Welp MagazineThe gaming industry was born about 50 years ago. During this time, dozens of genres and millions of projects appeared that influenced its development.
Along with this, the industry was driven by trends that changed every year.
There are the main trends to recall the main trends that have changed video games with aaa gaming company.
Renaissance of indie games
Even the first primitive games were created by a team of programmers. Soon the process became more complicated and artists, screenwriters, musicians, actors and so on are now working on one project. Over the past 10 years, video games have become more accessible. Not so much in terms of prevalence as in the relative ease of creation.
More and more novice game makers voluntarily refuse to support the publisher, creating games on their own or with a small team. In addition, it is often just such projects that can boast of original ideas and sink into the hearts of gamers. This is not to mention the millions of dollars these games bring to their creators.
To some extent, Valve should be grateful for the development of indie development, which made Steam the main platform for independent projects. Now it is easier for developers to raise funding for their ideas, promote them and develop them together with the gaming community. True, because of this, a lot of trash has appeared, but it is eliminated by natural selection, while worthy projects go to the masses.
Crunching, the so-called overwork, has already become commonplace in the gaming industry. As soon as the money, publishers and release dates appeared in the industry, developers began to take projects more seriously, sacrificing time and health.
Publicity of this problem has become an industry trend. If earlier developers worked almost silently overtime, now they talk about it in interviews, books and news. Even more – gamers began to think about it, and advocate the postponement of the release for the sake of the health of the employees and the quality of the project.
In addition, the crunch problem concerns not only big studios, but also indie developers. More and more often I hear stories from single developers who work from morning till night to catch the release, waking up and getting up at the workplace.
We’ll finish it later
With the development of the Internet, another trend has appeared in the industry, which, unlike the previous one, can hardly be called good. Relatively recently, such a term has appeared in the gaming environment as the “patch of the first day”. Developers are increasingly launching good but poorly assembled games to the market that suffer from an overabundance of glitches at the start of sales.
Previously, developers tried to release games with as few bugs as possible. Now the problems of the project are solved after the release, and gamers suddenly became tacit testers who find bugs and report them to the developers.
In recent years, this “anti-trend” has begun to gain traction, and Fallout 76 and Anthem are proof of this. If earlier games were just repaired, now some projects literally change after release. The same No Man’s Sky has become a different game in five years of post-release improvements.
At the same time, there is a positive side to this trend – games began to live longer. Now developers have begun to devote more time to post-release support, filling projects with content. As a result, many games only get better over time, delighting new and old players alike for game portfolio.
Retail is dead. Long live the digital
If previously gamers stood in lines for a disc with a new game, now most players buy entertainment without leaving their homes. So, according to the Statista website, in 2018 83% of games were sold in digital online stores.
Plus, more and more studios are reporting that digital sales are the main source of revenue. Yes, add-ons and in-game purchases are taken into account when calculating the metrics, but the sales of the games themselves also count towards the overall coefficient.
