Gaming gasm UK: Rubbing shoulders with LEGENDS and newbies After a week of hitting ferrets with my new Gauntlet inflatable promotional chicken leg and dying far too often in multiplayer set on hard, it eventually occurs to me: "Lucy needs daylight". Admittedly, I wasn’t outdoors for long as my venture out of the house took me to EGX, formerly Eurogamer Expo and apparently the UK's …
Since the introduction of the "little blue pill", I haven't missed ED one bit.
Games are like any other media. There's nothing genuinely new anymore, all we get is remakes of classics and variations on a theme, often more of the same but gorier, harder to play or just downright not on this planet anymore. Not that there's anything really wrong with that, it's possible to tell the same story multiple times, it's all down to the skill of the developers (how else can you explain game franchises like Fifa and COD).
In one way, since the technology became sufficient many of the stories that can be told with the current generation of gaming tools have now been told, so many things are effectively remakes.
However the other side of that is that people with a big-money franchise are inherently conservative because they are terribly and intensely afraid of killing off the goose that lays the golden egg for them. So they can't take risks or do anything new.
New games will come predominantly out of small and independent development houses. Once something becomes a safe bet ( moderately recent example might be Dark Souls ) then a big publisher may pick it up and start making sequels, but those will be more of the same.
Ultimately companies investing large amounts of money in games expect to see ROI, so they end up producing games designed by market segmentation research rather than by people who care about making games fun, original or interesting. This is a place where Kickstarter is proving to be somewhat disruptive, which is good news for people who like good games.
"Where is the imagination in the games world??"
AAA studios are unlikely to get imaginative - too risky for the men in suits at the top of the tree, they'd much rather stick to making the next installment of GTA/CoC/FIFA/whatever they know will sell providing they slap better graphics on it.
Indies used to be a much better bet... however, these days, many of the app stores are flooded with the latest Flappy Bird/Candy Crush/whatever clones that are shovelled out by so many in an attempt to cash in, making discoverability a complete nightmare. Moreover, for many indies, there is nothing more disheartening than having invested a great deal of their own time and money into creating and promoting their game, only to find that players are often unwilling to pay anything for it.
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