If the industry does crash, what will happen?

With all the talk recently of an industry crash, I was wondering what we, as consumers, can expect to see during the crash and what are the likely results of one.

I figure that games will get super cheap and only a handful of games will be able to continue to sell at the $50 price range.

But what do you guys think will happen and what will result from an industry crash? Could we expect to see downloadable games like the Phantom is doing to lower the cost of games or do you think the industry will recover like before and everything will be fine?

It will recover, but it will break the paradigm. Companies will look for ways to drastically change the way games are played and/or obtained.

It will be a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria!

[quote name='jmcc']It will be a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria![/quote]

Hah, that's kinda what I was thinking. But if zombies do come around, I'll be ready and and waiting.

I tihnk it will be a good thing. I would rather see much less games being produced, but with a more polished feel than companies throwing out tons of shit for no reason. On the other hand, there is a good chance that all we will see in the future are remakes and sequels, just because those are almost guaranteed money makers.

If it crashes I will be forced to take up another hobby like.......reading or basket weaving. I had enough of that in Boy Scouts. It will recover but there will be rough period. The Phantom is crap, but if a real company developed downloadable games it will work, I just don't feel it is quite there yet.

[quote name='jmcc']It will be a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria![/quote]

There's probably enough games out there that we could play the rest of our lives without having to play the same game twice. Not saying that you'd like some of them. I don't know about the Phantom, SEGA tried it before with the Genesis and it never took off. I think most people like packaging too much. The ApeXtreme is interesting to me, but at $500, it's too expensive for now.

I dont expect a crash.

You have to look at the factors that led to the first crash: a flood of sub par games for ludicrous prices and a general drop of interest across the board.

The fact that most systems play movies and games and cds makes them economically more viable to a gamer than buying those components individually.

Add to that the fact that there are far more gamers today and they just get older rather than completly give up games and there'll always be a user base.

For a true "crash" to happen like it did in the 80's the market would have to over extend it self 20 fold try to force stores to over purchase shit titles, and it's harder to do that now because companies are more cautious with the threat of things like anti-trust lawsuits watchdog groups waiting for a big enough example of poor buisness practices to go into action.

Also the market is self-correcting, with all these price drops on older games it's showing retailers that they cant just blindly buy so many units without putting more thought into way stock moves.

A crash would mean the majority of people playing games today would have just stopped alltogether and there's way to much interst in the digital medium between both consoles AND PCs.

The internet would have to cease to exist first.

[quote name='jmcc']It will be a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria![/quote]

You beat me to it. I love the dogs and cats living together quote.

[quote name='Tromack'][quote name='jmcc']It will be a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria![/quote]

You beat me to it. I love the dogs and cats living together quote.[/quote]

That whole scene is awesome.

"Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by dickless here."
"They caused an explosion!"
"Is this true?"
"Yes it's true...This man has no dick."

It probably won't crash. More likely these three things will happen:
1. One of these companies will fall out of this system race, and open the door for someone else.
2. Multiplatform games will become less and less common.
3. Less games will be produced each year.

There are probably a few other things that will happen, but the likelyhood of a crash is pretty low. This isn't comic books or something like that where if one company fails a whole bunch of them will be effected by it.

The movie industry NEEDS a crash, and yet it still seems to push a crap load of money into J-Lo's purse and lose millions upon millions when the movie is released.

I would say the game industry overall is in better shape than the movie industry.

The industry that is in shit is the music industry. I mean it doesn't take much to produce a cd.
A small movie still takes millions to make.
The movie industry isn't going anywhere, and neither is the game industry, since they take a lot of capital and talent to produce. The music industry is gonna die.

The music industry as we know it is going to die. Pre-recorded CD's are going to disappear in a generation and everything will be downloaded. I can walk into many malls in my region and they have no CD store. The only people selling CD's are BB, CC, Target, Media Play and other big box retailers.

The game industry isn't going to crash.... I will say it's going to consolidate and be more like the movie business than what we see now.

If the industry were to crash, it would come back as an online medium. Broadband delivery cuts out most of the middle men (a.k.a. retailers) and keeps the profits in the pockets of game industry companies.

In response to what bradr had to say about Sega Channel, that was actually a success. I worked for them towards the end of their existance. They actually shut down before they started losing profits. That company was bringing in $1 million a month. That is decent considering it was only a 15 person company. Sega Channel proved online delivery is a viable business long before the days of broadband as we know it. It's only a matter of time before the rest of the industry catches up.

the movie industry wont crash as long as there's a such thing as "foreign investors".

We won't see a crash, but these ludicrous clearances like CC and BB $5 games point to the fact that there is too much product choking retail shelves. We'll see the big chains like that two above and Target and Walmart start ordering less games and keep to the most mainstream titles. This may very well mean more sequals and derivative crap because as we see in the music industry, large companies cater to Walmart because they order so many units. We will probably see some more great sales sooner rather than later, but not a true crash.

If there is a crash, expect prices to drop for us consumers, lots of independent game stores to go out of business, and a few less succesful publishers/developers may also bite the dust.

Nintendo will die. if the industry crashes someone will go. nintendo is pretty weak and has had finacial problems. as for the whole industry, just more cheap games, we'll have $.99 CC sales. a ton of small time compinies will die.

[quote name='fireball343']Nintendo will die. if the industry crashes someone will go. nintendo is pretty weak and has had finacial problems. as for the whole industry, just more cheap games, we'll have $.99 CC sales. a ton of small time compinies will die.[/quote]

I can't really tell if you're wholly joking here, but you know that Nintendo has a war chest of several million, if not billion dollars? Even if Revolution totally fails, they'll still be able to launch another platform.

In other words, they're far from dying.

[quote name='BigHow'][quote name='fireball343']Nintendo will die. if the industry crashes someone will go. nintendo is pretty weak and has had finacial problems. as for the whole industry, just more cheap games, we'll have $.99 CC sales. a ton of small time compinies will die.[/quote]

I can't really tell if you're wholly joking here, but you know that Nintendo has a war chest of several million, if not billion dollars? Even if Revolution totally fails, they'll still be able to launch another platform.

In other words, they're far from dying.[/quote]

Besides they'd always be able to make money just developing games for other systems if it ever came down to it.

Are we forgetting who invented Pokemon? Nintendo. They've made more money of Pokemon than any other venture. No, Nintendo is going to be around for a long time.

[quote name='fireball343']Nintendo will die. if the industry crashes someone will go. nintendo is pretty weak and has had finacial problems. as for the whole industry, just more cheap games, we'll have $.99 CC sales. a ton of small time compinies will die.[/quote]

I'd love to see your proof. Nintendo is cash rich and sitting on a pile of money. The only reason they really lost that much money in the last few quarters is because they have sizeable amount of money in US dollars, and with the dollar weak and the Yen getting stronger, they lost money.

Nintendo would not disappear. Their IP is too valuable. In an absolute worst case, they leadership would run away with all of the profits and sell the company off bit by bit to the competition.

I mean heck, Atari still exists, if only as a nameplate. Nintendo is much more important to the industry than Atari was...so even in death I don't see the company vanishing from the realm of videogames.

Maybe they'll go back to making playing cards

[quote name='Grave_Addiction'][quote name='jmcc']It will be a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria![/quote]

Hah, that's kinda what I was thinking. But if zombies do come around, I'll be ready and and waiting.[/quote]

Me too! I can finally put into practice all the skills I've learned from playing countless Resident Evil and Castlevania games!

If the industry were to crash we would see cheap prices on the existing titles and see fewer releases until a company comes along to save the day like Nintendo did with its NES. An online medium has already been mentioned and that's a very likely solution.

Don't count on Nintendo biting the bullet either, they do have billions sitting in the bank and the Game Boy alone will guarantee their exisitance for quite a long time to come.

As for the biblical disaster aspect of this crash, it's fairly unlikely but anything's possible. One thing would be certain though - the zombies would be screwed going up against this generation of gamers trained on zombie killing simulators such as Resident Evil and others. They would truly have no chance.

[quote name='fireball343']Nintendo will die. if the industry crashes someone will go. nintendo is pretty weak and has had finacial problems. as for the whole industry, just more cheap games, we'll have $.99 CC sales. a ton of small time compinies will die.[/quote]

I'd love to have a company as weak as Nintendo.

Nintendo doesn't enjoy the near monopoly they had for a few brief years but they have strong revenues, a massive cash reserve, and an extremely valuable library of games that can be ported to other platforms as well as ownership of the involved franchises, not to mention several of the world's most successful game designers and producers in terms of their career revenue.

This is a much stronger postion than what Sega faced when they elected to get out of hardware. At the time Sega was nearly in receivership. It was either radically restructure the copany or sell out to one of their hardware and/or software competitors. Nintendo's console business hasn't been on the same scale as the SNEs era but their high-profile franchises continue to produce huge sales out of proportion to the GameCube's installed base compared to more typical hit games. THe GameBoy remains hugely profitable and using it in connection with the GameCube has boosted both platforms and helped justify their continuing in the console space.

Sony actually isn't in all that much of a better position than Nintendo. Their video game revenue is much higher but vast portions of the company have gone many quarters without net profits. In several recent years Sony would have been in the red if not for the game division. That's a lot of responsibility to shoulder. If Sony has an off year in PS titles it can clobber their stock valuation since the guy at the Nikkei are very aware of what is holding up the company.