A year later, we seem to be lingering in that shake-out period, plus we’re in the uncertainty of a half-step console generation, PLUS we’re in the early speculation phase of another full generation just around the corner. I have a feeling our engine technology is going to be a giant pile of chaos and dysfunction for the next couple of years. <\/p>\n
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To VR, or Not To VR?<\/h3>\n
<\/div>VR seemed to be a huge influence on things this year. Everyone was announcing or releasing VR headsets or related technology. No, we didn’t get any really killer apps for VR. But I think VR is a big part of the reason everyone is abandoning this console generation in its crib and trying to make a new one. 60FPS gaming is now a big deal, VR might suddenly become a big deal, and the nascent consoles are just shy of the power required to do those two things. <\/p>\n
I spent the whole year waiting for VR to piss or get off the pot. It needs to either come up with a really must-play experience (or several) to justify the brutal price tag, or it needs to get out of the way and stop distracting developers from making stuff the general public will actually want. The games so far have been just interesting enough to keep a small number of people engaged and talking about it, but not good enough to attract the masses. <\/p>\n
You can argue that VR is supposed<\/b> to be a niche product and we shouldn’t expect it to go mainstream. That’s a reasonable assumption. The problem is that niche markets do not mix well with high budgets. Japanese visual novels are a niche market, but they’re cheap to make and they run on anything. Imagine if consumers needed $700 of gaming hardware to be able to play a visual novel, and they required cutting-edge graphics engines and expensive 3D art assets to produce. If that were true, the genre couldn’t survive as a niche product.<\/p>\n
The graphics demands put upward pressure on budgets. Meanwhile, the expensive hardware keeps the audience small, which means you can’t expect to make much, which means you can’t afford to spend much. No matter how excited the press or how novel the experience, if the money to be made selling VR game is less than the money it costs to make them, this genre will die.<\/p>\n
The buying public are hedging their bets. Everyone is “curious” about VR, but the headsets haven’t taken off. The publishers are doing likewise. They keep making modest VR experiments, but nobody is investing in it on a huge scale. Everyone is keeping one foot in the door in case it takes off, but they’re putting most of their money on safer investments. <\/p>\n
Nobody wants to cash out. Nobody wants to go all-in. This is actually a really mature and forward-thinking approach to new technology, but I don’t know how long we can remain balanced in this state. <\/p>\n
The Great Indie Deluge<\/h3>\n
<\/div>It’s almost a running joke at this point. I declared 2013 the year of the indies<\/a>. But then indies were an even bigger deal the next year. In 2015, half of my year-end list was indies<\/a>. Every year, indies seemed larger, more important, and more numerous than the year before. <\/p>\n It turns out that this was not my imagination. The total number of indie titles has been increasing. The proliferation of titles has been exponential. To give you a sense of how steep the curve is: About 40% of all Steam titles were added to the service in the last 12 months<\/a>. <\/p>\n
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