Reminiscing about my gaming history i came to a pretty sad conclusion last night, that the industry is dying a slow painful death by generics, i was trying to think what was the last game i played that truly changed the industry for the better and left a lasting impression and i could only come up with a handful of games in the past decade that i could think of that aren't copy paste version of other highly successful games, so i wanted to break down the reasons for this and some examples of why revolutionary games are almost extinct.
It's now mainstream
Even 10 years ago gaming was still considered the weird, anti-social nerd club of virgin boys who didn't know how to interact with women, this was pretty far from the truth, but perception is everything, i've played with a lot of people over the past 15 years and some i still play with even today and i can say comfortably that the gamers haven't changed, we still crave games that test us and multiplayer games that we can exert our awesomeness onto others so what did change? like many things, it went mainstream.
Now going mainstream isn't always a negative thing, for example i'm glad i'm no longer a satanic child murderer just because i listen to death metal and wear band shirts, however with gaming it was a bad thing, specifically because of the money involved, going back a long time many of you may not remember the early origins of video games, that used to be in the form of things like Dial-up BBS role playing games that would get so deep and intrinsic you could literally spend days playing a text simulator, by today's standards, pretty boring.
But i'm old enough now that i can look back at the industry and follow its progression, when i first was introduced to video games it was an atari that was just lines on a screen something i could do for hours on end which now days also seems kinda boring, but as games progressed, became more popular, looked better and the culture grew, more and more people began to play and the market was born into what we have today, however money changes peoples priorities and the gaming industry is no different.
I could go into a long ass explanation of the early gaming industry surrounding things like nintendo, windows 95 and the like but it'd be way too long and complicated for the purposes of this article, the real shift begins at the end of the golden age of gaming, a period that most of us over 25 want to reclaim when video games were made by studios and companies, not for a pay check but were a labor of love and what made us rabid fans of said companies and loyal consumers, when gaming went mainstream and the market had to shift from specific targeted consumers, to massive scale supply and demand.
This alone is what led to a significant drop in quality of games, why? well it's pretty easy to explain, as i said, mass scale supply and demand, companies who couldn't afford to produce a bad game or a half assed game no longer had that problem, it pays more to market a terrible product to a million people, than it does to market an amazing product to ten thousand people, the overlap is going to be way higher even if the product is terrible to begin with, however is the product is amazing and marketed to a million people this is were the real problem comes to light.
Call of Duty Syndrome.
I fucking LOVE the first CoD's from 1 right up until MW2, i was still a bit blinded as to what happened with MW2 but after looking back on it a few years ago i realized it was what i was talking about with mass scale marketing, most franchise games have a sliding scale, they begin strong, become even stronger, then they release their best product and then it begins to decline, the only problem is it's still selling and making a nice profit and there's no reason to change a model if it's working but this is done at the expense of us the consumer.
Looking back at it, Call of Duty went from fresh and tight fps gaming to what in the fuck is happening why is there double jumping, robots and cybernetic doggos, now thankfully there is a market correction going on as they've realized this wasn't fun for most people and we now have WW2, but even in going back to their roots their bad traits are still rife in the game, kill streaks, perks, inaccuracies and general chicanery, the core game play hasn't really changed, just the aesthetics and some mechanics, as a matter of fact, Call of Duty's innovation in the gaming world stopped at Modern Warfare but continued to make money on the same game for a decade afterwards which is now in basically every shooter you can find on the market.
I wrote an article yesterday about allowing terrible trends in the industry to continue and this is no different games that are basically copies of themselves now flood the markets trying to be the #1 spot, and it is understandable, it is a money market and people have jobs and salaries, but the problem is, take Activision for example, this is slowing right down and saying "hey this market needs some innovation to get started again" instead they're just tripling down on what made them money in the past and it's leading to an exodus.
And most companies are like this nowdays, they will continue to push a market poison onto consumers simply because it made money in the past and without ever learning are starting to break their bottom line, this is usually where micro transactions and DLC's come in to sure it up but even that is starting to fail and unlike 15 years ago, a terrible flagship game that doesn't sell in the hundreds of thousands or millions, can nearly bankrupt a company, especially if a company is smaller than the leaders in the industry.
Paid content and Victimhood culture in the industry.
This is a big one, especially in the indie markets, games are no longer a talking point to the actual game itself, now 90% of the reason a game fails or flops is because of the consumer, or so the companies and the people they pay to write articles would have you believe and as such many gamers have tricked themselves into smiling when they're given a shit sandwich to eat, the victimhood culture of the industry is infuriating because you can't be a fucking victim of someone who is paying you money to insult them, that's just retarded.
However now after the advent of GamerGate we have indie studios who release terrible games claiming the reason they failed is [Insert social problem here] or amazing games that get completely overlooked because of [Insert Anti-SJW problem here] when us the players are left in the middle wondering when our next fix of awesome gaming is coming, but it also leaves the incessant pandering of studios to make games that no one wants, i can fully expect something like "equality quest" to come out before 2020, this is another reason rare games are becoming rarer, they're responding to the most vocal part of the market no matter how small it is and tailoring games to them, even though most of the time, these people don't even play video games to begin with.
A Hero denied his rant.
But this has gone off on a tangent and i haven't given you an overarching reason as to why amazing games that completely change the industry are becoming extinct, a reason that is pretty simple for anyone to figure out, it just doesn't pay to take a chance now, it doesn't pay and it's not worth the time if you fail, and as such this has led to the rise of early access, for a better idea lets look at rust, an amazing game that was created in response to DayZ's continuing failures as an Arma 2 mod.
Rust introduced an amazing concept of a lasting PvP FPS world with building and raiding that was run entirely by the players on the server, and as someone who has 1,100 hours in the game it was fucking successful, what happened afterwards though, not so great, it spawned a myriad of copy cats and i mean myriad in the literal sense "countless or extremely great number of people or things"and suddenly the "PvP survival" genre was dead in about 6 months at most.
This seems to be the way of things however, as when rare gems hit the market they're almost immediately swallowed whole and thrown back out in bastardized versions that add almost nothing to the industry except spark a bidding war in gamers and adding 3 or 4 new things to their version is heralded as an amazing breakthrough in the genre even though in almost all cases they're things that were considered stock standard 10 years ago.
Unfortunately however this is not subject to diminishing returns, now that there is a huge market for this and its growing daily, clones of great games are flooding places like steam and companies are recycling things from industry leaders in an attempt to make it big and have a culture surrounding it that denies criticism and openly pursues adulation, a dangerous thing for a market to have, sadly I don't see this getting better i see it reaching an inevitable point where gamers would leave all together as many of my friends have and haven't returned.
Where do you stand on this? do you think rare games are dying out or are older games like myself not shifting with the times?