To summ it all up i think its a very fair comment and a popular thought that games publishers should forget good graphics and make good games!

hah! have never payed more than 10$ for a game, pirate copies rock!
most of the games produced nowadays are piece of shit in general, its either in shining box but shit inside or good game but TOO short to enjoy, 1-2 days
some games are "so good", they get many arwards, medal and other crap, but after paying it for hour or so you want to throw it away
examples?
doom3 - way too short,
red aler3 is way worse than ra2, somewhere close to ra1, except ra1 was made in 90s,
CS this one for zombies and bots
there are few games that can be played longer than one weekend but there are very few fo them and that's disapointing
well at least for 60$ you can afford to buy old dusty p1-p3, get some good old 90s games like civ, doom, duke nukem and have fun

The economy does have some effect. Me personally I can only afford a couple games per quarter, and only have time to juggle maybe two or three games. The fact of the matter is that there hasn't even been three games worth buying for some time. You have hugely dominant titles like CoD4, Halo 3, WoW, coming out with tremendous value offering nearly infinte reply value with the multiplayer and there is no reason to buy another game.

Lately I have found myself going through beta tests with my Guild (as we get invited to nearly every test out there) and so far most of the games are unimpressive.

The fact of the matter is that the gaming industry nowadays is 95% crap games and 5% awesome. And more and more people are starting to realize that and are actually NOT feeding the publishers greed by buying games that should cost no more then $5 when they are charging $60. Look at Wii for example. Look at all the random terrible games that come out for that junk. Honestly you can probably count on your hand the number of games worth buying on wii. I am not saying it much better for other consoles, but that just shows you how corrupt the industry is. There really is only ~4-5 titles worth buying a year, and a few of those are multi platform.

They miss the point,no good games are coming out till fall,we are in a dry time.....

They may not yet have understood the point about making good games, but some of them have certainly got a hint about DRM.
I have never seen so many new, official patches that totally remove the DRM checks. Some even remove the requirement of having the disc in the reader.
To me, that is a lot more telling. Why go through the hassle of implementing DRM when you patch it out barely a year after release ?
DRM _is_ going the way of the dodo and, with a bit of luck, it will happen sooner rather than later.

On the other hand, I must admit that the only game I am waiting for at this point is Diablo III. All the rest holds little appeal for me. I have a game library of over 400 titles, all legally owned. Okay, not all are really good, but the point is I used to buy and buy often.
Now that I have been burned a few times by Stalinian DRM, I have all but stopped buying games. And no, I do not pirate them instead. I just play with the ones I have.
If the game industry wants to make me buy again, it will need to prove to me that I am considered a valued customer, not a thief.
A tall order, I agree, but those are my conditions.

We all have our systems of choice, why would we buy 2?

I don't know how it is in diffrent countries, but here in Poland. Each and every publisher raised game prices to unacceptable level, no wonder noone is buying them now.
I alone have more than 180 PC titles on my shelf all original, I usually bought minimum 5 games per month. Now since 2 months I bought only 1, why? Because its no problem to buy for me 5 games monthly for 69PLN but i wont buy even one if they cost 139-169 like now many titles cost. Its just too high price for a game, they had at least 345PLN monthly on me now they have nada, zero, null, nic.

NPD Doesnt account for online sales. This is a rapidly growing market, and with steams weekend sales, and the occasional deals on D2D, there is a signifificant number of people now making their purchases online.

So, while I beleive there is SOME impact on the industry (there obviously would be) This article is blowing it out of proportion, and ignoring the fact that NPD is not tracking online sales numbers, a market that is now extremely large and significant.

Apparently by reading Asian BOT Trsanslations for decades, become Hacked. Worse for staff:

producing studio 20th TV is proceeding with auditioning new actors for the roles after failing to reach an agreement with the original voice cast: John DiMaggio, Maurice LaMarche, Billy West, Tress MacNeille and Katey Sagal.

"We love the 'Futurama' voice performers and absolutely wanted to use them, but unfortunately, we could not meet their salary demands," the studio said in a statement Friday. "While replacing these talented actors will be difficult, the show must go on."

Back in June when 20th TV and Comedy Central announced a deal to produce 26 new episodes of "Futurama," the producers noted that no deals with the show's original voice cast had been closed . Only Valuable memories cost 'Em dra' jibber jobs, me thinks, Futurama out of production since 2002- cann't foot 'd bill, well, some day BIG Writers will crawl to theINQ, begging for Space. Futur ama space, no doubt.

Publish Or Perish Be Thy Modem.

vondrashek

interesting I read about this over 3 months ago, I think you guys need some new "news"

Funny how Nick already wrote this article a few months ago, with almost word for word title, subtitle, and opening paragraph. I guess if you are going to copy off someone, best be yourself.

People are saving money and the games are for the most part just remixes of old game play in a new shell, gamers know it too. I realize you can only have so many different styles but at $60 a pop, it gets expensive for the kiddie consols.
FF XIII will be the next time I buy a PS3 title. As for PC games (where I do most of my gaming) there is nothing good since Fallout 3. It is either seriously infected DRM rentware that I will not touch or just plan crap. Dragon Age will see my cash for the PC.
Consol and PC publishers are getting greedy too, even my favourite game, Fallout 3 has 5 expansions for it, 4 done 1 to go. Then you have the worst, EA games and the SIMS. Then lets not forget Activision/Blizzard and Starcraft 2 in three freaking parts. I love and still play Starcraft 1 but will not buy SC2 until In can pick it up one day with all three parts in one box. I have the patients, just what the game publishers don’t want me to have.

I have to agree with Stormy, the $60+ price point is one of the single biggest reasons NOT too buy new games. I usually wait for a price drop or buy on PC where you can usually still pick up games for $20-40 bucks. Not to mention the ridiculous cost of the consoles, if you want the usable models. Those entry level models are a joke.

I hope they DRM themselves into extinction. I always check the net to see how bad the DRM is before I buy a Game.
Limit me the number of installs or force me to register the game online just to play it ? NO THANK YOU ,KEEP IT.

And I have bought every game I have ,and I used to pay hundreds for games per year, but they shot themselves in the foot with DRM so bad I have moved on to using the money to enjoy other things in life.

Employed or not, people will buy what they want, even at the expense of what they need. I doubt it has much to do with unemployment and more to do with the crap games that are out this year.

Wii's hype is dying fast. People are starting to realize it's not an HD console. PS3 is still too expensive. 360 is cheap enough to increase console sales but there's hardly any exclusive games worth playing on it. +recession

Unemployed people generally don't spend on non-essential goods. With a worldwide economic depression, the video game industry is lucky it's still in existence. The U.S. is losing 500,000 jobs every month with no end in sight.

Piracy? Nah! Piracy never stopped or slowed the sales down. But prices are. 60$ per copy? WTF? 60$ for several hours of fun?

I got scooped. I was going to pretty much clown on the industry over this but the first to commentators already did that. So they blame the economy now instead of piracy?! Can't they just come to terms with the fact that they are making shitty games for overtly expensive platforms for which they are charging for every single thing they do while simultaneously DLCing us to death.

amen bother. at this moment there is ZERO new games, that match "good" game description.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that last year june was just a better month for games then this year. I mean last year june the 360 had Ninja Gaiden II, the PS3 had MGS4, and the Wii final got rock band. Compare that to this you and you will notice there are no big name exclusives which are generally what moves systems unlike the previous year and interest in the Wii has dropped considerably.

There was some good games in june but they were all multiplatform and most of them not big enough on hype to push people to buy a new console. Hell MGS4 alone sold over 2 million copies in june last year which at $60 a copy is 120 million dollars which isn't even accounting for the fact it cost more in certain regions, for those too lazy to do the math that's about a 5th of the difference made up by just one game. Also take into account the half million or so PS3's that sold because of it and that's another 200+ million not counting the especial edition bundles sold at an extra 25% over the standard price. So ya on one exclusive game alone and the systems that sold because of it you make up over half the difference between last year and this year.

Anyone really want to question why june this year isn't as good as last year?

Hmm,

No word of piracy this time? Should they have come to their senses? Nahh...
...must be a mistake!

And we can presume that the XB360's chronic hardware failures, the PS3's outrageous price tag, and copy protection the KGB would have loved have nothing to do with this...