Is third-party publishing destroying console gaming

[RetroGamingBlog]

Hi all,

New to the community here, was invited to join via twitter and thought I'd say hello. Looking forward to meeting and contributing to the community.

I've just started my blog site and released my first article which went live last night.

It's an open discussion on third-party publishers and if their influence on gaming is positive or negative. Be good to get your comments on this and see what the consensus is.

The link to the article is here: www.retrogamingblog.co.uk

Let me know your thoughts!

Every best wish,
Ash

 

[EvilTw1n]

Welcome to the forums! Glad to have you aboard.

It's an odd point of inflection for the gaming industry right now. Probably the closest we had to this before was the close of 16-bit era, where 2D platformers were absolutely everywhere. Now, it's "cinematic" games, FPS and sandboxes. And while constantly working on a series and making new iterations of similar games has to help hone a dev's chops and make for smoother games, you reach that point of saturation of having so many similar releases.

And then there's this oddity of releasing broken games and patching them. Sure, it's nice to be able to "fix" a bad game in a way that could never be done before, but it's also making us pay $60 to be beta testers for AAA games, which hardly seems fair.

Add it together, and you get a bunch of "me too" games alongside barely-functional ones. It can definitely be frustrating, compared to years past where you just bought a game (one that wasn't a COD/GTA/AC/Gears clone) that worked.

 

[Laer_HeiSeiRyuu]

Nintendo would rather people made unique games for 3 different platforms rather than port everything all around

 

[RetroGamingBlog]

My view is pretty much that TP houses have backed themselves into a situation where their budgets are so bloated they can't do anything but create cross-platform software. If they don't, they can't make enough to sustain the costs in the first place. And for all it's worth - they only have themselves to blame.
I get the feeling it's now a matter of them needing to survive by the most economical way possible, and Ninty's hardware doesn't allow for copy and paste development, unlike Sony's and MS architecture.
I actually think the phantom backlash Nintendo seems to be getting from the media will lead to some good. It will push them to innovate and create some truly wonderful games, and I have a feeling they'll start creating some really interesting online games that will cause some trending amongst other developers. We've already seen a reshuffle of their house and restructuring of their studios.
Nintendo, from what i can gather, are reinforcing their position to put in place some brilliant studios. TP's will wait at the wayside and all along Ninety will have their own loyal developers. It's sad in some ways TP's are sitting on the fence, but without it, I'm fairly certain Nintendo wouldn't have been pressured to finally make some much needed changes.
It's a pretty exciting time. And the TP's will all come back, praising. If Nintendo com good in 2014, which I'm very positive about