The Downward Spiral of Gaming

I’ve stopped buying games that I know won’t keep me playing for hours.  As consumers we vote with our money for which businesses we want to be successful.  We are to blame for terrible games coming out.

We are to blame for the scarcity of epic games being released.  I remember several epic games each year but now I can’t remember a single year where two or more epic games came out in the past five years. Years ago I can remember not having enough cash to afford all of the games that I wanted to play, but in today’s gaming market, I have too much cash and not enough solid games to buy.

Game developers and publishers have learned that our standards for games have dropped.  We’ll feed them $50 or more for a shitty game that offers “bonerific” action where the player only has to hold down the trigger at all times to have fun. Games that have little-to-no single player campaign and that focus entirely on multiplayer. Sequels that only offer better graphics and perhaps a few new features – “Back in my day” we called those expansions, not entirely new games that are full price. Seriously, the bar has dropped.

The worst part about it is that this trend is an unrecoverable downward spiral of gaming as new generations of gamers are introduced to gaming.  They will never know what epic games are.  They think mind-blowing digital eyelash rendering and non-stop action are what makes a game epic instead of days worth of singleplayer campaigns and engaging gameplay instead of a highly scripted movie that you play through. They have become lemmings, going with what is popular, regardless of the game’s actual quality – if their friends are talking about it, their minds will tell them that it is an awesome game, it will be an awesome game to them, and they will blindly buy the game.

On the other hand, perhaps tastes in games have changed in a manner that the new gamers are getting exactly what they want and us old horses are going the way of the past. Perhaps that is the case, but I doubt it. Game developers are doing what makes the most money and currently that trend is the pay to win and pay to be cool pattern. Gamers will buy whichever game is “cool” and they will pay additional money to get them the advantage over the competition on top of what they paid for the game.

Really though, there isn’t much we can do. If the crowds continue to buy the terrible games that are being released, terrible games will continue to be released. Hence the unrecoverable downward spiral. The best we can do is to support the companies that actually make great games and boycott the crappy developers, no matter how much peer pressure tells you to buy the game, and to spread the word about games that are truly epic.

What do you think about the current state and quality of games being released?

Tags: Featured, game developers