The Modern Gaming Industry

[Salmonface]

In recent times, many Youtubers and bloggers, news outlets and reporters, have speculated on the impact of the changes to the design philosophy of modern video games. In years gone by, a single-player video game would cost in some cases as little as $30 and would provide hours of uninterrupted fun, smashing through levels, completing challenges and feeling a sense of satisfaction and reward for having done so. I still have fond memories of 100% completing all of the Crash Bandicoot games on the PS1, including Crash Team Racing and Crash Nitro Kart. Those games kept me entertained I dare say for hundreds, if not thousands of hours.

The design philosophy was simple and made sense. Now, I'm not going to be one of those sticks-in-the-mud that say things like, "the digital revolution has made the world a worse place to live" because that's disingenuous and untrue. The digital revolution has changed the way our modern society works irrevocably and has paved the way forward for our evolution. Having the ability to tap a few buttons on a screen and order a pizza that will be delivered to your door within 30 minutes proves that philosophy.

Video games however, have become worse. The change to the philosophy of running video game companies like standard consumerist businesses has changed the landscape of our gaming world, maximizing profits at all costs and cramming video games full of predatory microtransaction mechanics, in-game stores and battle passes. Now, these things aren't inherently bad per-say, I understand that some players find satisfaction in getting additional rewards for their efforts, earned through non-gameplay activities. However, it's the games that make it mandatory for players to spend in order to succeed. I call this, "succession spending".

These are the truly insidious products that have polluted the industry and it has been picked up by mainstream media and politicians, the practice of lootboxes and microtransactions have even been criminalized in some countries. Some of these mechanics have been equated to gambling in some countries and there are calls for gambling laws to apply to video games that contain these mechanics. Yet, I haven't seen any video game developers come out and say that they think microtransactions are unethical. In fact, well known video game publisher EA had a former CEO come out of the woodwork last year to publicly insult and berate other developers for NOT utilizing microtransactions and other predatory monetization systems.

The new landscape of video games in 2023 is shifting however, with the critical success of smaller, independent video game developers beginning to grow their studios and expand their development projects to include new games and new concepts, explored through well-told stories.

What are your thoughts on the current state of the industry? Do you have any games that you think should get more recognition for the work they do? Have you recently found any hidden gems that could gain major traction this year?

[Zenfoldor]

Single player has staged somewhat of a comeback as of late. Yes, most live service games are predatory, and most mobile games are worse. Those generally aren't the games I play. Also, the industry is playing the lottery here. There is only room for a certain number of large live service games, not everyone will survive, only a few. We have seen many fail spectacularly, and we will see many more.

As for hidden gems coming up, it's not exactly hidden but Silksong shouldn't sail under any radars. IMO, Jedi Survivor has what looks to be the right stuff to be really amazing. Elden Ring dlc speculation shows why that games lore was so special. Any indie could pull a hades and blow our minds. It's actually a good time to be a gamer, and games have NOT gotten worse, they have gotten better.

Last few games I played:

God of War Ragnarok
Dead Space Remake
Hogwarts Legacy
Wo Long Fallen Dynasty

I'm about to play the Resident Evil 4 remake which got stellar reviews, they just dropped today. It's only march, gaming is good. I still havent' played Octopath Traveler 2, fire emblem engage, metroid prime remake, or Trails of Azure. CDPR just also patches the next gen witcher 3 release. This year we have starfield and tears of the kingdom and baldur's gate 3 and final fantasy xvi and diablo 4 also coming out, just to name a few. Hopefully we will also get a new Nintendo console announced, perhaps for release next year.

You might say the industry is a tad remake/nostalgia happy at the moment, but this is what gamers want imho.

Another thing, to get the most out of gaming today, one really needs to own all the platforms(you can skip the steamdeck and xbox if you have a gaming pc, but you need everything else to enjoy the full scope of what we are actually being presented).

One great thing that happened was the failure of google stadia. They closed that down before it had a chance to thrive and imo, it feels like it may have been mismanaged. Which is good, because game streaming only platforms with exclusives would have truly sucked for the industry, so we got really lucky that flopped.

Look at the identity crisis that the Suicide Squad game is going through because of the backlash to live service jank. Studios with live service games are often not working out how they had planned, because of the gaming community. Meanwhile, Elden Ring and Hogwarts are doing gangbusters.

So we are surrounded on all sides by bad stuff, but we seem to be making the devs to stay on the path, at least for now. Vote with your wallets and we can keep it going.

[Fencers]

Video games, like most media, are exactly as good and bad as they ever were. Your personal expectations and tastes have changed. That is all.

There is no such thing as "music/films/games/books today suck compared to the things I personally liked in the past!"

Some dude was writing on a forum; "gaming isn't the same anymore..." when you were playing Crash Bandicoot in your underwear and drinking Zima.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Video games, like most media, are exactly as good and bad as they ever were. Your personal expectations and tastes have changed. That is all.

There is no such thing as "music/films/games/books today suck compared to the things I personally liked in the past!"

I mean this is just objectively false lmao. You can argue that stuff is better or worse, that's fine. But the idea that quality never changes is laughable on the surface.

[Big Thanks]

Video games, like most media, are exactly as good and bad as they ever were. Your personal expectations and tastes have changed. That is all.

There is no such thing as "music/films/games/books today suck compared to the things I personally liked in the past!"

Some dude was writing on a forum; "gaming isn't the same anymore..." when you were playing Crash Bandicoot in your underwear and drinking Zima.

There is tropes and things that are considered cooler in that particular year though...
Releases that mark a generation too.

[Fencers]

I mean this is just objectively false lmao. You can argue that stuff is better or worse, that's fine. But the idea that quality never changes is laughable on the surface.

By what parameters?

- - - Updated - - -

There is tropes and things that are considered cooler in that particular year though...
Releases that mark a generation too.

Entirely subjective.

[Big Thanks]

Entirely subjective.

The "good movies" nowadays are completely different from the "good movies" back in the day on theaters (>_<)

You are effectively saying "culture" never change and humans never change.
We go forward...sometimes go backwards...then forward again. Ups and downs.

And im completely ignoring the advances of technology factor in this equation.

ALL im saying is...there is genres and tropes that are considered "cooler" in that particular year...
Every decade has a whole different vibe.

[Fencers]

Every decade has a whole different vibe.

Which is entirely subjective.

[Chilela]

I think one thing worth noting is that predatory practices have long predated the digital revolution, and for that notion, one doesn't have to look much farther than the era of arcades so many like to nostalgia over. Not too terribly long ago, I went to an unlimited-play arcade, and played a handful of games there. One that I went and beat was Final Fight. Thanks to being unlimited-play, it allowed me to dissect how truly predatory the game's model was. Like any beat-em-up, you had a limited amount of lives at your disposal per play, and in a regular arcade setting, you'd need to throw in more money once you ran out of lives. That's all well and good, right? Well, one thing of note was that the game started you off easy, but once you started hitting later levels, you would start running into enemies and hazards that would take massive chunks of your health out at once, and they were obnoxiously hard to avoid. So after the early game lulled you into a false sense of security, the late game would tear you apart in order to attempt to extract more quarters from you by creating an expectation that you'd want to see the game to the end. In hindsight, the Simpsons arcade game also had similar issues, though I wasn't as aware of the mind tricks at play at the time.

As I understand it, the notoriously brutal difficulty of Nintendo games was more or less done specifically with the knowledge that the console's limitations meant that an easy game wouldn't last terribly long, so in order to artificially squeeze out extra play time, various methods of nonsense would be implemented. And I think that's the key here. Technical limitations have been the main hindrance for the games industry previous to the digital revolution, within the context of monetization schemes. Generally speaking, any decent-budget game would rely solely on volume of copies sold, so there was more incentive to make games "good" within the context of the time. Once technology advanced, companies started testing the waters to see what they could get away with, both legally and in terms of what people would put up with. The Oblivion horse armor, for example, was very controversial for its time, but people still bought it, so the practice continued. In WoW, there was the Celestial Steed, which was similarly controversial, particularly due to being a microtransaction on top of a sub-based game with priced expansion boxes. But people bought it, so the practice continued. Loot boxes were, and still are, a hot topic of controversy, but again, people bought them, so the practice continued where they remained legal. NFTs in games are an experiment that, at least as of now, hasn't really gotten off the ground, but it's entirely plausible a company will figure out a way to market them in a way that people will buy them down the road, the practice will become more commonplace as a result.

The good news, however, is that the most predatory practices appear to be reserved to AAA companies who need returns on investment on massive budget games, and mobile microtransaction-fests, and smaller companies aren't as bound to such practices, though there are those who practice them.

Indies are in a better spot, to some degree. Game development is accessible enough nowadays where there's titles still coming out for virtually any niche imaginable, on top of decades of already-released games. The only issue is, there's likely many games that will never really see the light of day outside of very niche audiences. Word-of-mouth is difficult to establish unless you're well-connected in the indie scene, which is a whole can of worms on its own.

Even if you have relatively specific tastes and are more or less ignored as a demographic by AAA companies (and a number of smaller devs as well), you're likely to find at least SOMETHING that tickles your fancy. Even if the industry is no longer primarily catering to you, there's still plenty of stuff out there, whether as niche projects or older ones.

I will say that things like UI design and accessibility have objectively improved over the years, though. That much isn't really up for debate, IMO.

[Biomega]

A lot to unpack.

1. Nostalgia bias and personal experience. You were a different person than you remember, and a different person than you are now. So not only are you forgetting about all the bad things and overemphasizing the good (no offense but if you were entertained by Crash for "thousands of hours" something is off), but you are also judging them by different standards in hindsight. "when *I* was your age, I only had a stick to play with, and I loved it..." - sure. Gaming has come a long way. Back then those games were ALL YOU HAD. Now you have magnitudes more options, and decades more history to learn from and stack up against. If you'd never seen what you'd seen and someone handed you one of those crappy modern games, you'd weep and kiss their feet. And similarly, if someone reared on games from today was handed Crash 1 they'd laugh their anus off.

2. Selection bias. There are still plenty of cheap, great games. They may just be great in different ways. You seem to be focusing on splashy AAA titles - those naturally shift with the mainstream, and the more mainstream gaming becomes, the more average the consumer becomes. You're a gamer with decades of experience. You can't be the same customer as some rando commando who's been gaming on their cell for 2 years and now picks up a PS5 for the first time in their life. At the same time, there's sophisticated, smart, beautifully designed indie games out there for pennies on the dollar, that many people won't even look for let alone pick up. Because they're not the new hotness from UberGmr6969's popular Twitch stream or whatever. That doesn't make those bad games - it makes them different games. Maybe you'd like some, if you gave them a shot. Maybe not, who knows.

3. Predatory business stinks - everywhere. Games are by far not the only products or services that have predatory business models. The entire US healthcare system is exactly that. It's an almost automatic consequence of late-stage capitalism, in which rent-seeking behavior replaces more and more wealth generation. That doesn't EXCUSE what games companies are doing, it only explains it; but there's also the fact that unlike healthcare you have an actual choice here. You don't NEED to buy into those predatory games the way a diabetic does kinda need insulin. Which means these predatory business models exist because WE, COLLECTIVELY, SUPPORT THEM. Individually you may be opposed, but by and large, they are working because people keep buying into them. If everyone stopped giving money to companies that put such models into their games, they'd stop doing that overnight. But people won't.
And while predatory business models are of course a problem, not all MTX or additional revenue or gaming-as-a-service models are inherently bad. They can make a lot of interesting products financially viable. Which means more and better products for everyone, including people benefiting from MTX models without actually paying into them (because they tend to operate on freemium models with additional free content alongside the optional paid content). Not all games work like that, of course, and some are VICIOUSLY predatory with no redeeming features; but it's still fallacious to paint with a broad brush. And let's not forget that even outside of gaming, a ton of core products are working exactly for the same reason: they're free to most consumers, because the people who pay for them carry the moochers. That doesn't have to be a bad model.

You can't turn back the clock, and in many instances, you shouldn't even WANT to. Because all the improvements to gaming, both in fidelity and design, had to come from somewhere, and had to be financed somehow. It's a ridiculous, reactionary notion to just look back fondly on a nostalgia-tinted past and pretend that this could or even should have been sustained as the status quo forever. We had great times. Now we've moved on. More great times can still be had.

[Tech614]

Been on the internet long enough to know these types always insist current state of industry is bad and used to be amazing back in ___ gen. You think you're unique with these takes but you aren't and people where saying the same bullshit in the early 2000s acting like 80s and 90s gaming was some enlightened shit compared to the shitty modern games of the time back then. These takes are beyond tired at this point, people already realize this with things like the "zelda cycle" but in reality it's not the zelda cycle, its the gaming cycle.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

What are your thoughts on the current state of the industry?

Honestly, I've been losing interest in video games over the last few years. I very rarely buy brand new games nowadays. I hate Western AAA games. I hate their awful aesthetics, their terrible voice acting and dialogue, their cynical scripts, their forgettable soundtracks, their horrendous UI, their lackluster gameplay, and so on. And as aforementioned, buying a $60 game doesn't get you a complete experience anymore. The only western games I've played within the last couple of years that I can think of off of the top of my head are Guild Wars 2 and WoW. Otherwise, I'm playing JRPGs, but even then the JRPG genre has been in decline for some time. Trails, which was once the last bastion of quality turn based JRPGs, jumped the shark by ditching turn based combat for action combat. The writers lost credibility when the world war they hyped up for 9 games and 1,000+ hours was cancelled with no deaths. The once fantastic soundtracks have plummeted in quality with the departure and marginalization of Falcom's once talented composers and the misuse of the few actually good songs remaining. I've been emulating old games, but I am running out of good, quality JRPGs to play. Unless the video games industry sees a renaissance (which is unlikely given that the industry has been consolidated by megacorporations. Indies don't have the resources to release the high production value experience I seek, and the megacorps don't allow for creativity or imagination), I will probably just focus less and less on games and find another hobby. I've been getting back into reading fantasy novels. Currently reading The Black Company.

Do you have any games that you think should get more recognition for the work they do?

Despite having just pissed on Falcom, I will nominate their Trails series. Their games look aesthetically great. The music is still better than the vast majority of games on the market today. Their games aren't as good as they once were, but if I had to play a new videogame I'd pick Trails 8 times out of 10.

[Tech614]

Despite having just pissed on Falcom, I will nominate their Trails series. Their games look aesthetically great. The music is still better than the vast majority of games on the market today. Their games aren't as good as they once were, but if I had to play a new videogame I'd pick Trails 8 times out of 10.

Falcom games aesthetically look like about as bad of anime graphics as you will see and their music is pretty much bottom tier as far as JRPGs are concerned. No wonder you "lose interest" in gaming when you stan for such a mid ass studio that hasn't made a stand out game since the days when they where supporting the PSP.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

By what parameters?

Any parameters you want! You're arguing that movies in 1926 are exactly the same as now!

Content changes over time. There's a real debate about what is better or worse but the idea that it's always the same is nuts lol

- - - Updated - - -

Which is entirely subjective.

We're talking about art, not chemistry. Of course it is subjective lol

That's such a meaningless sentiment

[BeepBoo]

We're talking about art, not chemistry. Of course it is subjective lol

That's such a meaningless sentiment

It's not in context of "things are better/worse now on this artistic front than they used to be."

Because if you realize it's subjective, then you realize it's even MORE meaningless to say that statement than it is to point out the subjective nature of the topic.

[kranur]

Been on the internet long enough to know these types always insist current state of industry is bad and used to be amazing back in ___ gen. You think you're unique with these takes but you aren't and people where saying the same bullshit in the early 2000s acting like 80s and 90s gaming was some enlightened shit compared to the shitty modern games of the time back then. These takes are beyond tired at this point, people already realize this with things like the "zelda cycle" but in reality it's not the zelda cycle, its the gaming cycle.

Sure, there's a lot of nostalgia at play, and sure companies back then tried as best as they could to take people's money ... they just didn't have the means or as many means.
But ... take a look at how many games are releasing nowadays with pre-orders and early access that remain unfinished and unpolished forever. Of course people are looking back and think "Man, it was so good to be able to buy a game and fully play it" when today when a game is finished it's stripped of some things that are then sold for extra money.

[Tech614]

Sure, there's a lot of nostalgia at play, and sure companies back then tried as best as they could to take people's money ... they just didn't have the means or as many means.
But ... take a look at how many games are releasing nowadays with pre-orders and early access that remain unfinished and unpolished forever. Of course people are looking back and think "Man, it was so good to be able to buy a game and fully play it" when today when a game is finished it's stripped of some things that are then sold for extra money.

This is the part where ignorance is bliss.

Before the internet nobody ever knew what was cut from games to make release dead lines, and it sure as fuck wasn't patched back in nor was a a game continued to be developed on.

Its not just nostalgia at play, it's literally the entire thing. Nothing has ever changed. Developers have always chased trends and publishers have always tried to make the most amount of profit. Millennials in denial that they have become the boomers talking about "back in my day things where better" is all this is. Spoiler alert: Zoomers will eventually experience the same this isn't some magical unique thing to this current time or industry so let's cut the bullshit.

[kranur]

This is the part where ignorance is bliss.

Before the internet nobody ever knew what was cut from games to make release dead lines, and it sure as fuck wasn't patched back in nor was a a game continued to be developed on.

Its not just nostalgia at play, it's literally the entire thing. Nothing has ever changed. Developers have always chased trends and publishers have always tried to make the most amount of profit. Millennials in denial that they have become the boomers talking about "back in my day things where better" is all this is. Spoiler alert: Zoomers will eventually experience the same this isn't some magical unique thing to this current time or industry so let's cut the bullshit.

What gets cut out of the game to make deadlines is not same as for example cutting your inventory in half and putting the full version and the cool looking stuff in a shop. I haven't seen any game in the store in the early 2000s that had a label on it "Incomplete game, we're actively working on it and the full version will be out in a few months"

[Tech614]

What gets cut out of the game to make deadlines is not same as for example cutting your inventory in half and putting the full version and the cool looking stuff in a shop. I haven't seen any game in the store in the early 2000s that had a label on it "Incomplete game, we're actively working on it and the full version will be out in a few months"

The point.

Your head.

Still in denial. In 10 years you will be telling kids to get off your lawn and still oblivious to the fact you have become like your parents. It's so humorous to see people that don't realize this shit.

Go figure devs and publishers would use internet access to stream line development and do things that wasn't possible before. This does not make something worse. You're just looking for a reason to shit on things and yell at clouds. If a game was past dead line broken and unfinished it released like that and was never fixed or finished. Yea man those times where great /s. You just didn't have people on youtube and twitter to point this out for you for your #outrage.

[Edge-]

What gets cut out of the game to make deadlines is not same as for example cutting your inventory in half and putting the full version and the cool looking stuff in a shop. I haven't seen any game in the store in the early 2000s that had a label on it "Incomplete game, we're actively working on it and the full version will be out in a few months"

Yes, because that wasn't technically possible, especially given the challenge and cost of patching on consoles.

I suppose this is a criticism of Early Access or something since there is no label you're referencing specifically? Which is actually great for a lot of smaller/mid-sized companies who use it to get the revenue they need to finish making a game and often make a ton of changes in response to early community feedback?