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[Lonely Vazdru]

I thought this thread was about abandonware, not piracy. Pirating a new game is one thing, wanting to play Monkey island is another. I don't agree with downloading new games but i do agree with being able to play games that are no longer/almost not sold. I can understand a game company going out of it's mind about seeing it's brand new game "warezed" to death but i despise them when they prevent oldies from being freely distibuted (like Daggerfall). As Evad said, they should take it as a compliment.

[Havell]

Daggerfall looks likely to be released as freeware when Oblivion comes out. I'm waiting with bated breath.

[taikara]

@o.m.g:

Some information on the gaming industry.

The "Economics" section is particularly interesting.

[Nikson]

You're right. A few very interesting points in that section! I'm not sure about the 5% though. Seems a bit extreme.

[DeathDude]

Very interesting article Tai, and yeah actually the 5% may not seem to be that high but now a days think about it, the costs of making a game have doubled since the early 90's, if you want to really make a sweet game you need a big development team and support from a publisher like EA that can really help. Doesn't surprise me that number, not at all.

[omg]

it suprises me. and if its true i dont think abandonware and piracy are the main culprits. and i find it hard to belive that the industry could keep going if only 5 percent of product made a profit.
i cant see anyone investing in it if that is the case.
nice article tho tai k:

[A. J. Raffles]

Originally posted by omg@Oct 18 2005, 02:22 PM
it suprises me. and if its true i dont think abandonware and piracy are the main culprits. and i find it hard to belive that the industry could keep going if only 5 percent of product made a profit.
i cant see anyone investing in it if that is the case.
nice article tho tai k:

Actually I'd say that sounds quite realistic. The reason why they can still keep up would be that those top 5 percent in turn make huge profits, which sort of evens out the losses incurred elsewhere. It's still a bit of a risky business, though.
By the way, not only the gaming industry that works like that: many publishing houses (yes, I'm a bookworm, so that's the sort of thing I know about ) do the same type of thing. There are publishers out there which basically only manage to survive because they were lucky enough to have two successful titles - in some cases it's only one. And as soon as those titles cease to be successful for some reason, they'll be in deep trouble, obviously, if they don't come up with another successful title fairly quickly.

[DeathDude]

Look at the top publishers every year, it's usually either EA or Nintendo coming out at number one, then like Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Sega, companies that are really big, so they get a majority of the profits, and the development companies will only see a portion of that, so honestly 5% sounds very fine to me, again factor in costs now a days.

[blastradius14]

They should go back to making 2d games. Way cheaper that way LOL

Think of it like this: The legend of Zelda for the NES was way better than the Wolfenstien 3D or the Dooms for SNES... Of course the limited graphics of the SNES didn't help much, but I didn't see so many of the Doom type games in the N64...

[DeathDude]

Cough uh you don't recall many doom type games on the n64 eh, goldeneye (Still one of the best FPS of all time imo consoleside) and perfect dark ring a bell. :bleh: Some truly excellent FPS games made for the N64 I still remember playing goldeneye with friends sniff memories of me winning. :angel: