A few months ago, Cliffy B said ‘The middle-class game is dead.’ It sparked a heated debate online , first about what the hell a middle class game actually is, and then whether or not he was correct. Well, looking at the first day of E32011, seems that the Cliffster might have hit the nail on the head.
The middle class he was referring to, of course, was the huge volume of games that used to exist below Triple-A. Stuff that would be made for a lower budget and have lower expectations – for years a vital part of most publishers’ lineups. In the past year, though, these games have really suffered. The posterboy for middle class death is Enslaved, an expensive, double-A game that didn’t live up to sales expectations and ended up as a moderate flop. It joins the likes of Vanquish, Mirror’s Edge and this month’s Hunted: The Demon’s Forge as noticeable failures.
What’s to blame? Simple – the economy. It’s far from complex – games are more expensive to make than ever, consumers have less money, they only want perceived value. It is possible to succeed with new IP still – Dead Space and Assassin’s Creed have proven that, but they are both new IP with very specific and familiar hooks, and both marketed spectacularly and given reams and reams of good press. And they’re the exception.
So, it should come as no surprise at all that there is nothing like this so far at E3. Almost everything is a sequel to an existing popular franchise, and within that group, almost all of the games are shooters. Publishers just cannot afford to take risks at the moment – studios have been closing down left, right and center in the past few years. These are people’s jobs and lives, and as evil as we sometimes like to think the big corporations are, no CEO enjoys making talented people redundant. So they stick to what they know will work, or if they do want to experiment, they do it in the extremely low-cost, low-risk digital space, a place where the margins can be huge and the repercussions for failure relatively small. Or, of course, the old Wii model, where motion-controlled ‘family’ games can be made at a fraction of the cost and can potentially turn into huge moneyspinners.
When it comes to full-price, retail games, the risks are now almost unplayable. You either hit that Modern Warfare vein and become billionaires, or you lose your job. There’s very, very little in between at the moment. We can complain that there’s not much innovation coming out of the major players at this year’s E3, but it’s understandable – it’s all calculated hedge-betting. Gaming is bowing to commerce stronger than it ever has done before, and we’re just going to have to come along for the ride and hope for good times on the other side. And in the mean time, hammering a bit of COD or Gears isn’t really the worst thing in the world, is it?
Tags: Gears of War 3
Crysis 3, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Borderlands 2 and Far Cry 3 previews plus reviews for Prototype 2, Sniper Elite V2 and The Witcher 2.
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