Grandaddy - "The Crystal Lake"

I have been researching this book Reeling in the years by Mark Radcliff. In our groups we came to the conclusion that through describing and analysing this song he is talking about the development of man. And is trying to get his point across that technology will always play a part in our future. But he is trying to explain what part it will play. Will we progress so far with technology that it in fact could control us rather than help us.


Because of this i have decided to into further detail with what else was happening in the year 2000 that would affect the entertainment industry. Particularly the games industry. I have looked at some statistics to suggest that the only thing to really affect the games industry in terms of revenue, employment rate, development and marketing is the progression in technology. 

"With the cost of shifting to two new game platforms, Nintendo expects operating profit in fiscal 2000 to decline 27%, to $867 million, on sales of $4.2 billion. Analysts expect a sharp rebound in 2001." (1)

This suggest that the only reason major games companies were really under any strain form the outside world, was because that technology was moving too fast so that they had to keep up with it. By suspending projects to make sure that they could run games on new platforms, meant there would be a slight drop in sales and profit. 

"While it once cost from $800,000 to $1.7 million to develop a new game for Sony's original PlayStation, designers can now expect to invest $5 million to $10 million to write one for PS2." (1)

The progression of technology means that it would cost more to produce. This meant the massive developers for games could start actually making large amounts of money and companies started to form that would make big names for themselves. Developers in 1999 like Crytek and Bohimea Interactive. And in 2000 some more indie developers such as Popcap and AreaNet. (2)

(3)

The graph above shows the revenue every year from 1973 to 2012 for the video games industry. As we can see at the peak of the games industry it was worth up yo 33 Billion US Dollars. I was particularly insterested in the year 2000 because it was around that time that the games industry had to recover from the lack of sales in arcase games. I believe this steep drop exists becasue of teh creation of console gaming. The fifth generation of games console includes the PlayStation and the Xbox. The fifth generation of consoles spans for the years 1993-2006.










Referneces
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2001-03-25/nintendo-lets-play-survivor (1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_developers (2)
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry (3_