Do you feel like the video game industry is going the wrong direction?

[Anonymous]

[NamerOfStars]

No- I think it's going in about five different wrong directions:

-The rise of Zynga saw the start of the transformation from "this is a fun challenge" into "this is a Skinner box", and they wound up employing Soren Johnson, who made the best Civilization game- unless of course that was Brian Reynolds, who ALSO wound up working fro Zynga. When you're being sued by EA and the bulk of the public sentiment is against you, you done fucked up.

-The emergence of "celebrity" rock star-type developers. This is pretty much what John Romero tried to do with Daikatana; you'd think that would've killed it dead, but it survived, and came back with the rise of crowdfunding. Chris Roberts left gaming to make some truly awful movies (and possibly some good ones, to be fair), then came back, and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars without actually releasing a finished game. Richard Garriott followed suit, as did Warren Spector (though he never left the industry). Legends, all three of them, but making a video game isn't LIKE writing a song; it needs a team of people, and is still very, very easy to screw up.

-The dominance of current-day political issues in games. This isn't exclusive to gaming, of course, and I'm not saying there's no place for politics, even hot-button politics, in games, but when it goes from game content to game development, quality suffers. One day, a few years ago, I booted up Steam, and saw the ad popup loading in. The graphics at the side of it caught my eye, and I thought "That looks like the art for Bloodlines"; then I looked over to the center and saw it was an ad for Bloodlines 2, which I didn't even know existed! Intrigued, I looked into it, and was horrified to see that the lead writer was Cara Ellison. Thinking they couldn't possibly be THAT stupid, I figured it was just someone with the same name- but no. "Well," I thought, "let's be fair- maybe she's turned over a new leaf." So I went to the dev diaries, and found her bragging about how they've added the ability to choose your own pronouns. What does that option hurt? Nothing, except file size if it's voiced, but prioritizing that hurts quite a bit.

-Related to the previous three, the appeal to the mass market. Dwarf Fortress is an amazing game. When Steam finally approved it, the creator became a millionaire literally overnight, mostly from players who'd been playing the free version for years. But it's a niche game, in the sense that the UI is awful, there's no win state, and the stupidly deep and complex mechanics are going to turn off casual fans. It's not going to make anywhere near the same kind of money as a game with broader appeal, but it wins fans who'll defend it to the death. Since it IS a business, it makes sense that that's not the focus, but the vast majority of what's released today is like Avatar: expensive, flashy, and designed to be played, moved on from, and forgotten, instead of like Star Wars: deep, complex, and intended to be replayed, reexamined, and thought about from different angles. This mindset is what killed Ultima, grand-daddy of the RPG genre- though I've already gone about that at length.

-Anita Sarkeesian, et al. This isn't just about the politics. See, nerd culture as we know it today was largely founded by, and overwhelmingly pioneered by, autists. One of the wonderful things about autism is the complete disregard for status it bestows: they'll happily sit and listen at the feet of the master, whether said master is an ancient graybeard talking philosophy, or a six-year-old boy talking Pokemon. It's VERY egalitarian. That's what made Anita and her ilk, who are zealots at best, and more commonly hucksters, see an opportunity. But nerd culture isn't egalitarian because that's its goal; it's egalitarian because it's meritocratic. A subculture like Anita's, rooted in notions of perpetual victimhood and powerlessness, isn't going to get along with one rooted in personal achievement, skill, and exploration. Harsh as it sounds, it was a mistake for the industry to ever take these people seriously. Sometimes gatekeeping is a GOOD thing.

[Asker]

Thats more or less mostly cultural stuff.
I'm more talking about how games, their method of distribution, their cost, their gameplay, their level of user freedom, and their overall quality in terms of working without issues, have changed for the worse.

[Astarlessnightsky]

No. Still lots of great games coming out each month.

[Asker]

This isn't about whether or not new games exist or if they are fun to play.
This is about whether or not you are buying the game vs buying a license to use the game temporarily. It's about whether or not you have full agency over the product after purchase, and whether or not your device restricts you, or requires an account, or the game is streamed from a server, or there is paid dlc or microtransactions or fomo or loot boxes, or if the game or game delivery service spies on you. This is about the switch from physical games to digital downloads, and the overall anti-consumer changes in the majority of the game industry.

[robhazelnut]

Improving graphics has always been a hinderence to me. N64 was just fine for 3D and required far less memory for it's games.

[Asker]

I like improving graphics, I'm more talking about nickle and diming customers and restricting user freedom/game ownership.

While
i like pixel art and retro style graphics too, one complaint is that graphics in games right now just aren't any better than they were 10 years ago.

[robhazelnut]

Acknowledged. I don't knowwhat's currently necessary for various game companies to stay afloat and/or profit. Having only a rental-style "buying" system isn't something I go for, so they're at least losing potential dollars from one person with that tactic.

[robhazelnut]

Correction- *having a rental-style "buying" system ______

[Asker]

Well for comparison, games used to launch finished, bug free, no dlc, no microtransactions, no subscriptions, at 40 to 60 dollars. And you could go to blockbuster, rent it and 5 others games for a total of 3 dollars to see if you even liked any of them before buying them. And game companies then still made huge profits, despite getting nothing from each rental, having to pay fees to stock them in brick and mortor stores, and digital distribution not existing yet. They profited enough to release sequal after sequal.

Inflation has not gone up anywhere near enough to result into today's scummy sales practices. it is purely from greed, overspending on too many employees, paying big name publisher CEOs, famous actor voiced lines, system bloat, DRM, server hosting, etc, etc.

[Asker]

sequel*

[Asker]

When the ps1, 2 and 3 each came out, substantial differences in graphics could be seen, this is not the case with ps4, which had extremely minor differences from ps3, or ps5 which had essentially zero differences from ps4.

Games are getting worse, not better.

[Asker]

Games look the same as 10 years ago but are much more expensive and much more freedom restricting to the buyer.

[Anonymous]

Was it ever in the right direction?

[Asker]

Yes, up until about 2005, after that the industry started to shift and became progressively more and more greedy and controlling.

[strateguy632]

. yes