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Published on Thursday, 05 April 2018 18:09
Many of the things which have been happening these past few years (both good and bad), and which will continue happening beyond 2020 are a direct result of one thing. It's something I've been saying for a while now, and no matter which way I try to steer my arguments and observations, I always end up exactly where I left off:
Low barriers of entry.
In March 2017 I had written a blog post on
what the end of Steam Greenlight really means to developers when its shut down was first announced. A lot of my comments stemmed from this very low-barriers principle.
Taking all this into consideration, two things in particular stand out:
- In the past 3 or so years, more and more people seem to be realising (and are surprised by that same realisation, which is a fascinating phenomenon to observe) that if they want their game to be successful, to whatever degree, they need to do something about it and take it seriously.
- The industry has developed huge echo chambers. Subsequently, a very damaging culture of "trying to fit in" and conformity (cue Locutus of Borg memes) has grown. I would normally have expected the opposite i.e. for it to fuel a desire to innovate, break out and get ahead of the crowd. Perhaps in 5 years or so it will be a different story, once Darwinian theory really kicks in and when the group of people mentioned in point 1 above grows even bigger. However this will have a huge ripple-effect, a mini-extinction event, which is not altogether bad: to continue the evolutionary analogy, it's detrimental to the individual but good for the survival of the species. We've seen smaller versions of this happen on a micro scale within regional clusters. This will be a bit bigger.
What's your view on this? Tweet at me (@caruanas) or join the discussion in my GamesBiz group on Facebook.