With all the 3d madness that grips the game market, are older concepts viable today? Will they make money? I know there are several shareware operators here, and I am sure they can answer my question, is shareware* still viable? *By that I mean the older 2d type shareware games.

They will make money but don''t quit your day job for it. Keep it a hobby. I can''t imagine the scene being the same as five years ago.

There is absolutely a massive potential market for these games. Just try telling Chris Sawyer(Rollercoaster Tycoon, now working on a sequel to one of the best selling PC games ever) that all games need to be in 3D, or use huge teams.
You can make money from old school 2D sharewrae games, but they have to have GREAT gameplay. If you cant woo your audience with stupidly flash graphics, you need to make up for it in gameplay, and that means getting lots of feedback and doing lots of testing.

http://www.positech.co.uk

It's pretty amazing that blizzards first 3D game was warcraft3.
Personally I’ve been disturbed by the increasing complexity of gameplay models in games. It seems to me that in the past games were simpler. Each game had a few solid gameplay elements that the entire game rested upon. It was easy to define what the core activities of the game were; like Tetris, Zelda, Double Dragon, Contra. It was always obvious what the game was about and the gampley was simple direct and well thought out.

It seems today that game designers throw all kinds of crazy gameplay features into their games to try and "Set them apart". Recent examples of this would be Dungeon Siege, NWN, Morrowind, etc. Sometimes the added gameplay elements are a nice addition. But most of the time they just get in the way and make the games purpose seem less clear.

Blizzards Diablo and diablo2 are excellent examples of games with a modern level of sophistication without making the gameplay overly complex. I think in moving away from game designs that have been refined and chiseled down to their core attributes we have made our games overly complicated and less accessible to the average consumer.

This is why I think there is still a market for games which employ the design principles of a time gone by. Go to this site and download some of yesterdays classics. You wont regret it


[edited by - Ironside on August 21, 2002 2:58:31 PM]

Don''t forget the GBA and the PDA computers.Many publishers and developers are making money with old titles.

quote: Original post by Ironside
Sometimes the added gameplay elements are a nice addition. But most of the time they just get in the way and make the games purpose seem less clear.

I disagree. I find "simple" games to be far less entertaining than "complicated" ones.

quote: Original post by Beer Hunter
I disagree. I find "simple" games to be far less entertaining than "complicated" ones.

Yes but you do not represent the casual gamer which is one of the more lucrative market demographics, both because it is very large and because it is largely ignored by the current game industry. (There are of course a few exceptions, Sims, Diablo, MS Game Pack, etc and all have done exceedingly well)

In fact I know some independent game dev companies that have made over $1million in sales from one of their card games.

It is because of this ever increasing casual gamer market that the "simpler" games, and I put quotes around simpler because I actually thing that simple gameplay is more difficult to design, are still viable in today’s market.

I like 2D platform games just as much as FPS games.

quote: Original post by Ironside
Yes but you do not represent the casual gamer which is one of the more lucrative market demographics, both because it is very large and because it is largely ignored by the current game industry.

Huh? Casual gamers are not being largely ignored. The games being targetted at them just aren''t being hyped as much.

If you look at the best selling games, you''ll always see a mix of "simple" and "complicated" games. You can make plenty of money either way.

O.K. explain this, why has EA's Sims and Sims expansion packs dominated the weekly top 10 best selling lists for the past year or so and no one has come out with any spin-off or clone? The Sims is truly a game targeted at the casual gamer/mass market and yet there isn't even a competing product on the market.

We have our NWN, Morrowwind, Dungeon Siege; we have our EQ, AC, UO, Lineage etc. We have Quake, Unreal, Half-life. We have a bazillion Diablo knockoffs. And a million tycoon games (which are borderline mass market/casual gamer games). But nothing that even comes close to the sims.

I'm talking about games that appeal to everyone outside of the males 14-25 who play a game a month and own 3 consoles market.
A game like morrow wind or NWN just isn't going to appeal to most girls between the ages of 9 and 60. It also isn't appropriate for most kids or adults who haven’t really played that many computer games. Like the 35 year old who just bought his first Dell.

No question that you can make money either way. But there's just a lot less competition in the mass market games like the sims. Which is why there is still a market for simple games.


[edited by - Ironside on August 23, 2002 1:40:53 AM]