At the beginning of 2013 there are two separate narratives entwined around the video games industry. The first concerns the ebb and flow of the business, which for the last year or two has been very much more ebb than flow – it’s a sobering tale of slowing sales and flagging energy in our exciting hobby, the effects of a console generation that’s lasted so long that many publishers believe it’s damaging the industry as a whole. The apex of this narrative arc was last year’s E3, where publishers jostled to stand out with bombastic action and good ol’ violence, paradoxically resulting in a show where everything looked pretty much the same. (That is to say, like Uncharted.)
The second story surrounds the continuing explosion of gaming outside of that boxed-in space occupied by the big publishers, on mobiles and PC, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade. Telltale’s The Walking Dead game was one of the biggest hits of the year, selling 8.5 million individual episodes and netting the developer more than $40 million in revenue, as the Wall Street Journal calculates – and this was a game that didn’t exist on shelves until December in the USA (and still doesn’t exist on shelves elsewhere). Mobile games too numerous to mention made some lucky developers absurd amounts of money, although most still drowned quickly in the barely-navigable sea of games flooding the App Store.
Like most stories, there are elements of artistic license at work here. Triple-A isn’t in as much trouble as NPD sales figures might indicate; despite lower sales than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops 2 has somehow managed to make even more money, and a lot of the perceived shortfall in boxed sales is being made up elsewhere through digital sales and downloadable add-ons. Creatively, big-budget games are not as samey and predictable as they might look from the outside either, as games like Halo 4, Dishonored and Far Cry 3 showed us last year. The independent scene, meanwhile, has always existed, especially on PC, and has always offered alternatives to those suffering from franchise fatigue.
But for me, 2012 was the first year that downloadable games thoroughly outpaced their more expensive counterparts in terms of giving me what I actually want from a game. I played a lot of very short games last year, from 15-minute narrative experiment Thirty Flights of Loving to four-hour narrative experiment Dear Esther, the serenely creative Unfinished Swan and twitchy neon murderfest Hotline Miami. I played (and went to pieces in front of) The Walking Dead, an experience made all the more powerful by its episodic nature; it stayed with us for the whole year.
There were free games, too, like Slender (the scariest half-hour of my life) and Slave of God, a free game that simulates the hazy intoxicated experience of a club with wry accuracy (and Frog Fractions, which is the most surprising free game you’ll ever spend a half-hour on). On consoles there was Journey, Tokyo Jungle, Spelunky, Sine Mora, Mark of the Ninja. I don’t think I’ve ever played so many games in one year. Where 2011 was swallowed up in its entirety by a few massive games – Dark Souls, Skyrim, Skyward Sword, Deus Ex – in 2012 there was always something else tugging at the attention.
What these games offered was novelty – in their storytelling, in experimentation with form and style, and in the reactions they elicit in the player. I’m a bit bored of games that only want to entertain, rather than scare or provoke or challenge. In terms of the variety of experiences that games can give you, there has never been a better time. You can enjoy Black Ops 2’s masterfully-curated thrill-ride one evening and challenge yourself with Miasmata the next.
In terms of the variety of experiences that games can give you, there has never been a better time.
And although independent games have always been there, it seems to me that they’re increasingly visible (and viable) now. Hotline Miami or Dear Esther might have been free a few years ago (indeed, Dear Esther actually was). Now they’ve made their creators money. Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight, two of the most important stories of last year, have totally changed the visible face of independent game creation, eating away at the absolute power that publishers used to hold over which games get made.
This is going to make 2013 very interesting, as this is the year where many of these projects that we’ve backed will come to fruition – and face potentially disappointing thousands of people who’ve not only been following the game’s progress, but have actually paid money to make them happen. This is a side of the crowd-funding revolution that we haven’t seen yet, and I reckon there’ll be at least one high-profile project that will fail to meet collective expectations. I doubt that this will lead to a massive kickback against crowdfunding as a concept, but we should brace ourselves for a new conversation about crowdfunding ethics and reasonable expectations.
With new consoles very much on the horizon, 2013 also looks to be a year that will revitalise the big-business side of gaming. When Sony and Microsoft show new consoles (and you can bet that they will), they’ll bring with them new games, new IPs and a resurgence of excitement from both pundits and punters. It’s good news for the business, and good news for creativity too; technological innovation has always brought creative innovation with it in our industry. But will the next Xbox and PlayStation divert attention from the smaller games that have been flourishing late in this current generation?
I don’t think they will. The old console model is no longer the dominant force, and the fact remains that publishers and retail outlets no longer have that absolute power over what games get released, and whether they make money. This is the biggest change I’ve seen in eight years of writing about video games, and that genie isn’t going back into the bottle. This process has been in motion for years now, but 2012 was the watershed moment. At the end of 2011 it looked like we were standing at the beginning of a new creative age for video games; I think we’re there now, and it’s going to continue.
2012 was a watershed year.
In the '90s, when I was growing up, you could feasibly play pretty much every video game worth playing in a year. Now, between mobile, consoles and PC, between the fertile independent scene and big franchises at the peak of their powers and giant timesink MOBAs and MMOs, there’s no way that you can play everything. This is good, though. It testifies to the diversification of gaming, both artistic and commercial. Wherever you look, there’s something interesting.
It’s going to be a big year. The announcement of new consoles will test exactly how much interest there still is in traditional gaming, and the independent renaissance shows no sign of abating. A couple of years ago, I was worried that the financial crisis and waning creativity might eventually reduce gaming to Angry Birds, Farmville and Call of Duty, with precious little inbetween. Now I see very little chance of that happening.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK and has been writing professionally about video games for far too long now. Her Dad is still wondering when she's going to get a real job. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
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