What went wrong with gaming?

Jamesbaker1

Title

PTaylor

Jamesbaker1
The same thing that is happening to sport: identity politics are taking over and ruining the essence of what made it great to begin with.

Basically, any time there's an area that men go to get away from political correctness, it gets invaded by social justice and used as an opportunity to brainwash them in the name of a "safer" or "more equal" world.

Gigachad

Everyone buying bullshit doesn't help. I cite the latest pokemon as an example. Worst game in series. Sold best ever.

Basile

I don't really understand the question. Isn't there an endless amount of good video games available for little money on platform like steam ? There must be new things that are worth checking out every minute. You literally have not enough time in your life to play half of the good games that exist right now, let alone the ones that come out every day.

Do you mean that big companies are producing an increasing amount of over hyped shit games ? As Gigachad said, there is no relationship between the quality of the game and the money it brings. And a company is there to bring money, not to make cool games. So is that really something wrong with gaming ? The most effective way to make money is to copy paste what worked and to sell it as fast as possible, so now that companies figured out the market they will do just that. Not really related to video games.

But I'd say, between the endless stream of good indie game and the occasional AAA gem there is nothing to complain about.

LunaticHigh

Gigachad really? I hated sword and shield, but I’m really enjoying legends and violet. And, no, I don’t like let’s go or go.

cat_beepo

Gigachad i've heard this a bunch and still haven't done any research on it yet. what's so bad about this gen?

i know i hated sword and shield because the whole game felt like an extended tutorial

yukarihinata

As someone who doesn't care for most intellectual property law, a lot of it has to do with the ease of piracy for certain systems.

The WII and the DS were some of the most interesting consoles ever, but all of Nintendo's goodwill with the fanbase was drained as both were easy to hack and piracy was prevalent.

I think the current trend of shit tier games and lack of physical distribution come from a need to get rid of piracy.

I believe the current consoles have figured out ways to make piracy much harder, but it has come at the expense of quality of product.

Then again, I just like playing games for free. So, I am probably part of the cause.

Gigachad

yukarihinata Then again, I just like playing games for free. So, I am probably part of the cause.

If you buy a product that was good it equals out. I pirated kerbal space program, pillars of eternity and a few others an went back and bought them later. Now I also check their Twitter before buying.

histoire

yukarihinata

nintendo
goodwill with the community

lol
lmao even

Bricky

I feel gaming started going wrong when devs and publishers started using the internet to fix their mistakes. I know it went wrong after microtransactions and season passes for content that had yet to exist became normalised. Even worse knowing it disproportionately affects children, gambling addicts and those who are 'neurodivergent', and those putting it on them know what they're doing.

Does that mean good games can't exist? Not at all. I personally enjoyed Yakuza Like A Dragon because it took the reality of falling from grace and hitting rock bottom, and ran with the idea you are your own hero. It's one of the few games I would pay for, I can't say that about most.

Lumeinshin

I would assume the OP is moreso about the mainstream titles, A lack of real excitement and creativity. Part of that is going to be just the horrors of growing older, and a general lessening of the magic of it all. There is also the element of the dirty laundry of the press/companies being out for all to see as well.

But yeah I agree with @Basile, plenty of indies to play. I do think a lot of the magic has gone, especially for console players. day 1 updates, licensed dlc that expires, online only games, money hungry storefronts etc etc we all know those elements. less than a literal 'went wrong' its moreso the spirit.

its pretty good at the moment if you disregard the mainstream, emulation is super easy these days and there are lots of games that will tickle your fancy. lots of open source stuff too which is always cool

Redrick

People started to accept mediocrity and other crap. That's not to say no good games are made today, that's plain vanilla wrong, just that in the mainstream market you have less and less devs willing to make something special for a limited market and more and more wanting to make games a service that they can use as an endless revenue stream. What I dislike about modern games though is how many devs are against modding and how few are willing to ship with mod tools because giving their games longevity is bad for business or some crap

Love

I personally think the downfall of gaming comes from laziness from development team leads (Not the devs, only the leaders/higher ups!) and publishers' greed and lack of patients. A runner up point could also be the ease of internet access and the overreliance on it. I notice that a lot of games that release as a 1.0 before updates existed tend to have higher quality control because there is no intent to patch the game, so it has to be its best version on release.

Games now are able to be pushed out and fixed later, but the launch of a game really does dictate how that game will be in the future. Look at gran turismo 7 vs Splatoon 3. GT7 had a horrible launch and was DOA but Splatoon has a thriving community. I really can't think of any other game that had a good launch like Splatoon 3 did though so I don't have anything else to compare it to so I may just be dead wrong here.

friffri

The answer depends on what issue you have with games nowadays.

I completely skipped last gen (PS4/XONE) because every hyped game looked boring as fuck. They all seem rehashes of well known gameplay formulas in different settings with a mediocre story attached.
When I was a teen that was enough for me, I hadn't played that stuff to death so it was still fun, but now the idea of playing 30+ hours of Generic-FPS/TPS just to experience a B-tier movie is dreadful.

Nowadays I only play League of Legends (I know...) but that's more out of addiction and because it's a way to connect with some friends. Competitive online videogames also have a whole lot of issues, I've seen so many people completely lose their mind playing those games.
That's a whole other discussion though

Jon the slayer

The same thing that went wrong with the internet. It got too big. Games used to be made by small companies that actually wanted to make great games. Then they got bought up by companies that just saw gaming as another source of capital for their investors. It's these arrangements that lead to companies making decisions at the expense of their products just to make easy short term gains, which is how we now have bullshit like gamepasses and lootboxes, even for full priced games. The game developers don't want to actually put these things into their games, they're decisions from high up.

Basile

Jon the slayer A lot of people makes this exact argument with cinema. But, the good movies are still there. It's not because Marvel is the most advertised company that good movies don't exist anymore. There will always be people striving for original and good content (even in big companies).

Lumeinshin

Basile
I remember an interesting thing regarding the film industry, I think it was Matt Damon, but he pushed the idea that whilst there are still ultra high budget films being made, and ultra cheap indie flicks, there arent much in the way of AA films, where the budget is high enough to be experimental and have lots of effects (practical or otherwise), whereas the huge films HAVE to make profit so they cant experiment as much.

I think the likes of say A24 are bigger than the other indie films but maybe not quite at the AA level Matt Damon is after, theyre not far off tho
slight tangent from games but it may apply somewhat

Anonicus

The biggest problem boils down to Greed and trying to make everyone get a rush of dopamine for a while before they have an incentive to buy microtransactions in their 60$/70$ vidya rather than wanting to make a really fun game. Typically, Games that does this is generally Mediocre at best. But to me, I think the Indie scene is a lot better and is practically games that I tend to buy anymore since they're made to be fun.

Basile

Lumeinshin Interesting, I never thought of it this way. But it definitely makes sense. I wonder how it affects what kind of movie is produced and the overall quality.

Woland

Lumeinshin
This is exactly what I think it is. It's not that there are no good games anymore; the indie scene is full of great new games. It's that great new games have all but been relegated to the indie scene exclusively. Not only are big studios not making very interesting games, but there are no more AA studios left to do interesting ideas with a substantive budget.

Well, I say that, but that's not entirely true. There are some smaller studios making games right now, and they've made some of the best games of the past 5 years. Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Pathologic 2, all developed by AA studios. But we could certainly use more. And all the listed games, while great, are somewhat niche in their appeal and tend towards the more narrative-heavy. A resurgence of goofy, fun, and unique arcade style games like Katamari or Monkey Ball would also be great. Maybe more AA studios would also lead to more of them, but it feels like a stretch.

Sandro

I think it partly has to do with necessitation for success in the high end of the games industry. If your game bombs and you've no safety net to recoup to, then your studio is more or less out of work unless you're given another chance by your publisher. And that in turn makes it look more appealing to take the safer approach. One in the hand worth more than Two in the bush and all that. I don't think that mentality is inherently bad, and thankfully there's still good games with big budgets being made.

It doesn't worry me too much in the long run since, as people above me have already pointed out, theres plenty of decent indie titles getting recognition too.

damas

Lack of optimizations. Games consume too many resources.

Gigachad

LunaticHigh Performance wise it is terrible. And this is a more personal knock but it's open world didn't do it for me. Arceus was fun. I'll show my age but I want 2d pokemon. Pokemon does not translate well to 3d without alot of effort put into it. I wish they would accept not everything has to be top of the line 3d graphics. The switch can barely handle it.

LunaticHigh

Gigachad as a shiny hunter myself, I tend to agree. Not just because the bad translation to 3d but, the lack of challenge. Shiny hunting used to be a very tedious meta, now it’s just a joke. I spent a lot of time shiny hunting, thinking I had extremely rare Pokémon (which they still kind of are, depending on generation) now everybody and there mom can raid shinies on Pokémon go or whatever. and the shiny rate is so fucking stupid these days. I didn’t want it to be easier to catch shinies. It just bums me out

rolf

Gigachad Pokemon Stadium and its sequels look wonderful. SMT 3 and 5 which are the same genre of monster collecting look amazing. Though I find SMT's mythology-based demons far more appealing than Pokemon's simpler designs anyhow. They just need to inject personality

LunaticHigh I relate to this so bad. Shiny hunting is so hollow with the odds, and when Game Freak dared to add some difficulty to it by removing the obvious sparkle in the overworld for SV the new "hunters" couldn't stand having to actually focus on the game to acheive something. And don't get me started on the washed out colours

Gigachad

LunaticHigh When the "rival" started choosing the element you were strong against is when difficulty just stopped.

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