Mar 7, 2008. Sins of the gaming industry.

Now we're going to talk about the complaints gamers have with the gaming industry, and we all know which ones you guys have, because if you visit this site, you're probably an old school gamer who has been gaming longer than a few of the new gamers have been alive.

No doubt the biggest complaint is about the ridiculous number of sequels the gaming industry releases each year. Streetfighter IV is coming, which sees the franchise being older than the gamers who play the game. As a game reviewer, we know that companies need cash, and when a game sells alot of copies, why not release a sequel to cash in on that success? It happens all the time in movies, TV shows, and books. So we're not going to complain so much about that as the next problem.

Now this has always bothered us, which is why are games getting more expensive. Remember the N64 cartridges? They were very expensive, but only because developers had to pay Nintendo for the cartridge, which costs like $10 at the time. Then the game industry switch to CDs and then DVDs. It's ten years later and the game prices have gone up even as media prices have fallen. Now the developers are arguing that the high cost is from actually producing the game and the expensive license they have to pay Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo.

The question is why are these companies charging so much for licenses? They make money from selling games, not from licenses. You'd think they would want to increase the number of developers by lowering the licensing costs, not raising them. The success of the PS2 and PSX wasn't from anything but a huge flood of diverse games thanks to a huge number of developers. Why shrink that?

With the increasing number of graduates with degrees in computer animation and more powerful PCs, we don't believe that the costs of producing a videogame title should be that high based on the artwork or soundtrack.

What we do know that is expensive is the cost of a good 3D engine such as the Unreal Engine. It's outrageous, but not as expensive as trying to produce one of these engines and discovering some fatal bug. That's happened to a few game developers that results in the complete failure of the product and company.

Now what hasn't improved over the years is the AI. The world of AI hasn't changed much since the last big innovation, which was probably fuzzy logic a decade ago. Remember a game called Battlecruiser that tried to use fuzzy logic? The game had five or six updates and is called Universal Combat today. You have to devote your life to master the gameplay in that game. Today's AI is still scripted. Maybe it's not as good as Universal Combat, but it should be better.

When you put all these things together, you get a pretty expensive game. Right? Well maybe. This is Sins of the Solar Empire for the PC released by a little game developer. It costs $40 and features great AI, great graphics, and the ability to have hundreds of units on the screen at the same time on even the P4 single core systems. If this was a 360 game, the game would still run and cost $60. Even with the licensing cost, you have to wonder where the extra $20 goes.