Decline Why is Gaming stuck?

[Vic]

https://store.steampowered.com/sear...ortedlang=english&hidef2p=1&filter=popularnew

I have this page bookmarked and check in on it every one in a while, that's just the 'popular' new releases, not every new game, which would be a much longer and shittier list.

 

[King Crispy]

I was there when this industry was born.

I'll be here once it dies.

 

[Ezekiel]

Weak antitrust laws and overlong copyright terms? Perverse economic incentives? Budgets being blown on unnecessarily detailed graphics? You could write multiple door stoppers on the reasons why the industry is stagnating and hurtling towards a crash that everyone can see coming.

It’s not all bad, tho. The crash will probably be great for indie devs who aren’t tied to giant corpos. The lack of competition from the bankrupt corpos means that indie devs may have a much easier time finding investors.

I don't foresee a crash. It will continue totally crippled, because players have no taste.

I’m pretty sure there’s been multiple articles saying AAA will crash because of unaffordable prices, shitty design and corpos publicly insulting their customers.

Journos never criticize design in meaningful ways. They treat the most common problems and design choices that are beyond tiresome by this point as "just the way it is" because they are accepted by virtue of being so ingrained in what players have been supplied with for so long. You will never, to use the most recent example I can think of as I play the new Zelda, see a journo point out how awkward it is to place crouch on L3 (causing many players to press it unintentionally as they fight or try to escape) and not make transitioning from crouch to attack/dodge smooth and instantaneous, nor will they ever question if nearly every single action-adventure and action-horror game they review, including remakes such as RE4 and almost certainly MGS3, really needs this totally uncool crouch makes quiet feature. They CAN'T because it is so widespread that being against it will discredit them in the eyes of their subscribers. There is so little variation in game design, and I hardly see any outcry. I know developers always copied what was in at the time, but it has never been so inbred and cautious as it is now, thanks to how big the productions have become and how risky they now are.

Prices may stagnate for a while if they become too high for consumers, but I don't foresee AAA developers stopping with their unrealistic goals that necessitate very risk-averse design. I also don't foresee players stopping. They will keep buying the games even if they have to live paycheck to paycheck.

 

[jaekl]

Gaming is like anything else that was cool but subsequently got ruined by money. Rap used to be cool until corporate money got funneled into it and the suits optimized the soul out of everything. You’d think music in general was dead if you only listened to what’s popular. It seems like the internet was ruined, but this place exists right?

Corporate dickheads with excel spreadsheets trying to quantify “engagement”, “mechanics”, “monetization” and gay shit like that suck all the heart out of anything they touch. If you want to play something that isn’t shitty then it’s not going to have ultra fancy graphics for you to drool over like a lobotomite. If you insist on staying married to brand names that corporations hold, you’re going to either be miserable or in a delusional state defending shitty products to protect your ego.

It's like when Star Wars got sold to Disney. I said to myself “Whatever, Star Wars is over.” But then a million retards spent the next several years being surprised that everything that came out Star Wars related was extremely shitty and lame. It’s like what did you think would happen? But then they keep watching the next one just in case something suddenly changes. NO! STAR WARS IS OVER! These slimy corporate conmen bust loads over the thought of syphoning money from your sentimentality. Enjoy things when they’re good and be ready to toss them into the trash as soon as the quality drops. You aren't missing out on a damn thing.

Once big corporate money gets into your favorite entertainment product, you now must seek out the good stuff yourself, it will no longer simply fall into your lap. It’s called being a snob.

 

[J1M]

The root of the problem is team size. A team with 50+ people cannot execute on a consistent vision the way that a handful of people can. Even hiring that many people who actually care about what the game is trying to accomplish is impossible.

AI tools may help here because most of the team bloat is art and writing.

 

[lycanwarrior]

New games happen all the time. You're tunnel visioned.

A decade ago Josh Sawyer arrogantly dismissed this claim talking about how gamers were clamoring for the days of half a dozen Ultima, Wizardry, and Might & Magic sequels.

I wish we had those kinds of clones from AAA studios nowadays...

 

[lycanwarrior]

As Alexander Hamilton once (allegedly) said, the people are a great beast!

The average person should be treated as if they have low IQ tastes/morals because it's generally true.

It's why "lowest common denominator" is a real thing.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

humanity as a whole has stopped in the early 2000s. both art and technology froze, while society has been slowly collapsing, but is now going down faster and faster.

 

[v1c70r14]

Gaming is like anything else that was cool but subsequently got ruined by money.

Everything people like about video games was built with money, publishers, financial gain as motivator and all the rest. You can't point to economics or greed as the cause since that was the reason video games took off as a medium in the first place. Namrūs overtakes Ptahil-Uthra and this thread is full of people thinking one of mankind's oldest companions is responsible. Greed was alive during the strictest periods of the USSR, greed fuels conservatism as well as revolutionaries and greed built all that you now mourn. Coins are very old and unless you advocate anarcho-primitivism I don't see how you could without hypocrisy and delusion point to them as the origin of all your troubles. Why did they sell rap albums in the first place? Why did any of the classic games get made?

 

[jaekl]

Gaming is like anything else that was cool but subsequently got ruined by money.

Everything people like about video games was built with money, publishers, financial gain as motivator and all the rest. You can't point to economics or greed as the cause since that was the reason video games took off as a medium in the first place. Namrūs overtakes Ptahil-Uthra and this thread is full of people thinking one of mankind's oldest companions is responsible. Greed was alive during the strictest periods of the USSR, greed fuels conservatism as well as revolutionaries and greed built all that you now mourn. Coins are very old and unless you advocate anarcho-primitivism I don't see how you could without hypocrisy and delusion point to them as the origin of all your troubles. Why did they sell rap albums in the first place? Why did any of the classic games get made?

I'm advocating for being a snob, not whatever you're going on about. Once there's enough money to be made, corporations optimize the humanity out of your favorite niche. So you become a snob and don't buy the mainstream products anymore.

 

[v1c70r14]

Once there's enough money to be made, corporations optimize the humanity out of your favorite niche.

There is no difference between rap songs recorded in a basement and ones recorded in a top tier studio, they're both commercial enterprises. Due to the scale of one it requires mainstream appeal, granted, but music snobbery, like most other forms of it, is very pretentious. "The Man" didn't come along and "ruin" rap, once the genre took off people were desperate to "sell out". Snobbery itself is a part of the business schema, the premium product, the higher grade, the luxury Swiss watch, organic free range chickens and Fiji water. Albums on second-hand cassette tapes, vinyl editions, holographic prints. The idea of an underground, more humanity, productions with soul, that's a marketing gimmick. It's just another way to sell you, the consumer, the experience. It has nothing to do with the real world.

It's like when Star Wars got sold to Disney.

Take this. George Lucas might have had a lot of passion for what he was doing, but the man is a businessman first and his later films have been described as toy commercials in some corners. They're both wrong and not, during the productions of the films he always had the commercial side in his mind, what sort of merchandise he could license out, the future of the special effects studio he was putting together, risks and possibilities. The man might have been outside the Hollywood system but to say that big business ruined Star Wars, or being a snob about it? That's mental but it's also a good comparison to those glorifying smaller music productions and the rest of it.

 

[anvi]

Gaming is like anything else that was cool but subsequently got ruined by money.

Everything people like about video games was built with money, publishers, financial gain as motivator and all the rest. You can't point to economics or greed as the cause since that was the reason video games took off as a medium in the first place. Namrūs overtakes Ptahil-Uthra and this thread is full of people thinking one of mankind's oldest companions is responsible. Greed was alive during the strictest periods of the USSR, greed fuels conservatism as well as revolutionaries and greed built all that you now mourn. Coins are very old and unless you advocate anarcho-primitivism I don't see how you could without hypocrisy and delusion point to them as the origin of all your troubles. Why did they sell rap albums in the first place? Why did any of the classic games get made?

Gaming was big and popular before it was making a lot of money. And a lot of the people involved in early gaming were not driven by money. They were driven by interest in PC technology, programming, and game development, and all of those things were new at the time. They also liked games and played games, and wanted to make better games. That was the motivation, and it succeeded a lot, they had hit games and success with small teams and budgets. They were young people too, running game studios more like a band. DSI were run by a 17 year old. People would see Westwood Studios people partying in Vegas, a lot. But like bands they aren't always profitable. And like bands not everyone wants to sell out and make crap for the masses. A lot of companies were struggling financially even though they were making great games. Bad management or whatever else meant bad finances and all those companies got eaten by Electronic Arts. All those gamer geek legends who made great games, all got retired from the business.

Since then the gaming business went from gaming legends making the best games they could imagine, into a corporate machine like McDonalds and Starbucks and whatever else. It's not gamers leading the world with their ideas, it is corporations making games by committee, completely profit driven. Not only that but it has pushed the budgets up so much that the big companies can't afford to try anything new. (And medium sized companies can't afford to compete with AAA anymore.)

 

[jaekl]

Once there's enough money to be made, corporations optimize the humanity out of your favorite niche.

There is no difference between rap songs recorded in a basement and ones recorded in a top tier studio, they're both commercial enterprises. Due to the scale of one it requires mainstream appeal, granted, but music snobbery, like most other forms of it, is very pretentious. "The Man" didn't come along and "ruin" rap, once the genre took off people were desperate to "sell out". Snobbery itself is a part of the business schema, the premium product, the higher grade, the luxury Swiss watch, organic free range chickens and Fiji water. Albums on second-hand cassette tapes, vinyl editions, holographic prints. The idea of an underground, more humanity, productions with soul, that's a marketing gimmick. It's just another way to sell you, the consumer, the experience. It has nothing to do with the real world.

It's like when Star Wars got sold to Disney.

Take this. George Lucas might have had a lot of passion for what he was doing, but the man is a businessman first and his later films have been described as toy commercials in some corners. They're both wrong and not, during the productions of the films he always had the commercial side in his mind, what sort of merchandise he could license out, the future of the special effects studio he was putting together, risks and possibilities. The man might have been outside the Hollywood system but to say that big business ruined Star Wars, or being a snob about it? That's mental but it's also a good comparison to those glorifying smaller music productions and the rest of it.

Nah, being a snob is cool actually

 

[Fedora Master]

humanity as a whole has stopped in the early 2000s. both art and technology froze, while society has been slowly collapsing, but is now going down faster and faster.

"End of History" indeed

 

[v1c70r14]

Gaming was big and popular before it was making a lot of money. And a lot of the people involved in early gaming were not driven by money.

What I'm arguing against is the idea that video game as a business is responsible for the state of video games, it's not. Were developers often more passionate and product oriented than the video game giants are these days? Absolutely, no question about it. They were always commercial enterprises though, nobody starts a development studio to lose money. Video game development is easier than ever now, anyone could put together a video game, but since we're not being flooded by great games that means that passion is not enough.

What made games shine previously were that they got the spit-shine with the help of publishers. When Julian Gollop put X-COM together it wouldn't have been the same game without MicroProse, it would have been just another one of those mediocre tactical games. What I'm trying to dispel is the notion that if it weren't for those big meanies forcing developers to make Candy Crush and Fortnite forever in the casual slave mines we wouldn't have any problems. Didn't we already get over the kickstarter phase where people gave developers money directly for the sort of games they thought they wanted from them? Badly managed studios and businesses aren't a sign of a creative genius it turns out.

The very idea of the rinkydink smalltime developer up against the soulless corporations is a marketing tactic. The truth is that medium sized businesses deliver the highest quality wares since they are small enough to keep a handle on their product, but also large enough to provide value for your money and higher production standards. What has gone wrong with video games, in terms of them as a business, isn't that they are too commercial. You can go onto Itch right now and get your dose of games by passionate developers working tirelessly not for profit (because their mediocre talents couldn't bring that in) and with a shoestring budget (again, because they suck).

The real problem is that they are not commercial in a way that appeals to the bourgeoisie currently. The masses clearly are content with the mass-produced, by the numbers products they are getting. There has been no time in video games where it was easier to be a penniless creative starving artist smearing their soul over unity assets or whatever romantic conception you may have of that. But if you're not rich enough to be in the ballgame of publishing games, or patronizing them like an aristocrat, and aren't enough of a pleb or a prole to enjoy live-service game slop, then the market isn't what it used to be.

It's not gone though, the middle-class still get nicely crafted games like Bone Totem every now and then.

 

[Ravielsk]

I think a huge part of it is that the audience has changed too much. Not in the sense that normies now outnumber the real patricians(such as myself) but that the reason why people even engage with the industry have shifted from being fans of videogame to just ego stroking.

You can best observe this in multiplayer games, especially in the free2play variety where at least half of the playerbase is chronically unable to have fun unless they are winning. My most recent experience with this phenomena is from Master Duel where if you read through steam forums a solid chunk of the playerbase is made up of completely losers that cannot grasp the concept of having fun without winning. Its straight up impossible for them have a fun duel without winning. The end result is that the game is completely busted with about maybe 200 cards being competitively viable in a game that has well over 10k cards on offer. Because that way the loser crowd does not actually have learn to play the game or even build their own deck. They can just give Konami 200€ each month to buy the best cards and win basically by default.

These people do not play the game for fun but to make themselves feel better about themselves. So as long as the game massages their ego they will burn money on it and vigorously defend it because they basically bonded with it. Attacks on it are attacks on their ego. Hence they(even if only subconsciously) they have to keep pumping money into the industry because stopping would mean admitting to just being losers that burned thousands of bucks on literal jpgs.

 

[SlamDunk]

I was there when this industry was born.

I'll be here once it dies.

Fixed.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Gaming isn’t really stuck. I’ve seen this in clips from short films before. It’s just pretending to be stuck so you’ll fuck it. I mean how does gaming even get stuck in the dryer to begin with? The dryer opening is too big to get stuck in.

 

[Pika-Cthulhu]

I dont why it be like that, but it do

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Gaming is like anything else that was cool but subsequently got ruined by money.

Everything people like about video games was built with money, publishers, financial gain as motivator and all the rest. You can't point to economics or greed as the cause since that was the reason video games took off as a medium in the first place. Namrūs overtakes Ptahil-Uthra and this thread is full of people thinking one of mankind's oldest companions is responsible. Greed was alive during the strictest periods of the USSR, greed fuels conservatism as well as revolutionaries and greed built all that you now mourn. Coins are very old and unless you advocate anarcho-primitivism I don't see how you could without hypocrisy and delusion point to them as the origin of all your troubles. Why did they sell rap albums in the first place? Why did any of the classic games get made?

Gaming was big and popular before it was making a lot of money. And a lot of the people involved in early gaming were not driven by money. They were driven by interest in PC technology, programming, and game development, and all of those things were new at the time. They also liked games and played games, and wanted to make better games. That was the motivation, and it succeeded a lot, they had hit games and success with small teams and budgets. They were young people too, running game studios more like a band. DSI were run by a 17 year old. People would see Westwood Studios people partying in Vegas, a lot. But like bands they aren't always profitable. And like bands not everyone wants to sell out and make crap for the masses. A lot of companies were struggling financially even though they were making great games. Bad management or whatever else meant bad finances and all those companies got eaten by Electronic Arts. All those gamer geek legends who made great games, all got retired from the business.

Since then the gaming business went from gaming legends making the best games they could imagine, into a corporate machine like McDonalds and Starbucks and whatever else. It's not gamers leading the world with their ideas, it is corporations making games by committee, completely profit driven. Not only that but it has pushed the budgets up so much that the big companies can't afford to try anything new. (And medium sized companies can't afford to compete with AAA anymore.)

Gaming has been making tons of money since the old arcade days of Space Invaders and Pac-Man. It’s always been a business. It’s not like gaming was just hobbyist fucking around for themselves and money didn’t matter until the mid 2000s or something.

And if we’re talking gaming legends eaten up by EA, the sad truth of the matter is many of those legends did it to themselves. Like, Richard Garriott wasn’t fucked over by EA, Richard Garriott was fucked over by Richard Garriott. When you insist on make a new engine for every new Ultima title even if you don’t need to, and you aren’t selling, you’re only going to be able to run so long before things are over with or without EA.

Origin was Origin’s own doing. Making Ultima 9 a game that couldn’t really run on most PCs people had when it released wasn’t the best of ideas. And how long was some version of that game in development for? Like half a decade.

Westwood? Look at their 2000s output and tell me (anyone) you’re surprised they got closed. Did it suck to see them go? Yeah. Is it surprising after the failure of Command and Conquer: Renegade? Not really. Renegade had to be a big blow for them too. What was that game in development for, like 3 or 4 years in a time where game development was like half that time? They were also one of those PC studios where you look at them and ask: Why the fuck aren’t you releasing your big stuff on consoles? Like once it was the year 2000, unless you were Blizzard, you kind of needed a console release too so as not to die.

Bullfrog? Kind of became superfluous with Lionhead...who made Black and White for EA.

 

[flyingjohn]

When Julian Gollop put X-COM together it wouldn't have been the same game without MicroProse

MicroProse canned the game and the only reason the game was even out was because Julian worked on it in secret.

 

[Hellraiser]

I’m pretty sure there’s been multiple articles saying AAA will crash because of unaffordable prices, shitty design and corpos publicly insulting their customers.

PSA: If you see more of crap cuntsole bundles offering fortinite bucks instead of pack-in games, such as the offer below, it means the consumer base is beyond hope:

https://www.amazon.com/Xbox-S-Fortnite-Rocket-League-Bundle/dp/B09H73LTM6

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Because no one is able to create anything new anymore.

 

[luj1]

Because no one is able to create anything new anymore.

that is a symptom, not the cause

 

[luj1]

I swear we have a thread like this every other year. The reasons have been stated already. Games cost too much now and don't take risks

That is not the main reason

Talent went down, technology went up, greed went up