After playing Titanfall beta... (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 22:02 (3939 days ago) @ MrPadraig08

In the same way, Destiny seeks to do this with Halo. From here, people seem to connect the dots to mean Destiny is new Halo, no need for Halo anymore. Not true.

There is still a place for Call of Duty as there is Halo and Destiny and Titanfall, because black and white evaluation of games as good-better-best doesn't align with actual player trends.

Example: A million and one FPS's have been spawned out of CounterStrike and thus their sequels, have more and iterative features and gameplay must be better and will be played instead of CS... expect that people still play CS, exclusively and over all other choices.

They may still play CS, but they don't buy it, and nobody's making a monthly fee from people playing it. (Well, except maybe server hosts.) From an industry perspective, CS might as well be invisible. (In places that eschew dealing with Steam for various reasons, the popular version of CS is still 1.6 and not CS:Source, for instance.

When industry pundits talk about a "CoD Killer" or a "Halo Killer" I don't think they really care about who is playing what. They care about how who is playing what determines which studios get to keep pumping out titles that cost tens of millions of dollars to make, and which ones get shut down.

There's every indication that there is a limited space in the console market for highly anticipated military/sci-fi shooters. Sony and MS consoles had their big exclusives (Halo, Gears, Resistance) and then there's the multiheaded hydra that is CoD, which gobbled up all the other WW2 shooters before absorbing splinter cell and then aping both Halo and Gears. If the leading positions are taken over by Titanfall and Destiny, it remains to be seen if future iterations of the Halo and CoD franchises will be as popular or as profitable as they have been in the past. If so, there may come a point where the publishers and developers of those franchises decide that they either need to become cheaper or stop being made. (Or perhaps one decision leads to the other.)

I'm sort of amazed that by this point the games industry hasn't adopted a more Hollywood-like model, where companies are formed specifically for the purpose of making a single title, and a re-formed if there's enough interest to make it a franchise. As it stands, it's sort of like riding a mechanical bull: you get a hit and then you keep trying to stay on top until something knocks you off. You become a prisoner of success, forced to keep doing the same thing over again because it made money last time, and only crazy people say no to steady money. Another way Bungie is doing things a bit differently-- leaving a franchise near the peak of its popularity and choosing to do something else that's just as expensive and risky to make without any guaranteed market or known intellectual property hooks.