PC Games as B-Movies

This is a great post I recommend reading!

On my travels recently I’ve come accross an increasing number of what I’m going to term B-Games. In cinema, the B-Movie was the cheap filler that was produced – often as accompanyment to a more polished feature – to feed the unforseen demand that had appeared overnight. They usually focussed on tick box stuff that could easily be sold: horror, gore, sex, exploitation; and audiences were so hungry for content that they devoured it without complaint.

The idea of a cheap, poorly crafted game is nothing new, but it seems the environment is ripe for a whole new wave. The audience for games today is larger than it has ever been. The games themselves, though, are more expensive to produce and provide ever shorter playtimes. This, I’d argue, is exhasperated by the fact tastes are more niche than they ever have been. There are a greater variety of genres to focus on – many of which are hard to come by these days – and gamers are older and more set in their ways than the fledgling industry could have allowed 20 years ago. Digital distribution, therefore, provides just the low cost delivery platform required in order to produce and distribute a cheap genre game that will – for simply being in that genre – satisfy a profitable portion of the audience.