Thoughts on the Video Game Market

The problem with “indie” games is that too many are never released on physical disc, so I never so much as notice them.  If it isn’t on disc, I’ll probably never buy it.

Aside from that, one issue I have with video games released the past couple of years is the political and social preaching. Stories with a moral lesson such as Aesopes Fables and Biblical parables have their place, and parents should decide which authors and publishers are appropriate for their own children.

However,  IMO “moral lessons” do not belong in video games, particularly those designed for adults. That was my #1 contention with “The Last of Us Pt. 2”.  How dare a mere video game developer deem himself worthy to teach me, a full grown adult, a “lesson about revenge”?  Ironically, the end of the game nullified and disproved Druckmann’s ” moral lesson”.  Huh.  So after all that violence and gore, apparently revenge DOES pay off?  So one can pursue cruel, unjustified, violent revenge, and get away with it.  Got it, Neil, point taken, loud and clear.

I can’t trust a video game developer who uses a video game to spread propaganda, no mater the slant, right or left.  A game should just be a game — a good game,  a FUN game.  Leave the moral lessons to parents and Sunday School.

The propaganda ruin games, ruined movies, ruined series

I barely watch tv anymore, and now prefer old movies I never saw, or things I already have for decades !

Games are following the same steps, battlefield VVOke bombed, last of crap 2 is a big mess,

and the greed of EA and Ubi being the worst with bandai-namco, pay to win, or pay to unlcok every outfit such in AC origins, when in your youth the full outfit unlocked was rewards because your good playing !

fuck this compagnies !

Each new day I play more retro game, specially 16-bits generation

After what soyny did to geek and gamers and others, I am not planning to buy ps5 anymore, and perhaps if m$ gets woke too I just will stop new games !

the sure thing is no day one console, ( which is a non sense anyway )

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by VenomBroly1993.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by VenomBroly1993.

I feel that, as a whole, the game industry’s quality has dropped considerably in the last 10 to 15 years. Among my biggest gripes are the pay to progress. I say that instead of pay to win as the developers don’t want you to win. If you win, you lose interest in continuing to play. However, if you can only progress, then you have to keep paying. At first I found standard DLC for consoles a bad idea. But then as I thought about it, PC games have had expansions for years prior to XBox Live and the DLC trend. The big difference being though, PC expansions usually came out 6 months to a year from the release of the base game. Now, we have DLC in the online store on the day that a game launches. Which for me shows a certain level of greed. If it’s ready to go on launch day, it should be in the game itself. I feel like the quality of games would improve drastically if we had to unlock this stuff by completing the game, discovering secrets, etc. Games like Warface (which pushes out new guns almost every week that aren’t really an improvement over the ones you unlock naturally) and World of Warships design their entire game around the microtransaction mechanics but with unrealistic prices (($100 real dollars for a ship like the Arizona…seriously?). If you can’t design your game to stand on its own with no microtransactions or at least extremely low cost transactions (honestly, how much does it really cost to create a digital warship?) then your game isn’t a complete game.

My other big gripe is how every game’s focus now is on multiplayer and the campaigns are an after thought. I’ll use Sea of Thieves for this example. When a new player starts SoT, they could do the Maiden Voyage mission but it barely teaches you the basics, then you’re shoved out into the open seas of the PvEvP map. Rare has stated that they wanted a game that encouraged community interactions, but 95% of those interactions are just PvP interactions, despite the PvE aspects of the game. The mechanics of the game world are very good and the world itself is beautiful. But a game like SoT, where players may just want to sail around and do the Tall Tale missions, allows random players to come up and provoke/attack anyone they want. Such a game would have been better off as a solo/co-op adventure story and adding the PvEvP section as a separate game mode. CoD and Battlefield are guilty of the multiplayer first, campaign second style. I LOVED the COD games on the PS2. World at War was my favorite as I got to play the campaign in co-op with my friend. Since then, the campaign has gotten subsequently weaker to the point where you finish it within a few hours and then have nothing but online PvP. Battlefield 1 had some pretty good single player stories, but they could have been expanded with subsequent DLCs. More battles from WW1 could have added based on the maps that were being developed. But that never happened. Even basic co-op is being ignored by the big developers. It’s usually the smaller/Indie games that allow more of the co-op stuff.

Another aspect of the game industry that has dropped in quality are the game journalists. Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that they NEVER sided with certain developers prior to our modern era, but at least in the late 90’s, early 2000s it wasn’t quite so obvious. IGN used to be my go to site for news and game guides. Try to find a decent guide for a modern game, it’s nothing but links to game play videos of idiots or people with heavy accents that talk way to much. Gamer magazines filled shelves on the grocery shelves and in book stores, now everything is online, posted by freelance writers who don’t have to worry about accountability and shill for whatever company will give them the most perks. In my youth I had wanted to get into journalism and I’m glad I never did. I wouldn’t have the stomach for it now.

I feel as though the game’s marketing also plays into it. Much like the way the marketing for TLOU2 embellished what the game was truly about. When someone plays Battlefield or COD, they know exactly what they are getting…a pvp experience. A player buys those games because they want a PvP experience. That is how they are marketed. The early marketing for Sea of Thieves, though advertised as a PvEvP experience, never really showed how vulnerable players are. So now the forums are full of people wanting PvE only sessions and the extremely vocal majority moves quickly to squash those discussions. Now, one can look at Destiny 2 and see that it is mostly a PvE experience, with other players running around on the map with you. You can go over and assist in taking out the enemies that another player is fighting but you can’t attack each other. Other games in the past have done this as well, namely MMOs that have special PvP designated areas. The way I see it, developers have always made games to be played in certain ways. Some games allowing more freedom of choice than others. But modern developers seemed to forget or ignore that you have distinct types of players, those that like PvE, those that like PvP, those that like co-op, those that like competition, etc and the developers try to put all those people into the same game. We don’t have as many niche or specific genre games like we use and instead, a game is marketed to everyone and then you have this mixed bag of player types.

Which brings me to another point. The gaming community itself can and has hurt the gaming market. It’s really discouraging to players, especially those new to a game, to go onto a forum and ask a question or propose feedback and then get jumped on for it. My favorite responses that I hate are the “git gud” responses and the “well, you must be doing something wrong because I can do ‘this’ and ‘earn this amount of reward’ and do ‘this particular action’ all within ‘this amount of time’. I see it a lot on Elite Dangerous when someone posts how many credits they can earn in an hour in some vain attempt to brag but never tell the inquiring player what their ship equipment and load out is, or where they are located on the map to earn that much or what their action course of actions are. I mean, I thought we were supposed to band together and help each other. Instead it’s a competition over who is better in a competition that doesn’t matter.

“Widespread” is a matter of perspective, I guess. I just speak of what I have seen on specific game forums but I think it’s fair to say that, over all, players could be more supportive of each other. I miss the days of the forums on the Nintendo website (back when it was the Nintendo Loudhouse). I don’t remember there being a lot of confrontational discussions.