@sorrow_42 No what is happening is that game development costs have skyrocketed and as older developers leave the PC market newer entrants will come in to pick up the slack over time. It's about competition. Right now tools and development costs are not very good, costs and tools have to get better to allow more competition into the field. Right now games are developed in a "hand crafted" way, tools like procedural generation are coming down the pike but they are going to take at least a decade to appear. What has happened is that graphics and high fidelity are the golden handcuffs that have caused companies to become risk averse. Compare the development costs of PC games 15 years ago between 1990 and 2000 and compare it to a modern multiplatform game. Duke 3D was made on a ~$300,000 development budget. Duke nukem forever? Way more then that and that's "part 2" that has been lost in development for the last 12 years. Game developers got bogged down by graphical realism and complexity, it's going to take a while for them to get out of the mud and bring dev costs back down. Things go in cycles. We have starcraft 2, diablo 3 and games like Magicka (check it out on steam) and others coming out, look to smaller developers and find other things to do while you wait out this period. Right now the whole industry is stagnant and stuck in the mudd and it's own delusions (social gaming) it is going to take a while to get out of it.

@Fyre8892 Part #2 I'm sorry but companies control what gets produced and what gets marketed, the fact is game developers have lost touch with their audiences, "hardcore" and not. Crappy games sell only because the gaming population is not static and many (not all) newer gamers don't have the discriminating tastes of older gamers, or younger gamers who've played backlog of retro (oldschool) games. I can't be the only one who saw the abortion that FF9 was, as well as many other games that never live up to their potential because they are pushed out of the door way too soon or the devs are clueless of the games pedigree... Before FF9 was released I was thinking it was a return to the roots of the original final fantasy, the crystals fighters, ninja's class, Garland, Behemoth, etc. Traditional "medieval like" Final fantasy, swords and elves and all that... but it was about a monkey boy from outerspace, it wasn't a bad game by a long shot, but it's obvious a lot of dev's making these games have lost touch with what the audience cherished about their games, because the dev's have never played the originals or have only played the most recent games in the series

@Fyre8892 It's not to capitalisms benefit that lowest common denominator stuff gets released and bought, the fact is many customers have no clue about what goes on in the industry, many of hardcore have been scratching their heads and been wondering "WTF HAPPENED??" many developers in the industry have gone independent for the exact same reason, there are too many people in the industry that don't get the core of why gaming was fun to begin with and until real gamers who have the skills and have played every game under the sun start joining the games industry in droves, the industry will suffer from developers and business people that don't understand the lessons learned from other games because they have not played them.

This is about non scarcity of digital goods, the "replicator" for information works has been invented, and it rubs capitalists the wrong way... boo hoo. Truth be told in a world of war, poverty, exploitation of man by man for profit, DRM is just one way the ruling investor classes use in their naive attempt to control the internet and gouge clueless drooling gamers, as well as consumers of other media like movies, these corporate idiots want to take away our rights, it's creeping capitalist fascism that is alarming. They would try to have us rent products on a permanent basis and never own anything, it's a sick way to enslave people who work hard for their money. I mean really, Halo? call of duty 4? America's love with first person shooters buy buying the same stuff in a box over and over again is diluting gaming diversity. Everyone pirates, they are not dark seedy people, they are your mom, your sister, your dad, your brother. Anyone says they don't is lying, people install an OS on their families computer without buying an individual liscense for each computer, same with games. This whole capitalist bs mentality and "intellectual property" bs has to stop, consumers should legally be INVESTORS and CO-OWNERS of all intellectual property the product they INVESTED IN, with games we can't get source for games from companies to fix old games that companies have abandoned. Things like Freespace SCP (google it) would not be possible of not for great people in the industry like John carmack and the guys at volition that opened up their games source so people could learn, modify, and create new works for their favorite games. I'm tired of people who support the elimination of their rights and are Pro corporate, pro IP excessive capitalist wanks.