Brother None's letter to the editor

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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The Escapist published Brother None's reply to some inquiries surrounding their Fringe Cults article, under Letters to the Editor:<blockquote>As for "the industry has moved on," it has and it hasn't. It's not that much different. For instance, Cain once said about Fallout's combat: "It also showed how popular and fun turn-based combat could be, when everyone else was going with real-time or pause-based combat." That's no different now, everyone else is going with real-time or pause-based, only this time so is Fallout.

So if anything has changed it's that the unique situation behind Fallout can't be reproduced. Not because the people aren't there, but because the companies have closed ranks, and even a proclaimed independent like Bethesda joins those ranks. Only Blizzard remains, I guess, with their hearty sod off to the, as CVG put it, "'big new feature' kind of showmanship." ... I'm sure Bethesda's Fallout 3 has the potential to outsell the Fallout 3 BIS was working on, but BIS didn't need to sell a million copies just to break even.

The base investment cost of the license and ludicrous expenses like their PR department (including a community manager who doesn't really do anything, from what I can tell) or hiring Liam Neeson are choices Bethesda made, and only because of those choices do they have to compete in three markets to so much as break even. That's not inherent of today's gaming market, but I'll admit it's predominant, and it will have to collapse in on itself someday. These high-risk high-profit ventures are a way [too] instable base for an industry. Heck, you don't see any other industry doing it.</blockquote>Link: Letters to the Editor.

Thanks Briosafreak.
 
I wonder when that crash will come...
Hopefully right after AfterFall launches so I can have something freakin great to play while the game industry goes ploop
 
Sorrow said:
It went ploop long time ago.
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No it didn't. The game industry is instable, but its instability is also the support of making it huge, the size of the movie industry. It's size over stability, profit over safety. And that's their problem.

I'm reminded of David Gaider's comments on the topic:

Maybe. I can sort of see where the thinking comes from, however, though it may be short-sighted. Take MMO's, for instance. Right now one could surmise that there is a huge market for MMO's similar to World of Warcraft (which would be all of them, practically). What MMO's there are which are different are very small and niche.

So do you enter an already-saturated market by making an MMO like World of Warcraft (assuming you would want to, of course)? Or do you make something different and hope there is an invisible market out there and current alternative MMO's are simply under-supported?

To the gambling man, the WoW-like MMO has numbers you can count on. There is a proven audience out there, one that is already buying and well-known. Trying to prove to such a man that if they invested in something different that the market would materialize is difficult to justify. It requires a leap of faith, and one that you tend to get only with small companies that have nothing to lose -- every now and again one of them comes along and proves everyone wrong, and suddenly everyone's scrambling to catch up.

To a degree, it's like that in many industries. Games more than most, perhaps, because it's not very established yet and especially now the volatility is really high -- the majority of games put out are simply not profitable. Is the answer to make higher quality games? That would be nice, but I'm not sure that's the entire answer... and if the current system isn't sustainable, I'm not certain that what it would evolve into afterwards if there was some kind of "crash" would be very much to your liking.
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Goweigus said:
I wonder when that crash will come...
Hopefully right after AfterFall launches so I can have something freakin great to play while the game industry goes ploop
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Indie games will never be affected... Afterfall may, but not much... if anything.
 
Morbus said:
Indie games will never be affected... Afterfall may, but not much... if anything.
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Depends, indie games is a wide market, and there's quite big difference between indie game makers with dedicated followers like PopCap games or Spiderweb games and indie game makers on their first route through, like Intoxicate Interactive and Iron Tower Studios.

Don't see indie gaming going anywhere but up in case of a crash, but who am I?
 
Unkillable Cat said:
So it is. Though I had to look it up in a dictionary as no-one I knew had heard of it, and even there it just said "see unstable".
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so you went out and asked people if they know 'instable'? wow, i'm impressed.

and yeah, iceland has always been a font of correct english language. ;)
 
It's "unstable", not "instable".

It's "instability", not "unstability".

The Concise Oxford Dictionary is the measure of all things.
 
Unkillable Cat said:
So it is. Though I had to look it up in a dictionary as no-one I knew had heard of it, and even there it just said "see unstable".
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You had to look it up? :P
 
Per said:
It's "unstable", not "instable".

It's "instability", not "unstability".

The Concise Oxford Dictionary is the measure of all things.
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euhm, what?

maybe a little too concise there Per ;)

it is in Longman's Contemporary English (the bigass edition) and on dictionary.reference.com
 
Per said:
The Concise Oxford Dictionary is the measure of all things.
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Not to rag on Oxford too much, but I once looked up eschatological in an Oxford New English. The definition had me in tear. To paraphrase:

es·cha·tol·o·gy
1. any system of doctrines concerning last, or final, matters, as death, the Judgment, the future state, etc.
2. the branch of theology dealing with such matters.
see scatology

sca·tol·o·gy
1. the study of or preoccupation with excrement or obscenity.
2. obscenity, esp. words or humor referring to excrement.
 
That's because the Oxford New English was an early experiment with psychic paper. It tries to direct you where you want to be. They had to cancel it because it was too successful.
 
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