Is it High Noon for shooters?

DOMED!

The problem with the shooter genre is that for a while now they have been remaking the same exact game over and over again.

It has got to the point where in many cases we can’t even tell if screenshots from different shooters are from the same game or not because they all look the same.

At some point people are going to get tired of playing Realistic, Modern Day, Military Shooter #357

The whole problem would be fixed with more Western Shooters.

Better question to ask is whether it’s high noon for any triple AAA genre that isn’t a third person cover shooter or a COD style FPS.

Yes please!

Never trust a Lannister.

I don’t see this as genre failing; I do think some companies approach the genre seeing a lot dollars and trying to chase after with weak carbon copies or not enough originality or crisp releases to really stand-out or get the crowd.

I’ve read that Space Marine was a money maker for THQ.

I think a lot of games get hyped up as the next Gears/Halo/CoD/whatever and when they don’t reach such lofty heights, it’s spun as a “failure”. I bet the publishers still make money on them, though.

I thought shooters died ages ago with the introduction of auto-regenerating health and cover-based mechanics? :)

What matters in a shooter is ; Do you have a flashlight or not.

Excuse me good sir, but in western shooters we don’t need no namby pamby flash lights. We either just sleep at night or get a mob with pitchforks and torches to do people in. If a mine or cave is involved we just blow that puppy up and move on. We ain’t got no time for shenanigans in dark places!

SADDLE UP!

I’ve read that Space Marine was a money maker for THQ.

I think a lot of games get hyped up as the next Gears/Halo/CoD/whatever and when they don’t reach such lofty heights, it’s spun as a “failure”. I bet the publishers still make money on them, though.

Calling Space Marine a shooter is also a pretty egregious mischaracterization.

Would you say it was more of a chainsawyer?

-Tom

Westerns were outdated in all sorts of ways, that’s why they went out of fashion. White hat vs black hat in the era of Vietnam? Haha. Horses when everyone had a car? Haha.

Shooters are only beginning to come into their own. To me it’s more equivalent to the advent of movies. At first movies were filmed as if they were filming a stage play, because that’s all they knew. Then innovators came along and expanded what movies could be. I think the Doom to now era is the filmed stage plays era of shooters. Now that everyone has gotten WWII out of their system we should see game developers forced to branch out and innovation will follow by necessity.

Totally.

I would tend to think it’s not the fall of the genre so much as companies finally learning that they should stop trying to make the next Call of Duty, because the next Call of Duty is always going to be…well, the next Call of Duty. Outside of maybe Halo 4, nothing is going to sell like Black Ops 2 this year. Far Cry 3 may not sell anywhere close to CoD numbers, but as long as Ubisoft was planning for that and not shooting for the CoD moon, I don’t see how that means the genre is in trouble.

Isn’t the problem that the [Generic Military Shooter #211] games do sell and thus you might as well define the shooter genre as [Generic Military Shooter #211] because every company focuses entirely on them?

Isn’t it about time we got a dsecent Outlaw remake, could tie it in nicely with the new Tarantino movie

  1. Narrow target audience.
    Each of these factors apply to contemporary shooter games

Premise fail. Anybody got numbers on what percentage of people that describe themselves as “gamers” enjoy shooters? I disagree that the audience is narrow.

I don’t have any definitive source, unfortunately. I’m going by the scant data available from NPD charts and press releases, inferences, and possible indicators of success like announced sequels and extensive DLC support. Definitely take my list with a grain of salt.

That said, I can give some rationale for every game on my list for you to judge. Here are a few:

  • Crysis 2: Well below Homefront and Dragon Age 2 on the NPD list the month of its release. Considering Homefront caused an investor backlash and the closure of its studio, and considering Bioware was pretty silent on Dragon Age 2 numbers, and given that it’s highly unlikely that Crysis 2 was much cheaper to develop than Homefront, I think it’s safe to infer that Crysis 2 didn’t do very well.
  • Killzone 3: Very weak initial sales of 280K for one of Sony’s attempted flagship franchises. Lower than Bulletstorm, which was developed with cheap Polish labour costs but was still a disappointment for Epic to the point where it won’t get a sequel.
  • Bulletstorm: See above.
  • Resistance 3: 180K sales in its first month. It hasn’t come close to the moderately successful Resistance 1’s sales of about 3 million.
  • Space Marine: This one’s tough, and very open to question, but it did worse than Resistance 3 on the same NPD chart and THQ was ambivalent about a sequel (and this was before their perilous financial situation).
  • Rage: Was in development for a very long time, didn’t tear up the NPD charts, Bethesda laid off people from its team, and a sequel is very much in doubt.
  • Homefront: See above

I’d be happy to comment on other games on my list if anyone’s interested.