evidence that gaming has changed from what it once was. Development groups used to be small teams of people, but now, over a hundred people are involved in the making of a single game. All these people work to squeeze as much as they can out of the console to make the game as presentable or "desirable" as they can. What would happen if a game with the graphical appearance of an 8-bit generation game appeared in the lineup of a current generation system? It's not hard to guess that it would be shot down in a second. Why is this? Gaming companies shaped gamers to only accept games that take advantage of the best current technology, and paying for a game that didn't take millions of dollars to make for a new console would be a "waste" of money and power.
Look at Sony Computer Entertainment America. Back in 1999, Capcom decided to release a port of the original Rockman (Megaman) games for the psx, so that the current generation would have a chance to play them. When presented with the games, SCEA rejected them and refused to license them for release in North America. Their reasoning? The graphics were inferior and didn't "deserve" to be in the PSone's lineup.
Games nowadays cost so much money to make, they have to sell a ton of copies to make a profit. Game consoles are tossed out the window for new technology about every 3-4 years now, while systems like the NES sat proudly in the TV stand for much more than twice that long. Gamers now, however, will only settle for the newest and best gaming systems, and only the flashiest games.
But it's hard to make profit when it costs so much to keep technology up to date. Competition between the gaming companies forces them all to release new game systems before theirs is made "obselete" by another one. A console doesn't have much time to build a solid list of good games before it's tossed aside for the next new thing. Raising costs of production is forcing publishers to charge more for games, which makes it harder to convince a gamer to buy a particular game. In the old days, you didn't have to hire a fraction of the employees to make a solid development team, so making games was cheap. Not as much was at stake as there is now in the sales of a single game.
Sure, gaming is still fun, but the current generation of gamers has completely changed from that of the past. It used to be perfectly accepted (even coveted) to play a game with Mario in it, but now, any game that has too many colors, isn't about shooting things or running over pedestrians is seen as "kiddy" and labelled as stupid.
I really feel sorry for the "Second Generation" of gamers; they totally missed the golden age of gaming. You don't often see ten-year-olds crowding around a NES like they used to, but when you do, it's a good feeling to see that some of today's gamers actually get to see what great gaming truly is.