The Gaming Industry as I See it.

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I’ve played quite a few games growing up, but I don’t feel that it became a hobby for me until I discovered Halo in 2001. I’ve blogged about it. Gaming was a lot different fourteen years ago than it is today and I can’t quite put my finger why that is. The Internet has provided an outlet for everyone’s opinion (much like this blog) and it’s a lot more popular now than it has ever been. This is evidenced by the scores of gamers consistently yelling at each other and developers about almost anything. Gaming news has grown exponentially, but my realization of this could simply be because I didn’t read much of the gaming news available fourteen years ago. The biggest thing I’ve noticed, however, is the quality of games being made as well as corporate greed rearing its ugly head.

Once upon a time I would purchase every game that I was interested in. This was a time before Gamefly was a thing and before I had bills. I grew accustom to purchasing games before I had any idea how good or bad they might be. This risk was like an expensive version of eating a piece of assorted chocolate not knowing what the taste might do to your body. Certain companies earned my trust because they didn’t release the game version of whatever that chocolate is with the pink crap inside. Game franchises have also made blind purchases easier for me because I’m familiar with their brands and clearly enjoy them. Halo, Mario, Sonic, and Uncharted are just a few examples of that. 

Yet franchises mark the beginning of how different things are now compared to when I started gaming. Every title released in a franchise has the potential to be nothing more than a rough copy and paste of the previous title, only with better graphics. Think of Call of Duty as an example. I don’t care what anyone says, the core experience of that game has been practically the same since Modern Warfare came out and yet people still buy it regardless. They’re selling us the same product and it’s successful because of the title on the box. This reminds me of a quote from Tommy Boy, not word for word, “I could take a crap in a box and slap a guarantee on it if that’s what you want, but all you’re getting there is a guaranteed piece of shit.” That’s exactly how I feel about Call of Duty, each year it’s a piece of shit with the name brand slapped on the box for the comfort of those who don’t want to risk sixty bucks on something that may or may not suck.

Call of Duty epitomizes what can happen to franchises that release games annually. The experience is nearly identical with a fresh coat of polish to make it look nicer. Then they add a difference here and there to make people think they’re getting something totally new and worth another sixty bucks. But it’s a facade. What’s really happening is the quality of these games decrease with every new title. Not every franchise is like this, though, so don’t let me being jaded towards Call of Duty deter you from liking it.

Once the quality goes down in our games it feels like we’re paying a lot more and getting a lot less. Let’s look at Sim City 2013. Its colossal failure at launch was ugly and only proved to the world that corporate greed was at play. First and foremost they wanted us to stay connected to the Internet in order to play it, a primarily single player game. The thought alone of that is annoying enough, but when they did that they must have overlooked the fact that their servers weren’t ready. So they crashed and the game was garbage for however long it was because EA thought they were successfully battling pirates.  Even when it was playable it was a half assed version of what we’ve grown to expect out of a Sim City game. I dumped sixty bucks on this “masterpiece” without thinking because I loved previous city building games and yet it bit me in the ass.

Fast forward to 2014, the year of disappointment in my book. First we have Watch Dogs from a company I trusted to put out good games, Ubisoft. They’ve made some of my favorite franchises, Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, and Far Cry. So when Watch Dogs was rolling its hype train deep into my brain I got really excited. I could write an entire article on why Watch Dogs sucked and how Ubisoft half assed the game. The subpar graphics, mediocre story, and generic gameplay all rolled into one was disheartening. Why can I shoot random people if I want yet I’m unable to punch them in the face? Why the hell can’t I jump! What is going on?

September rolled around and we got Destiny a game developed by my beloved Bungie. The creators of Halo! Destiny was going to be so awesome and then it tanked. It’s very fun to play, but it’s an unfulfilling experience. It lacks a story, period. The story that is present makes you feel like a bunch of it was cut out for whatever god-forsaken reason. After completing the game you find yourself replaying the same missions over and over and over and over and over again in order to level up, earn new gear, level up that gear. It’s a grindfest and it’s my absolute worst nightmare in a game. I felt very betrayed here because I held Bungie up high on an undeserved pedestal because…Halo. They’ve lost that trust.

Finally, and this one is a real doozy for me, Halo The Master Chief Collection. This IS my game. Four games wrapped into one with every single multiplayer intact. Holy shit balls I was ready to relive my Halo 1 and Halo 2 experiences with my friends and it was going to be all I ever needed until I died. That was until the game released and didn’t work for close to FOUR MONTHS. That is completely unacceptable and yet I threw my money at them because not only was it coming from a company I trusted, but also because I’ve played all four of those games on the previous two generations of Xbox and they worked just fine. Again, I can write forever on this subject and have even posted on article on it already.

Ubisoft finished up my year with three games that not only burned the bridge of trust I’ve had with them, but helped me lose faith altogether. Assassin’s Creed Unity had its massive hiccups as well as The Crew. Far Car 4 is a fantastic experience if you wanted to relive the exact same experience you had in Far Cry 3. Well, minus the good story in Far Cry 3 and in the mountains instead of an island.

So what we have here is a list of games that came out in the past two years that have been broken upon release, had a lack of content, or simply sucked. I know it’s happened in the past and perhaps having social media and gaming news constantly at my finger tips pushes these items up on the list of what is and isn’t important, but part of me finds it truly odd that all of this happened in the past year and I haven’t even mentioned the flop that was Drive Club. The thing that truly baffles me about this, though, is that more and more big companies are spending loads of money on their games and yet here we are getting less in return. Destiny cost half a billion dollars to make and the amount of content within its universe is abysmally small. You’d think with larger production costs that we’d at least see better quality in our games. I don’t need a game that is busting at the seams with content if more than half of that content is simple fluff, but I do expect a certain standard of quality. Hell I expect the game I purchased to actually work *cough* Halo *cough*.

Console games haven’t always had the luxury of patching their titles as games on PC have. It wasn’t until the last generation that this became a thing and we would see all sorts of titles forcing day one patches. That’s because it gives them a bit of extra time to finish the game. But what’s the rush? Why not pretend like it’s ten years ago when you had to make sure your game was as perfect as it could be because you wouldn’t get a chance to fix it? It’s because gaming is a billion dollar industry and the faster you push games out the door the faster a brother gets paaaaaaid. I believe that since gaming has grown into a huge money making business that corporate greed has begun to settle and tearing away the quality that use to come in a game and replacing it with useless content (fluff) that’s safe.

It reared its ugly face, for me anyway, with companies like EA forcing people to buy online passes if people who bought used copies wanted to play their game online. It seems weird to me. Someone bought that new copy of the game so it isn’t like there are two different people somehow playing the same copy simultaneously from different locations. That one purchase still shows up as one person online.  Well obviously used games are killing development studios, right? I don’t think so. It’s when distributors like Gamestop try selling you a used copy for five bucks cheaper than a brand new copy only a week after the game came out that I think hurts the industry, but I digress.

Downloadable content (DLC) has become a big issue over the past decade. I remember a time it was a labor of love where the developers of our favorite games gave us the chance to play more content. PC gamers are familiar with this stuff in the form of expansion packs to their favorite games. Unlike expansion packs, which came with a lot more content, presumably, DLC was hashed out in smaller doses. Here are five maps for Halo 2 at the low price of ten bucks.  Sweet deal, and we bought it because we wanted to and the developers made it because they wanted to. Sure they could easily make some extra scratch, but that isn’t the only reason they did it. As time progressed the cost of DLC rose. Five bucks for this, ten bucks, and now fifteen dollars. While some of it is well worth the money, it soon began to look like a desperate grab for some extra cash. Finally it seemed that every game was doing it.

Then DLC grew into a model I really have distaste for. Season passes. At first I thought this idea was brilliant, I could pay ahead of time and simply get all the DLC. Whoo! But I’ve soon realized that paying early for content makes it so the developer could release a steaming pile of shit (guaranteed) because I’ve already given them my non-refundable money. What am I to do then? They can give the three DLC packs as promised, but there isn’t a guarantee on how much content there will be nor the quality of that content. We’re basically just throwing our money into their pockets and hoping that they provide a worthwhile experience. We’re showing them good faith by paying for something that isn’t here yet and it’s disgusting. It’s gotten to the point where season passes are being sold before the fucking game is even out! Batman Arkham Knight is currently selling fans a forty-dollar season pass for their unreleased title. Disgusting.

All of this stuff is designed to milk the games we’re buying for as much money as these developers and publishers can get out of them. While at the same time we aren’t seeing anything new. Sure we get a few new IPs here and there but how often do they sell well? The Last of Us did great, but that title fits under the trust we have for Naughty Dog, which has provided very successful games in the past. But what about games like Kingdoms of Amalur, developed by 38 Studios? That game wasn’t all so terrible and yet the studio went bankrupt. Why is that? Well this whole business model is terrified of that very thing happening. These companies spend millions of dollars developing a game and they don’t know how well it will sell. They don’t know because gamers themselves are scared. Every time we spend sixty bucks we are risking our hard earned money on something that, for most people, is expensive.

So what this boils down to is gamers purchasing things that they are comfortable with. Call of Duty 14, Halo 10, Tomb Raider 12, whatever. That’s why franchises like Assassin’s Creed are releasing games every damn year because it’s usually a safe bet for gamers. So these companies doing that wind up making loads of cash while selling you the same damn thing over and over again and never truly providing something fresh and new. On top of that they sell you DLC to keep you playing that game so you won’t take it back to Gamestop after three days to get something else. It’s DLC that has been in production before the actual game has even released. Hell, this DLC may have been stuff that was taken from the original game and then sold to you for additional money.

Sidebar: The attention span of gamers these days is ridiculous. Gamers rarely finish their games and often times when they buy a brand new title, it’s being traded in for something new a week later. What in the holy hell people? Am I the only person who likes to see most of his games all the way through to completion?

So all of this stuff to milk games on top of many games being rehashed or unimagined versions of what they should be has really lowered the quality of games where as ten years ago we were getting twice the content and quality. It’s because they don’t care as much about their games anymore as they use to. Developing a game use to be a labor of love while now it seems to be a massive cash grab. Who cares if the game sucks as long as we make a profit from it and we can do that by hyping up the game and making look like something it isn’t. Who cares if the game is broken, it’s got Halo in the title and we can just fix it in four months and forget about in favor of the next game we’re going to release. There is no integrity I tell you.

But there is light during these dark times. Indie games are the way of the future and after the last AAA studio has fallen to their own greed (will never happen), Indie games will be right there trucking along. The production cost is a lot lower and this allows them the creative freedom to try new and exciting things. Since the production cost is lower they can sell their games for cheaper meaning more gamers may be willing to take a risk. I recently had the pleasure to spend 12 hours playing through Ori and the Blind Forest and I can tell you that I got more from that 12 hour experience than I ever did with the forty plus hours I put into Destiny. 20 dollars worth of game valued my time more than a 60-dollar game did. I know there are probably crappier indie games out there on the market, but that’s because they can afford to be shitty. They’re at least trying new things rather than rehashing the same experiences we’ve been “enjoying” over and over in other popular titles.

I’m now realizing that this whole article is nothing but a giant rant, but I’ll try to sum things up here and end it. I’ve lost my trust in the companies that make games for me to play. I feel that they lack any real effort in the games they release so that they can produce them faster and milk the fans for additional money on DLC. As a result we’ve seen crappier quality in our games than we used to. I feel that indie development is the way of the future. Regardless, I’ve made it so I won’t pre-order games anymore, no matter how much I like being able to pre-download them and play them at ten the night before release. What’s the point of me showing good faith to a company that may not even deliver a functioning game? I only buy DLC when it’s on sale and if it’s for a game that I really enjoyed.

Seriously. Trust will take you a long way. You may be able to fool the idiots out there or the rich people who don’t care, but I’m hoping with all of my heart that gamers unite and force corporate greed out of the picture. Make games because you love games; don’t make games because you want a fat check. Have some integrity and earn that fat check the way you’re supposed to. Great quality products WILL make money. Okay, the end. Mad props if you read this whole thing. Rant over.