Well the FPS industry is in good hands, for now, because that's flourishing. But other genre are going the way of the Dodo. You don't see anymore games like Megaman anymore like platformers and such.
I don't think the gaming industry is dying much but its not flourishing either or evolving in its design of games, especially with some genres. Its that its become too mainstream and thus higher production values thus higher dev cost and then higher projections. There's been so many development house closing that i lost count already, that is not a good sign.
I do agree that consoles will eventually lack an disc format in them and will be like what the Xbox 720 will be: always online. And yes Devs can no longer blame a lack of RAM or a lack of this or that for a subpar product. But i also think some publishers are just either too lazy or too complacent with its success (i'm looking at you Activision). There was even an article saying that some people are afraid, because of the next gen consoles close resemblance to a PC, that devs would probably release an inferior product because of the ease of use of the console and put no actual effort in creating a creative product.
I just think there are more inferior Hack n' Slash games that deserve more hate because they haven't changed there formula enough, like God of War, but yet it keeps selling more then MGR or DmC or even the regular DMC. GOW is pretty much the CoD of the action/adventure genre not DmC.
To be honest, i don't think that one genre being successful necessary kills another ones. The stupidity of the companies is what makes that trying to making his own games resembles more and more these successful games or appealing to some concepts they appeal too.
This "always online" DRM thing **** me off, i always liked the idea to just put my disk/cartridge in my machine to play it and that's it, all that i need to have some fun. About being complacent with this success, to be honest if i runned a company i would stick with what makes money mainly if my franchise is one of the most profitable in that genre. But i would try to explore another genres too and expand/evolve my main genre to have a kickstart in comparison to similar titles, obviously for the sake of attracting people and making more money.
Keep changing things all the times is not necessarily a good thing, there are things that will always be good but needs some improvement to remain interesting as the time passes, change for sake of change is just dumb as keeping things as they are just to keep things as they are, i think that you have to keep all the good ideas and to some extent the features that makes your consumers loves your product because this is arguably what makes it good. About the hardware being similar with a PC: i don't see any problems here, i think that it's even good because makes ported titles run similar in all machines, i don't know if a complex hardware structure like PS3's one really offer something different for the devs to work out than a PC offer, if you have some knowledge about this i would be happy to listen to what you know.
Sadly, this is true, not every good or decent game make his way to the broadier audience, most of them are not that appealing on a surface level to most people. God of War is popular because it impressed (and keep impressing) people on the visuals, i mean: Kratos itself as a character is very brutal and "badass", most manchilds and young adults likes characters as this, the game appeals on sex too, overused violence and things that people somewhat pay attention. The same thing happened with Mortal Kombat in the 90s, it appealed to something that impressed people and make his way as a fighting game, it started as a very mediocre fighting game but evolved and turned out to be an appealing package of violence and decent gameplay (i'm a MK fan, just to make things clear here, haha). But as i already said: "not changing the formula" is not a bad thing for itself, God of War is a mediocre but well-polished and balanced hack'n'slash game, their fans likes what they get and there's no really need to change things, as far as i know (i'm not a GoW fan, so i can be wrong) they even implemented multiplayer modes on that last GoW... this is something that deserves some analysis too, they could have bring some good ideas to other hack'n'slash titles. I don't dislike GoW as i dislike DmC because GoW never interfere in my fun with DMC directly, they never took anything from a franchise that i like away, i don't have motivations to "hate" GoW nor i have to hate DmC too, i have nothing against the game as a game itself, but it's kinda obvious for anyone here that if DmC has to live DMC has to die and vice-versa, they are not that profitable for the companies to run both of them at the same time.
What I don't understand is, how shipping nearly 1.15 million copies when the games only been out 4 months is some sort of failure. Capcom still has the rest of the year to capitalize on DmC, plus the inevitable re-release on newer consoles in some sort of special edition. These sales don't even include PC or any digital sales, so while I know some people would like this game to be a failure, it isn't, and at some point you'll have to let it go.
Secondly, the other games we have no idea if they sold 2.4 million or shipped over 2 million (btw, this is their supposed lifetime sales, not 4 month numbers), there's no distinguishing between the two for capcom, shipped/sold is what they were able to sell to retailers so the criticism about what's sold or not is the same for DmC as it is for the older games.
Also, keep in mind, DMC4 was packaged w/ both systems, who knows how much that cuts into potential profits per units sold.
And don't forget, this DmC builds brand awareness for the DmC movie that is in preproduction. Capcom is a bit smarter than people give them credit for.
It's because after the first month or months the sales are mostly like decreasing quickly, Sam. Let's take a look at CoD:BO II for example: it sold 7.5 mil units in 11 days [Source: NPD, and seen on
Joystiq] , and sold like 23 mil units total [Source:
VGChartz]. If you take a look, in 11 days the game sold nearly 1/3 of the total sales, i can't gather data on how the sales had been over the months after this (i have done a quick research on Google).
DMC4 sold 2 million in the very first month [Source:
Gamespot, Capcom], and likely 2.7 mil in total, so i guess this points out to what i've stated before. It can has exceptions? I think its possible, although it's kinda rare. I don't think so, i think that shipping means straight what it means: shipping, sellings talks more about what retailers sold, i don't really know if it includes the games that comes with the bundles, but most of the data gathered from sellings don't includes hardware + softwares bundles, they are kind a "different" category of sellings in the charts.
I don't really understand what's the matter with the movie. You're saying that it can kinda works like a late publishing of the game? I think this could be true, but in this case i think we have to wait to see if and how much the movie will impact the games sellings.