While it’s trendy to blame ‘the economic situation’ for almost everything at the moment, it’s undeniable that, whether there’s a genuine lack of finance to keep buying it all, or even if everybody’s just bored with the whole affair, the day of the gaming peripheral has, it seems, reached an end.
After all, when a company with the weight of Activision effectively makes such a statement – canning both the Guitar Hero and DJ Hero series in one fell swoop late last week – there’s little everybody else can do but nod their heads in agreement. When the biggest games publisher in the world effectively declares something a failure, it’s best not to argue.
But what’s set to replace these chunks of living room plastic? If you ask us, it could very well be the time to substitute them with nothing whatsoever. And why stop with just the instruments?
Because if an age of austerity is encouraging us to puritanically empty our lives of ‘stuff’, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to consider that, after lumpy toy drum kits, the next thing to see its way permanently to the refuse incinerator of gaming could be the boxed product itself.
Those grubby, Socialist Worker-reading fingers that love to celebrate the indie developer are all this week pointing to Double Fine and its excellent downloadable title Stacking as the next people’s champion.
While Tim Schafer’s new business plan – that of releasing a pocket money game every few months in a solid production line of four titles released with THQ – was a mouth watering prospect, having only the mediocre Costume Quest as proof-of-concept left many with a lukewarm reception to it all. Until now, anyway.
Because Stacking might – should – change all that. It’s the kind of highly creative, delightfully offbeat concept that would have died a miserable, lonely squeak of a death at retail, but shines radiantly when advertised on an Xbox Live dashboard. It’s bringing aged concepts such as cheerful surreality, relative non-violence and, above all, humour back to videogames in a way almost nothing on a disc could ever, in today’s entrenched sequel-obsessed retail market, get past the besuited risk managers.
Far be it from us to say that the increasingly swollen super-publishers haven’t looked far enough beyond the end of their own noses, but if sequel potential is all there is, what’s in the pipeline after the (admittedly still plentiful) nutrients to be drawn from the Call of Dutys of this world have been exhausted?
If more folk follow Schafer, these dogged establishment behemoths could well be swept away to reveal a gaming underbelly teeming with new life and prospects; genuinely brilliant and original concepts currently overshadowed less by the assured quality of so-called Tripe-A titles, and more by their mindwarping media saturation campaigns.
Yet, this time when even less people than ever can spend £54.99 for a new game release with nary a thought, won’t last forever. Indie developers need to act now, take advantage of this socio-financial blip and join in this crusade while there’s still time.
In keeping with the authority-toppling theme of his game, could little Charlie Blackmore, armed with his Double Fine chums’ savvy business plan, be set to sneak behind his bigger opponents and stack his way to the top of the industry? Maybe not today but, mark our words… the times they are, indeed, a changin’.
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