[b]"maybe the bubble is ready to burst again, maybe it is even necessary, who knows."[/b]

This is a very interesting subject. Everytime I think about how big the insdustry has gotten, I feel like its gonna burst soon. Specially because of everything you stated. Also, the amount of good studios that close because they need millions to survive...

Interesting concepts, but I think your fear is a bit early to some degree. I doubt the industry will... fall, but we may endure some serious hardships in the coming months. The biggest issue is that AAA companies need to learn better business practice. Spending thousands of dollars on this and that to increase graphics just a bit seems pointless. Instead, we should be spending thousands on immersion and creating a new game experience for the future gamer.

I know all to well what you speak of and in most of the industry we, the developers, programmers, artists, all see the trends that you speak of and it obviously saddens most of us. This is what happens when something of value is taken for just that its core $$$ value. Something I have personally aimed for ( and i know other indie developers are doing as well ) is looking to bring back the intrinsic value of the game. You are right though, this will never be the aim of the big business because this will never be worth the $$$ to time ratio. You and me might spend 2 years or 3 on our game... to a guy in a suit who speaks only of $$$ 2 - 3 without solid income = failed investment. This is where Kickstarter and other Cloud funding locations have shined. It gives the developer such as you and me the chance to make something without worrying about a hardcore deadline from some guy in a suit who only cares about the $$$.

Lets be real though, we all want the $$$ for the work we do, just some of us dont want to sell out and make CODxxxxxxx to do it. I know where you are coming from but I think the simple answer for the industry is to realize the following:
[list]
[*]New and innovative ways of gaming must be looked at
[*]Aim for style, rather than realistic. WoW, Spiral Knights, Diablo 3, Torchlight I and II are all great examples of great games that work on low end requirements.
[*]Hard copy releases only work for the console. PC gamers are looking for DDistro now, it is simple and easy to do
[*]Stop with console ports. Half the reason high end games do so shitty on the PC market is because the developer tries to save time and money by just simply porting it to the PC. Maybe they dont care because in the end its more $$$ in their pockets... but it makes the game look bad and gives the PC a bad rep.
[*]Stop trying to develop for 50 different markets. You are spreading yourselves too thin. Many games have done well at first in a singular market and once they earned some serious revenue branched out to other platforms. Minecraft is a great example of this.
[/list]
I dont know, I think we have reason to be concerned for sure, but I dont think it will all be doom and gloom. Often, for us, as humans, to realize our biggest mistakes we must endure some hardship. From there we look for ingenuity and creativity to create us a new world and a new life. This is the pattern we have been doomed to repeat and it happens in all forms of our lives, including the game industry.

For now, i think it best we just keep trucking along while we can! Great post btw, and a real good way to start the morning with a philosophical topic.

Well, one thing is certain... when it does crash, [i][b][font=comic sans ms,cursive]"It's all the fault of pirates and used game sales!!!!!"[/font][/b][/i]

Certainly nobody will admit that their short-term make-as-much-money-as-possible business plans have no real long-term sustainability.
It reminds me of a Futurama quote I'll paraphrase:

[quote][url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=OqVyRa1iuMc#t=65s"]Futurama[/url]:
[b]Documentary Narrator:[/b] Fortunately, our most brilliant game developers came up with a cheap, last minute way to make as much money as possible. Ever since 1998, we simply raise the costs of games and find more and more ways of gouging consumers for content we were previously giving them for free.
Of course, because the development costs are still building up, it takes more and more sales to break even, at the same time as we are alienating our consumers, thus solving the problem once and for all.
[b]Little girl:[/b] But...
[b]Documentary Narrator:[/b] [i]Once and for all![/i][/quote]

Don't missunderstand me, I don't fear the future of the game industry (I'm not in the game industrie or have dire pretensions to make money from games), but I'm watching its way the last decade like many of us. I think that the current situtation is the calm for the storm, either a storm of enthusiasm or destruction, most likely both, just in different areas. I believe that the next console generation is some kind of catalyst and that the current entanglements of different topics is a huge domino playground.

[quote]
more ways of gouging consumers for content we were previously giving them for free.
[/quote]
Lol, this reminds me of the current trend of F2P: you can grind as long as you like, but if you want to have fun, you need to pay...

Well, this trend has a real destructive nature.

About indie game developers, do you people think that the gap between the indie and the big AAA companies is getting smaller, because technology is advancing and offers simpler method to make nice graphics ?
For example, the introduction of shaders made the nightmare of the fixed-function pipeline go away, the programs became simpler and shorter. Thus a small team is able to write and maintain nice renderers.
The deferred lighting approach made the some of the postprocess effects and game code design even simpler.

[quote name='solenoidz' timestamp='1353073210'] About indie game developers, do you people think that the gap between the indie and the big AAA companies is getting smaller, because technology is advancing and offers simpler method to make nice graphics ? For example, the introduction of shaders made the nightmare of the fixed-function pipeline go away, the programs became simpler and shorter. Thus a small team is able to write and maintain nice renderers. The deferred lighting approach made the some of the postprocess effects and game code design even simpler. [/quote]
No, this is kind of misleading. Indie have [i]free [/i]access to top engines (UDK), the problem is, that top engines, shaders whatever requires top art, and creating this art is the really expensive part.
I think that an indie game created with pretty 2d game will have an higher profit chance than a 3d indie game (please exclude minecraft clones).

Well, we have been able to master several shaders, which has helped the overall look but without the artists to fully utilize those tools its pointless. ( luckily we have those ) So i get what Ashaman is saying. A well done 2d project will go much further than a half ass thrown together 3d one.

[quote name='riuthamus' timestamp='1353106088'] Well, we have been able to master several shaders, which has helped the overall look but without the artists to fully utilize those tools its pointless. ( luckily we have those ) So i get what Ashaman is saying. A well done 2d project will go much further than a half ass thrown together 3d one. [/quote]
Yes, they help for sure to improve the visual quality. But when ever you add some new cool shader, the artist need to invest more time to utilize this shader and the investment of the artist is higher than that of the shader coder.

10 year before you just have vertex lighting, you just needed painted textures. Today you have per pixel lighting, now you need hi-detailed, normal,gloss, specular maps. You no longer can model a simple low-poly model, you now need to sculpt high-poly model, re-topo and bake them.

The same could be said about GI, 10 years before you got good looking lightmaps, next you will have fully dynamic GIs, but this is only useful if you have this level of dynamic in your game.

This is not bad and will deliver amazing visuals, but it is sometimes misleading, that a shader can take away burden of making great art (the same occurs to stylized art, many people think, that having less details makes it stylized and easier to make... ).

A good (cliche) example is minecraft, it has very simple art, very simple shaders, everything is retro/abstract, still it is successful. If Notch have added more shader magic, higher polycount, better models etc, would the game be [i]better [/i](most likely it has been released later).

Minecraft is perfect in the sense of
[quote]Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.[/quote]
and a perfect example for every hobby-indie developer, not because it uses cubes, because it is very simple.