The Decline of Gaming

I've been playing video games since I was three, when my parents substituted a Game Boy Color and Pokémon Blue for a babysitter. Growing up, there were so many things I loved about games that I was able to play and experienced countless amazing experiences. titles and witnessed the industry as it grew and evolved after playing something like oblivion or Bioshock halo 3. I would just sit there and wonder what's next; However, in the last nine years or so, in many ways it feels like the quality of video games and especially triple-A titles have

decline

d, the industry is always creating something new, innovative and epic games as a medium have evolved. very quickly in the 35 or so years they have been around and while there are so many great aspects to love about this hobby, just consider this a more pessimistic view of the state of

gaming

, so what has caused the

decline

of

gaming

?

No, they're not these old flash cartoons, but they did inspire the name. It is the same thing that ruins much of this beautiful world of ours, insatiable greed. microtransactions in Star Wars Battlefront 2 just to clarify, these are my opinions based on the facts I have researched and observed. If I'm wrong about anything, don't hesitate to let me know. I'm sure everyone will for every negative thing that has happened. with video games you could argue that there has been an equally positive benefit and that is a fair point, greed is the driving force of this decline, but it gets complicated because greed in this case takes various forms, no it is not a Overweight Italian with a ridiculous mustache, that's something. both subtle and direct, let's not waste any more time on a nice introduction, let's jump straight to perceiving the decline, is it in our heads?

It is challenging and overwhelming to address the core problems that plague a multi-billion dollar industry with so many different companies, developers, publishers. programmers spread around the world, is it possible to categorize and identify this decline? All we have to do is follow the money, so let me list a few things that you have probably noticed and I will explain them in detail in the future. An increase in buggy games. -cheap releases often have a failed launch and are forced to rely on updates to fix their problems number two, an overabundance of remakes, remasters and sequels, number three, the corporatization of games, the behavior of major companies , editors and developers and of course number four, the obvious influx. of RNG loot boxes forced into all game genres and increasingly aggressive monetization schemes, it could be that our own minds play a factor in this too and we could possibly see the gaming industry being worse because we had it so good in The past, that's all.

The disappointment we've caused simply by older, more jaded scrolling is very likely due to the negativity we associate with modern games outweighing the more positive innovations that have been made to make games look better. The most epic characters in history are portrayed so realistically. The animation greatly enhanced my point. It's about trying not to become too overwhelmed with nostalgia for the glory days and remembering that your perception plays a huge role in this decline. What do you have and don't have a problem with? That's something you have to figure out, but now we have a solid foundation. for this topic, let's delve into the decline of games complacency satisfied especially with oneself or with merits advantages situation often without awareness of any potential danger or defect self-satisfied complacency is probably the biggest impediment to innovation in game design quality The perfect example is Valve once known for their unconventional methods of game design and their repertoire of critically acclaimed releases, so many instant classics that to this day they are considered some of the best games of all time, but since then it seems there has been a change of plans, well Valve is They haven't made a new game since Portal 2 eight years ago and the last time they released a new IP it was considered dead, that was 11 years ago, but let's take a look quick look at the games they released since then. -strike source which was a remake of the original Counter-Strike Dota 2 a remake of the Dota mod for Warcraft 3 Counter-Strike online only for Koreans Counter Strike Nexon zombies free zombie shooter no thanks, 4 survivors were left alone for Japanese the laboratory, a series of 8 virtual reality minigames that was more or less just a Dota experiment under Lords, a mobile version of Dota, Auto Chess, I need to explain, this is the same company that created Half-Life 2 and However, Valve is simply content to develop These nondescript titles can really sum up the disappointment that players have had with this company at the reveal of the artifact.

Everyone was so excited to see what Val was working on. It had been so many years since they released an amazing new game and when. revealed that everyone lost all interest in the Dota2 card game. Now the question is why Valve stopped making real games. What happened to your ambition? Well, as of March 2015, Valve makes 18 million dollars a month from Dota 2 alone. Valve also has a ratio of one of the most profitable companies with the fewest employees in the United States earning approximately $300,000 per employee they earn on 30 % of every expense spent are simply making money right now chimichangas gold bars if you're making tons of money selling the same thing for seven years and you're a businessman, well why would you stop doing that?

Why would you take the timely risk of developing and selling a new product when you can simply keep your current products and watch the profits pour directly into your bank account? Oh hey Bethesda, how's it going buddy? I didn't see you there. You're still selling Skyrim. There's no doubt that Valve fans will eat up any new game they come out with, as long as it's a type of game that people want as consumers. You would buy Portal 3. You would buy Left 4 Dead 3 and you would surely buy Half-Life 3, the long-awaited and practically dead Half-Life 3 is a perfect example of complacency.

I have nothing to say about Half-Life despite the critical praise and its relentless With so much hype for this title, you'd think Half-Life 3 would be at the top of Valve's priority list, but it never did. was. Instead, we're getting a VR game and while it's cool, they're finally making another Half-Life, all I can think of. What about the games that people want you to see Valve and even some other companies need to learn bonus lessons? You know, never stop trying to be in the spotlight, keep moving forward to infinity and beyond, Bethesda and Rockstar are two other clear ones. examples of how complacency has crept into the video game industry, the undisputed masters of Ries, in the same product in as many ways as possible after Grand Theft Auto 5, Rockstar basically did nothing but update the game and port their games old to different platforms for up to five years.

They later released Red Dead Redemption and now again. I'm not saying they're bad games, but if you look back, in the five years between 2001 and 2006, they released games like GTA 3, Vice City, Midnight Club 2, Manhunt, Red Dead Revolver the Warriors. and bully Rockstar used to experiment and try new things by developing multiple IPs at once and building a library of games to their name, but now they've gotten complacent, but in the meantime there was a five-year wait between Oblivion and Skyrim that felt like an eternity. But my goodness, it was worth it. Skyrim was amazing, it flew off the shelves like crazy, all my friends were playing it and now it's been eight years since Skyrim and we basically have no news about the game or anything about Elder Scrolls 6 after the new Vegas.

Bethesda five years to release Fallout 4, a product that was highly polarizing among the Fallout fanbase, and then 76 releases. Do you see this decline? It's this complacency, this lack of desire to innovate and create new things that has led to some of our favorites. game companies release new games much less frequently and when they do it's either something you don't care about or it's just another sequel even though almost all game companies have fallen prey to complacency, almost none of this applies to Nintendo, which has stuck to its roots and continued to evolve and release new games that surprise us.

Nintendo is still doing things the old way and making a ton of money, while these other game companies are doing things the easy way, because if it doesn't work but you make a ton of money, why fix it? Due to the abundance of remakes and remasters, it is a fact that games have followed certain trends over the years. It had arcades where you paid twenty-five cents for entertainment. Back in the NES days, it was all about side-scrolling platformers. SNES and Sega Genesis eventually focused on graphics. we had online games, rhythm games, battle royale, so many trends have come and gone, some have stuck around, but occasionally a certain style of game is perceived to be no longer profitable or attractive for the major 3D platforms, for example, they have long fallen out of favor outside of Mario in In this case, instead of developing a completely new game and a genre that is considered dead, companies will choose to remaster the old ones and, if you look, they become very popular , who would have thought that Spyro would revive a crazy trilogy with incredible remasters and since then?

They were so successful, don't you think people would be even happier to see a new gaming star in the purple dragon or the lovable bandicoot? But there has been no such announcement, other than a remaster of Crash Team Racing with which you can do amazing things. A remake sometimes turns an outdated game into something entirely new, effectively remaking it to be as good as you thought it was back then, remakes are a great way for new players to experience the magic of the past without the daunting task of playing something that seems like this or it can be a method for developers to add to their old project and give it some new features, a remaster is capable of updating old games with several quality changes and making it the definitive way to experience an old title can be pretty awesome when they port something to a newer console so you don't have to buy it, an old expensive copy like Symphony of the Night and other Castlevania games are imported to Xbox, that's great, the problem arises. when companies are more content reselling their old games than creating new ones, it's become a meme how many different versions of Skyrim Bethesda has produced legendary edition Skyrim special edition remastered Skyrim on Switch Skyrim now with Skyrim mods for VR in April 2013 Bethesda announced through their blog that they would be leaving Skyrim and preparing to work on other projects.

Yeah, that's fun. Skyrim pinball edition. At times, some remasters simply take advantage of their nostalgia and try to flaunt their old game as something new with an HD. At the end of the title the only thing I'm saying is that there weren't many remakes or remasters on the PlayStation Xbox ps2 or GameCube n64 and that's because they were focused on creating new games, in fact I can only think of one. remastered those consoles conker live and reloaded which made the game look so incredibly sexy the visuals are still stunning to this day and they even released a new multiplayer mode which was just amazing but nowadays some remasters are just a shameless cash grab where you can I can look at a side by side comparison and not notice any difference but hey at least they added some extra dirt on the glass for Bioshock Remastered take my $40 remember the original port of Dark Souls on Steam, yes, it was so lazy and ruined that they didn't do it.

We didn't even change the button cues on the Xbox 360 version, I mean, holy shit, and then from the software, Dark Souls Remastered comes out, a real version of the game, and they charge people 40 bucks to play Dark Souls with a revitalized pvp community and a uniform DS. remastered didn't bother to fix several of the game's glitches highlighted in this wonderful Inferno Plus video. Companies will also go a step further. EA turned Dungeon Keeper into a cheeky pay2win dumpster fire mobile game. Activision not only released Modern Warfare remastered with Infinity Warfare, but later added loot boxes and paid weapons to a game that didn't have those things in 2007, some games like Sleeping Dogs Last of Us will come out with a remaster a year or two later of its launch.

Do you expect me to believe that technology has advanced so far? In that time frame where a 1 year old game is now considered obsolete, it's nice to improve frame rate andresolution of the game stability, but it is really worth buying exactly the same product again. What I mean is that many companies don't do it. willing to take more risks, it's disheartening to remember a time when the original Xbox was a haven of incredible original exclusive titles and now the Xbox One doesn't even seem to be competing. This trend of lazy remasters and remakes brings me to my next point of pursuit. trends early access Hi guys, sorry for the poor quality of this section.

My video is still in early access. You can donate to my patreon to help fund my willingness to sit in front of a computer and edit in an effort to capitalize on whatever is currently most popular. of game studios will just blatantly rip off others or release a basic part of a game. Remember the Lawbreakers Man didn't do so well trying to copy Overwatch, so how about Boskie Productions just copy Fifteen Days and Pub G and release a shitty Battle Royale that should bring in radical money Heights, God mine, oh wow, this Battle Royale craze has really taken off, let's release a new game that completely abandons the old one and alienates our fanbase, the call to show how desperate some developers really are of course.

It would take too much time and effort to fix pub G before porting it to Xbox, so oh my god, they burned it, they burned it all, somehow they made it worse. It's a little shocking how a company that made all the money on King Tut's Castle did it. I didn't use any of this to improve the game instead they just wanted more and in Titanfall it made the advanced move popular. Well, of course, it's a must that Halo has to adapt it to their games, even if the developers don't understand what makes movement good, even if it compromises the design style. and the identity of their franchises just copy it I don't care if it works if it's unintuitive, crazy and sucks just copy them, do what they're doing, a lot of these game series used to go their own way and I missed that the term early access has now been hijacked by companies that are too lazy to say their games are complete or admit they will never finish them, it used to mean you had early access to the game and it was often like an indie title led by a small team, but you get the point which didn't have the big budget that other games have and needed additional funding but now all that means is the game is going to be a disaster and you can't be mad at them because you hate it's just early access even if they make billions of dollars blue Hole and Epic will still call fortnight early access titles and pub G, then you have all those shitty zombie survival games that my friend brought for 7 days to die once and after playing them for 5 Minutes I thought, Dude, you got ripped off, you buy this from Jose in the alley behind a strip club, what is this?

Once eSports were set to take off, developers began adapting their games to be competitive, everyone wanted their product to take the eSports territory by storm. and that can really mess with the vision of the project when all you care about is chasing the hottest trends in cash flow, you release all these half-assed games and suddenly the desire to create something new is replaced by the desire to copy. other games as service online updates only failed launches etc. The ability to patch a game after its release was one of the biggest revolutions in game development, allowing teams to continue their work before moving to Gold, bug fixes, balance updates and more, now possible even when a game comes out and you buy it on the release date, it has an update because the developers are still working on it after they started shipping copies, nowadays you can fix the settings and save your ass as a developer with this luxury of after support at launch. an excellent example of when used well, it needed several updates to become what it is today, without them most people would have gotten bored of the game.

The idea of ​​constantly adding new content and features to attract players and keep them coming back is good for both. For gamers and companies, however, it's when the games-as-a-service philosophy starts to envelop every stage of design, when developers rely too much on fixing the game and adding improvements after release, that we see games decline. Halo 5 Guardians from the beginning had like a 7-month Content Plan, why didn't you work on that in the three years of development you had? You compared Spec Ops and Modern Warfare 2 and 3 and there is no mistake that everyone prefers those versions to the 2019 version, where Infinity Ward one is now needed. month to get to the missions ten years ago they released a game with 23 of them, the difference is very clear and how the games are developed, you look at something like kotor 2 halo 2 and smash bros melee, all of these games had hellish development cycles that They ate up the lives of the people who work on them, these heroes sacrificed time with their family just to complete the game when it was supposed to be done so that we, the consumers, would get the best possible product despite the many bugs, glitches and general lack of polish on these three highly anticipated sequels turned out phenomenal because neither Obsidian Bungie nor Nintendo could rely on simply fixing the game after the fact, not having that luxury put pressure now with the luxury of post-release support, compare the content of Halo 2 with the latest guardians of the game.

At launch, Halo 5 had 4 game modes, the lowest in this series, and it took a whole year of updates to make Halo 5 a somewhat complete package. What Halo 2 accomplished in its three years of development in 2004. Halo 5 needed one more year later. It already came out in 2015, but this is not exclusive to Halo, it happens to all game series where the gears stopped turning and something as simple as launching a game in a playable state becomes an urban legend, a myth. Bad Company 2 launches perfectly and works. Okay, so the dice roll Battlefront 3 on Battlefront 2, all of which had nightmarish problems and just didn't work, it gets so ridiculous to the point where you wonder if the games they released are actually illegal because the product doesn't work as advertised. announces. you have something like Cod World War 2 where even the menus didn't work, look at how Mass Effect 1 came out in 2007, pretty good, Mass Effect Andromeda ten years later somehow looked worse and was a bug riddled mess Diablo 1 and 2 works absolute masters Diablo 3 is coming out, people have been waiting over a decade to experience this game, it releases an era 37, you can't play until Blizzard realizes it, then you had Dead Island for the developers completely ready and released the wrong game . version of the game, how does that happen?

SimCity was built to be always online, except you couldn't connect to EA's shitty servers. Batman Arkham Knight was deliberately released to PC even though the publishers knew it was a terrible port with horrible frame rate issues. I'm not saying that all the games from the glory days were released in perfect condition, but these playable disasters happen much less frequently and at the time I was much more forgiving of them and then we got to the Master Chief Collection which was a testimony of how broken, you could release a game and somehow not be investigated by the Better Business Bureau this atrocity was so unplayable.

I'm surprised no class action lawsuit has been filed. The new blur scenes were amazing, but there's barely any consolidation when nothing worked. the menus were game glitches everywhere impossible to find the game rating system that kept resetting 343 it took me like three or four years to make MCC a consistently playable game three or four years after I bought the game I was finally able to play it the way I was promised Halo 2 Anniversary will contain the original Halo 2 multiplayer exactly as it was released 10 years ago, although this is a subjective point. Check out these MMORPGs. World of Warcraft changed the landscape of gaming as we knew it and truly gave rise to gaming as a service.

Philosophy with monthly subscriptions, new expansions, it was a good source of cash flow and for the players who enjoyed the game it was the best thing ever. Wow has been supported consistently for 15 years and that's great, but there's one important point: Warcraft is almost never mentioned as a The series has been an MMORPG longer than a real-time strategy despite three games with multiple expansions. . The reason Warcraft 4 doesn't exist is because Wow does it similarly. The reason Knights The Old Republic 3 doesn't exist is because Old Republic does. Elder Scrolls 6 doesn't exist yet because they've been working on Elder Scrolls Online for better or worse.

This amazing game series has converted to the games-as-a-service philosophy. They have turned their backs on their roots. EA is famous for going out of business. several game studios, including Visceral, who were working on a single-player Star Wars game, but because single-player games cannot be turned into a service, they saw that this company was not as profitable and closed it down. , it's actually surprising when something like Jedi Falled Order comes out with no warnings and is a really great game, but in the six or so years that EA has had the rights to Star Wars, this is the first single-player game they've released a flashback to. early 2000s.

Oh baby Jedi Academy. Republic Commando kotor 1 and 2 episode 3 game Lego Star Wars bounty hunter obi-wan Force Unleashed battlefront 1 and 2 empire at war The Star Wars games were available, but EA is becoming complacent now that we live in a time where updates to a game van are more impactful than the actual release and it's the fix-it-later-now mentality that allows companies to produce so many titles that it really sucks when they come out. A video game should never be a bet in which the consumer does not know if it will work or not. anti-consumer corporatization probably the worst thing about the decline of games is their corporatization.

The gaming industry is increasingly controlled by a board of directors who don't see this hobby the way you or I do. Aren't you thinking about how we can make the best game possible? How can we make our fans happy? They are thinking about how we can make the most money with the least amount of effort. There are investors who meet my deadlines. Game development used to do it. being just a group of nerds pooling their talents and creativity to make something awesome, something they'd like to play. Corporatization has been sucking the life and soul out of games and this is illustrated by the complete lack of originality on the games' cover art.

This Nikki Jakey video is really good, but it makes a bigger point: soullessness. It would be foolish to condemn all pre-order bonuses, microtransactions, DLC, etc., because only a Sith deals in absolute terms, but you are the consumer, what do you want? Do you want interesting and meaningful cosmetic unlockables that showcase your achievements? Ok, what's the ideal way for the player to unlock them? Ask yourself this question first. Is it that good for the game? Is it good for the player to unlock game-altering abilities or cosmetic items and monetize them randomly? Loop boxes are a form of progression and unlocking that is beneficial to the player, of course not, so why do companies include it?

Because consumer well-being and quality of experience are secondary to what is most profitable during the 360 ​​ps3. and gamers of the Wii generation noticed that there was much more downloadable content than the previous generation; in fact the Gamecube didn't even connect to the internet, but now it seems that loop boxes are much more numerous, that's because companies realize that the DLC was just a one time thing. buy, but what if there is a way to turn players into payers? Doing that would produce high results. Then you have all those season passes where companies want you to pony up $50 based on a pledge as video games become more and more expensive to make. the price of a new release has remained the same for decades and while any company, large or small, needs to make a profit, the efforts some companies go to to link their games is absurd, sometimes being so greedy to the point of compromising their 343 game design and creative assembly went so far in this direction by creating a mode specifically to integrate loot boxes into Halo Wars and creating a pay-to-win model for Madden and FIFA Ultimate Team Wow, those are so cool ruined by pay to win loot boxes battleground 1 and for offering literal shortcuts through the progression system, think about that for a second, the designers created the XP system, how you wonhow much it takes to unlock things and then they decided to monetize a way for players to skip it entirely.

Bungie literally cutting and reselling parts of Destiny 1 and 2 as DLC making shaders consumable so players have to buy them again was not a decision made for the player's benefit Forza 5 offers as many payable cars as are earned in the game the list of dlc just for the sims is amazing the shadow of middle earth prize a single player game chose the loop box method to deliver rewards to players dead space 3 interrupted the game to ask you to buy More Parts Train Simulator 2015 Offering Over $4,000 in Purchasable Weapons DLC in Black Ops to Give People an Edge Microsoft Charges You to Remove Ads in Solo Solitaire Microtransactions for some games, it can be so bad that functional microtransactions become more important than a functional game.

I couldn't get into matches in Cod World War 2 when it came out, but you can bet your ass I could buy loot boxes and then the consequences 76 Wow, easily one of the most shameful and blatant empty cash grabs the industry has ever seen. never. Do you as a player want to have sections of the video game you purchased sealed? in random boxes that are paid with real money. Hell no, there is always a better alternative. Titanfall 2 is the shining example. It may not make the most money, but there's nothing involved. What you see is what you get and the game is no worse.

It's better because companies have tried seemingly every slimy, underhanded tactic to get you to pay a little more. class slots, but in recent games you can just buy them, that's where we are now. Valve and Blue Hole opened avenues for selling and exchanging bets with other players, leading to gambling websites and notorious shitlords like Team Martin and Pro. syndicate trying to make money from this infamous gambling scandal. csgo lottery, the increasingly aggressive monetization of video games had gotten so out of control that it attracted the attention of several world governments. I mean, if you look at those patents leaked by Activision, it tells you the whole intent.

It's there, adhering to these patents, they want to make you as addicted as possible to spending money, they want to control you, that's why Bungie decided to limit the amount of XP you get. I bet they wouldn't have done it if they hadn't tried. to sell me shiny engrams, the decline of gaming has manifested itself in many different ways and it hurts to talk about how the games industry I knew and loved has become complacent with the trend of lazy titles chasing garbage, remasters to stockings, corporatization over monetization and the lack of The drive to create something new, games as a service and early access become crutches that developers rely on and when fans get upset at how dysfunctional and empty they are their latest releases or I wonder why there are still game breaking issues, do they use early access or are we working on it since their shield don't get me wrong, the good stuff is still out there but you have to find it among all the noise but with all this has changed for the worse in gaming, it's starting to feel like soulless assembly line production and the way companies treat their consumers is making me lose faith in this industry and that's how gaming has declined.