You are completely wrong. In fact, the opposite is true.
Runescape broke 250k concurrent users recently. K2 Network’s games are doing just fine. Outspark likewise. If anything, the market is going the opposite direction to the one you suggest. WoW will sit there on the high end making a shit ton of money, but the free stuff is going to continue creeping up, and faster than you think. The quality of the free games is improving very rapidly.
In fact, I would not be surprised if free to play games start eating into WoW’s market share at some point within the next couple years.
Congratulations. This single statement completely crystallizes the dumbshit attitude that article is talking about.
Why the hell do you care that alternatives to the massive tent pole stuff succeed? Blizzard’s not going anywhere. Neither is Valve, id, Epic or anyone else. If anything, the sort of games they make will benefit from all the other things that are flourishing elsewhere.
You can’t expect hardcore PC gamers to simply roll over in submission. If that happened, you can bet your ass that those marketing executives would stop seeing any reason to pander to the hardcore demographic anymore.
The fact that the hardcores are as vocal as they are, and are willing to spend money on high-end hardware, thus becoming first movers, are some of the main reasons why more people don’t just give in to the casual attitude and make shallow games. Companies like ATI and nVidia are willing to sponsor the development of some of these games simply because they know they’ll make up for it when gamers buy their products to play those games. Think on that.
It’s funny that you should bring that up. Imagine, if you will, a reality where everyone wore plain brown shirts and ate nothing but gruel and bread because nobody cared about taste or enjoying anything better.
Sounds like Soviet Russia or Mao-era China.
It’s the very fact that there is dissent, an inequality in tastes and demands that better things exist. If it wasn’t for the hard core ‘whiners’, we’d all be accepting crap games.
Acceptance of poor quality games equates to the creation of more, poor quality games. Why do you think games these days are plagued with bugs, half-finished features and undelivered promises? It’s because we’re used to it and there’s not enough gamers out there who are outraged enough to stop purchasing these products.
Instead they say, “Stop whining, the game will be fixed.”
I’m sick of getting these ‘enriched’ sterile eggs that never hatch, injected with who knows what. What ever happened to the good old ones that didn’t come with the cancer risk?
I’d definately describe myself as a hardcore gamer. My current most played game? QuadraPop (Tetris-clone) on my mobile. I’ve got a game running where the score is now past 2 million.
I went to Soviet Russia in '89 and had one of the best restaurant visits in my life. Even the commies couldn’t fuck up Beluga and vodka.
Who the fuck sits around waiting for eggs to hatch?
The ones I buy are organic and taste very nice, but I’ve never tried hatching them, though.
If you really want to make a serious argument out of my snark, then I admit that peoples lack of taste in food have let to a lot of mass market crap foods being readily avaliable while the better stuff is more expensive.
A niché market if you will.
But don’t tell me, that you can’t buy decent food anywhere. You might have to cut into your gaming budget to do so, but life is full of compromise.
