State of the video game industry

[MMC]

Not sure where to really post this but I just can't help but have an incredibly pessimistic view of where the industry's at right now. Sure a lot of good advancements have been made and some genuinely great games have come out recently, but it feels like for all of the good, there's double the bad. There's just a myriad of issues and decisions that have completely turned me away from being nearly as into video games as I used to be. All of this seems to have especially gotten bad over the last 10 years or so. It constantly feels like all of the major studios behind every hyped release just releases their games unfinished (Cyberpunk, No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, any new Battlefield really), or what feels like an empty game until you purchase what is becoming an insane amount of DLC, or waiting out updates from the developer. Microtransactions are also flooding pretty much every genre at this point and while not all are egregiously pay-to-win, they are nonetheless incredibly annoying and just makes the entire game reek of corporate greed.

There also just seems to be an overall complacency from developers to release anything new, when they can milk current IPs with updates, or just make shitty remakes to resell something they already worked on. The amount of crappy remakes that have come out lately that do little to enhance the experience of the original game is unbelievable. And it just feels incredibly rare now when a major developer comes out with any big new game. From 2001-2006, Rockstar released:

GTA III
GTA Vice City
GTA San Andreas
Red Dead Revolver
Manhunt
Bully
Max Payne
Max Payne 2
Midnight Club 2
Midnight Club 3

From 2013-2018? Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA V, good games nonetheless but considerably less output and nothing original. And does it look like they'll be releasing ANYTHING from 2019-2024 outside of the crappy GTA remasters? Skyrim is 11 years old and has also been released multiple times with no indication of when we can expect ES6, though Bethesda at least finally has a new IP coming for the first time this century with Starfield.

And then there's just the tendency to hop on trends which also just really grinds my gears. Every franchise suddenly felt the need to have a battle royale mode in their games once Fortnite and PUBG took off, even if it was at the expense of other shit that made their games what they were (no story in BO4).

I dunno man, I just worry about where this industry is at right now. There's very little I get excited for nowadays and it's a miracle when what I do get excited about is actually a playable game to start off. I used to also not think Nintendo was innocent of this, but nope, they recently ruined their image with me and my faith in them not practicing these greedy business practices with the disaster that was AC New Horizons.

Just want to know what you guys think, if you guys agree with my pessimistic view or if I'm just being too cynical.

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[blue425]

Indie games my friend.

 

[MMC]

Indie games my friend.

Even those I haven't been as pleased with as I was before, but they definitely are at least innocent of most of the bullshit I talked about in the OP

 

[blue425]

AAA developers won't take chances anymore, so they churn out a seemingly never ending amount of recycled horse shit. Sadly people keep buying it.

Speak with your wallet. Find devs and publishers who don't use those practices. Devolver is a solid example of a publisher who puts out quality, complete games, free of micro transactions.

What type of stuff are you using into?

As far as trends that's always been a thing. Fighting games in the early 90's, then FPS, and so on..

 

[K Fleur]

There are a lot of companies selling nostalgia.

I’m as guilty as any consumer of buying into it too. I think the last 2 day 1 game purchases I made were the Final Fantasy 7 remake and the Mass Effect Legacy Edition.

 

[MMC]

AAA developers won't take chances anymore, so they churn out a seemingly never ending amount of recycled horse shit. Sadly people keep buying it.

Speak with your wallet. Find devs and publishers who don't use those practices. Devolver is a solid example of a publisher who puts out quality, complete games, free of micro transactions.

What type of stuff are you using into?

As far as trends that's always been a thing. Fighting games in the early 90's, then FPS, and so on..

It's not the fact that games follow trends that bothers me, it's when developers take away from key existing elements that made their games great in order to focus on the new modes that are trending.

 

[Commander Clueless]

There are a lot of companies selling nostalgia.

I’m as guilty as any consumer of buying into it too. I think the last 2 day 1 game purchases I made were the Final Fantasy 7 remake and the Mass Effect Legacy Edition.

To be fair, you can either see that as being sold nostalgia, or as an indication that you used to like games a lot more than you do modern ones....

 

[aleshemsky83]

To be fair, you can either see that as being sold nostalgia, or as an indication that you used to like games a lot more than you do modern ones....

Tbh I've been thinking about this and really, other than Dark Souls or something, there hasn't been a major videogame innovation in 25 years. Every game that will ever be made has already been made. Don't expect anything groundbreaking. Find what you like and play it. You're never going to experience Mario or Zelda or whatever for the first time again because there isn't a Mario or Zelda out there. Part of it is getting older but part of it is that videogames just aren't a new medium anymore and there's only refinement left.

 

[S E P H]

Nintendo is probably the best company out right now. They've had some duds that they pushed out obviously too early like first Mario Party Switch game and the Paper Mario game off the top of my head, but Mario: Odyssey and Breath of the Wild are two of the some of the best games I've played and both have been modern era games. Then they had the honesty to realise the new Metroid game wasn't going in the direction they wanted it to go, so they made the smart decision to inform the public and take whatever was useful to a studio that will give the game justice. The worst company currently for the Switch is Gamefreak and that's because they've been stuck in a COD-threshold where people will buy Pokemon games regardless of how good or bad they are.

The biggest problem isn't necessarily game studios, it's idiotic fans who allow these companies to do this. It's fans who pre-order games like Fallout 4, next Call of Duty v12.5, and any EA sports game where they do the bare minimum yet want to charge full price. For example, if Madden had horrible sales, then they would actually have to put in thought, work, time, and resources to make the game worth a damn. Don't get me wrong, some studios have been shady AF when it came to micro-transactions at the beginning stages of the ops complaints (which are justified) until countries started to threaten to ban games like Belgium from "gambling tactics." However, if people didn't buy these games one after another who had these sort of tactics, this would've already snipped in the butt these greedy strategies. Nonetheless, gaming studios and production companies like Activision kept pushing to see how far they could've gotten until they realised they had to stop.

 

[Shareefruck]

To be fair, you can either see that as being sold nostalgia, or as an indication that you used to like games a lot more than you do modern ones....

Bingo. Not saying that poster is guilty of this, but personally, I hate how quick everyone seems to be to label things as examples of nostalgia (as if newer = better and any exception could only be the product of bias/irrationality or something). Personally, I lean towards retro sensibilities because I agree more with that minimalist philosophy and art style, not because I'm remotely sentimental about my childhood.

Tbh I've been thinking about this and really, other than Dark Souls or something, there hasn't been a major videogame innovation in 25 years. Every game that will ever be made has already been made. Don't expect anything groundbreaking. Find what you like and play it. You're never going to experience Mario or Zelda or whatever for the first time again because there isn't a Mario or Zelda out there. Part of it is getting older but part of it is that videogames just aren't a new medium anymore and there's only refinement left.

I feel like the medium is way too young to think that we've run out of creative possibilities already.

Even those I haven't been as pleased with as I was before, but they definitely are at least innocent of most of the bullshit I talked about in the OP

Curious what you mean by "before". I feel like 2015 - 2019 has been the peak era in Indie games, and the two years after that are COVID years.

 

[x Tame Impala]

I don’t understand how game studios can get away with shipping out games that are buggy or incomplete. It’s complete horseshit. Games are constantly delayed and then still somehow swimming in issues.

It feels like gaming now is stuck in the last decade. Either too afraid or too incapable to make strides of their own, so instead they turned to something dishonest. They’re much too content capitalizing on addictive practices they’ve fine-tuned to lure as many people as possible into gaming for 3+ hours a day. Most major online franchises are built with some sort of progression system with time based objectives/rewards. It’s a blatant means of locking people into believing they need to keep grinding the game. The more they play the more money they’ll spend with MT’s.

It’s a scam. And now they’ve got tens of millions of people locked into $15 a month for game pass and PS+. They can ship out cheaply made games and now get more profits from consumers while having to do less.

 

[Ceremony]

The Jimquisition - YouTube

 

[John Price]

I agree with this commentary. There are very few games out right now worth buying and the few that are are just rehashes of previous games. Look at Chel. EA has swindled so many people putting the same game out for 8 years now.

And even if you do find a game out now, it's been watered down. It's all about money now. EA and CHEL and HUT, MUT, FUT, and then Battlefield 2042 flopping like it did. But that's only EA right? Let me tell you about Warzone and Activision..."MAJOR DEVELOPERS ONLY DO THAT!" Let me tell you about Genshin and MiHoYo...

Lost Ark is one of the very few games now I can just sit back and relax without worrying about gameplay being watered down or how much I have to spend for loot boxes!

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Agreed, AAA gaming has been utter garbage for years now. I'm getting to the point where I'm only excited for maybe 1 AAA game every other year. My favorite games of the year have pretty consistently been indie games in recent years.

AAA gaming is 100% just a business these days. Hell, most of them are publicly traded companies who's sole purpose is to make money. They make an appealing idea, have generic game play, and design a game play loop that is more about getting you to keep grinding than actually having fun. Look at all these battle passes or unlock systems. Everything is about rewarding you for playing for an hour in some miniscule way to keep you playing. "Oh, just another round and I can unlock this skin!" "The season ends next week, I better grind so I can reach the last level of this battle pass since I'll never get to unlock that skin again!"

Either that or they throw a ton of random BS things you can buy with real game money or spend 40 hours grinding to unlock it. I hated unlock systems 15 years ago when it was just about playing enough to unlock better guns. I thought all it does is make the players who play more and are more experienced in the game even more powerful which pushes away new potential players.

But when you look at Rockstar like your example, why would they waste their time making new games? People keep buying DLC for GTA Online or whatever. They're making so much money it's insane. Why bother? They're a publicly traded company. Their earnings are already great. Why raise costs big time when who knows if your revenue gains will be worth the time?

There's a ton of great indie games out there and they're not all perfect. But at this point I pretty much refuse to play games that have DLC right off the bat because I know the game can't possibly be that fun if it's designed around you paying even more money.

 

[SpookyTsuki]

I’m very easy to please but gaming had a different feel during the 360/PS3 days.

 

[Beau Knows]

The consolidation of game studios by Microsoft, Sony, Tencent and others certainly isn't going to help.

 

[Andrei79]

It's not just you.

I also find the gaming industry has become pretty corporate without much room for innovation. At least, in terms of European/North American studios. There's a downgrade in both stability and gameplay. At least, when it comes to the AAA industry. Outside of Nintendo, Larian and FromSoftware, I'm usually very disapointed in games. Even CDProjekt Red has become awful.

Indie games however have never been better.

 

[pistolpete11]

I know this world exists. I just don't participate in it. To me, it's no different than trashy TV, formulaic pop music, ho-hum cars, lite beer, etc. It appeases the masses, but it's not for me. So I don't consume them.

Although, I just got into video games like a year ago. So I don't know what it was like and I have generations worth of great games to play. If I ever get to the point where I don't have anything worth playing, I'll probably just stop playing games altogether or find something else to do with that time until one of the good ones does come out.

 

[H3ckt1k]

If you only play shit games the state of the game industry probably seems bad

 

[syz]

AAA games are no different than Hollywood movies. They're focus tested to appeal to the lowest common denominator. In the case of games, increases in fidelity (or specifically general consumer expectations wrt fidelity) has resulted in games that are both more expensive to make and harder to get working properly--especially when the people making them are being crunched to meet investor-driven fiscal release dates. Meanwhile the price of games hasn't increased beyond fluctuations in exchange rates regionally. Naturally this has all resulted in a risk averse industry at the top end, as well as publishers looking for ways to make extra after the fact, i.e. loot boxes.

All that being said I don't feel particularly affected. The stagnation to me is largely in the western AAA space, which is a space I haven't been super interested in for multiple generations now. There are more games being made now than ever before, at more budgets than before, coming out of more regions than before. As long as you're not interested exclusively in the lowest common denominator market games have probably never been better. If I was I would definitely find another hobby, because the consolidation that's happening there isn't going to make things better.

 

[John Price]

If you only play shit games the state of the game industry probably seems bad

The problem is all the major games are shit now

That was why the GOTY 2021 category was so weak

 

[Shareefruck]

The problem is all the major games are shit now

That was why the GOTY 2021 category was so weak

I mean, I agree with the premise, but to be fair, we probably shouldn't ignore the effect that COVID had on that year, even for Indie developers.

 

[Fiji Water]

Elden Ring comes out soon. So there is that. Also, as people mentioned, indie games. Try out Celeste and Hollow Knight if you haven't already

 

[guinness]

It's interesting that one person thinks that Nintendo is great, whereas I have the opposite opinion.

Nintendo just nickels and dimes people on nostalgia now. Many of the Switch titles I do own or want, are remasters of previous generations. People pay to keep playing the same old NES/SNES/Genesis games. You have to pay to do backups of your saves.

As for the general trend of remakes/remasters, nothing new, and Hollywood has been doing that for a century, but sometimes the remakes are better, especially if the technology improves.

But to reiterate some of the other comments, I also feel like that there is so much money being thrown around, only so many studios, bigger fish swallowing smaller ones, they're afraid to take risks, but people need to quit buying said remakes/remasters or pre-ordering (raises hand, with CP 2077, I really thought that game was going to be worth it).

 

[Beau Knows]

It's interesting that one person thinks that Nintendo is great, whereas I have the opposite opinion.

Nintendo just nickels and dimes people on nostalgia now. Many of the Switch titles I do own or want, are remasters of previous generations. People pay to keep playing the same old NES/SNES/Genesis games. You have to pay to do backups of your saves.

You're not wrong, Nintendo knows how to milk the past for all it's worth. I don't know why people are buying games they bought 30 years ago for the 5th time, but they are, and they'll buy them again at the next opportunity.

But, they do still make excellent games. Their big titles are consistently far more polished than the average major release that other studios put out these days. They don't require giant patches to be playable, they don't release half a game and promise to fix it later, and they don't build their games around selling microtransactions. They aren't as innovative as they once were, but their games are still generally great.