The Evil Within is possibly another 3M+ seller. It'll be close either way.
I'm not concerned with the future of single player, transaction-less games. I think we're past peak oil here with the MMO-lites, the consumables craze and the future will be a return to the past, with retail being left behind.
Perspective, most of the games, studios and ideas filtering to retail that have fallen out the bottom of the industry were garbage making up the numbers and embittering careless consumers who chanced upon them. The golden age of gaming is an empty husk of jank, poor ideas and worse execution.
Upside, digital development and the internet era. Indie games of today are bigger, bolder, better and more numerous than the retail trash of yesteryears. Every genre is flooded with singleplayer hits, with production values and gameplay polish that retail games of 10-15 years ago could only dream of. More importantly, its easier to reward quality and avoid crap today.
"What about the AAA singleplayer productions", you might ask. Well first of all, the bar between indie and AAA is rapidly blurring because the success stories of the indie scene are carving out new territory on the corpses of the former mid-tier publishers. They're doing it leaner, with more information, better tech, reasonable expectations, and no nasty "HD-era" jumps coming their way to put their margins into a death spiral. Secondly, the quality retail titles are still being handsomely rewarded. Its hard to think of a single example, outside the Wii U (a dead system), of an unambiguously good single player title not finding success. We're not going to take Quantum Break, a divisive title with mediocre reception, as some sort of litmus test, are we?
I'm not concerned with the future of single player, transaction-less games. I think we're past peak oil here with the MMO-lites, the consumables craze and the future will be a return to the past, with retail being left behind.
Perspective, most of the games, studios and ideas filtering to retail that have fallen out the bottom of the industry were garbage making up the numbers and embittering careless consumers who chanced upon them. The golden age of gaming is an empty husk of jank, poor ideas and worse execution.
Upside, digital development and the internet era. Indie games of today are bigger, bolder, better and more numerous than the retail trash of yesteryears. Every genre is flooded with singleplayer hits, with production values and gameplay polish that retail games of 10-15 years ago could only dream of. More importantly, its easier to reward quality and avoid crap today.
"What about the AAA singleplayer productions", you might ask. Well first of all, the bar between indie and AAA is rapidly blurring because the success stories of the indie scene are carving out new territory on the corpses of the former mid-tier publishers. They're doing it leaner, with more information, better tech, reasonable expectations, and no nasty "HD-era" jumps coming their way to put their margins into a death spiral. Secondly, the quality retail titles are still being handsomely rewarded. Its hard to think of a single example, outside the Wii U (a dead system), of an unambiguously good single player title not finding success. We're not going to take Quantum Break, a divisive title with mediocre reception, as some sort of litmus test, are we?
