New Games Suck... Or Is It Just Me?

Can't wait for GTA6, that one should be extremely fun for this thread.

My point is that gaming as a business fundamentally hasn't changed much. Some business model changed slightly over the years, but not the core.

Before dlc we had "expansion packs". We had live service models since Ultima online. And large numbers of commercial creators (including mangaka and novelists) ruin story continuity for their profit too. If we want to discuss how Corporate "ruins" games as art medium then the history goes even way back.

Did cartridge or disc games have expansion packs (bonus game content, stuff like the star fox 64 expansion pack doesnt count)? This only started to became a thing when data was stored locally and could be altered.

I see Nynja wasn't a PC gamer in the 90s ;p.

On PC expansion packs existed way back in DOS era I think, you can find titles like "Tony La Russia Baseball II: Player's Expansion Disk" released way back in 1993 on the internet.

But yeah, I don't think it was a thing on consoles back then. It was part of my childhood memory to purchase all that expansion packs for 90s RTS games on the PC. I guess console gamers didn't experienced that in the 90s.

Sonic and Knuckles was released in 1994 and is literally an expansion cartridge (DLC) for Sonic 3

Designed as one game and split into two for profit.

It also works on Sonic 2, 1992. And if you add Sonic 1 to it, it adds a DLC to Sonic and Knuckles.

you dont need to go that far back, StarCraft had expansions in 1998. here is this bit from the wiki article on brood war

The sentiment that expansions were cash grabs was already brewing as that quote shows that even when brood war landed it was already being compared against its contemporaries the "uninspired extras"

StarCraft's expansion only followed the path of other classic RTS released before it: Command and conquer, warcraft II, Red alert, Total Annihilation etc.

They ALL had expansions. It was a strategy game tradition to release expansion packs back then.

Saw this pic and remembered your post lol

So in early game development for games like the Ultima series or other early games, the corporate side of the company was usually also the creator of the game itself.

I haven't researched the video game crash of 1983 in depth, but I've heard about it plenty. Common thread being they saturated the market with slop when little demand for the slop existed. Nintendo then overcame that by marketing the NES as a family console.

Coming off the heels of that, and also just due to the nature of the work at the time, there wasn't as big of a split between corporate and creators. And they had aligned values in both wanting the games to be good and for the games to appeal in specific ways to specific people.

Flashback to Ultima, right, and Richard Garriott started that in 1981. His series was on Apple II primarily, and it appealed to a certain type of PC gamer. It had his vision though, and he put things into it like the "Possessed Children" room. It made him wealthy enough to build his own eccentric fantasy themed mansion.

And his company ran into monetary issues often enough, but their only solution was to build a better game and expand how they did things.

You look at his company and other gaming companies, and there's this trend from the 80s into the 90s into the early 2000s where the success burgeons and blooms. Making the billion dollar industry that gaming is today. At some point, either the companies die out or become so large that corporate becomes separate from the creators. In some cases, the creators don't even get a seat in the board room.

His particular company was bought by EA in 1992 for $35 million. It then expanded and made an MMO. Its last major title around 1999/2000 and beyond that was maintenance mode for Ultima Online. EA killed it in 2004, a corporate decision.

So back to why 2001. Well that was a deliberate dig by me at the Square Enix merger. Square's corporate branch was notoriously bad with finances, and they were discussing merging with Enix even before Spirits Within bombed at the box office. In fact, Enix almost pulled out of the merger because of how bad that movie bombed, when previously they'd bribed for the merger because it would be easier to merge still than to just buy Square outright. Either way and particulars aside, after the merger the way staff and creatives both were treated/reacted was to either be moved, removed, or quit. The merge actually happened officially in 2003 but had been on the table since 2000. Spirits Within bombed in 2001. With no capital to negotiate with, Square had to lay all of their IPs on the table and give control of them over to Enix as well as the direction for the company. Really less a merger and more a Enix putting its fist up a Square puppet's ***.

The same year that Spirits Within bombed, in November, in fact, 23 years ago on this Friday, the Xbox was released by Microsoft. They made the Xbox as a business decision because consoles had become so popular that they believed consoles might overtake PCs as a primary entertainment device threatening their main item of sale. The first efforts and games going on Xbox were given a high amount of care and they brought on teams like Bungie for its launch with its flagship title, Halo. These great games lead to lots of smear campaigns against eastern gaming companies, with each year after, Microsoft grew more and more complacent about it.

By the time the Xbox 360 came out in November 2005 they had made Xbox influential around the world, and so they were able to sell the 360 in more countries than any other console at the time. Though I don't think it had the highest sales numbers total, it was still quite influential. Among its influence was Xbox Live which pushed and swindled for always online to be the next big thing by diverting more and more games to require Xbox Live Gold.

Seeing that Xbox could get away with this, the other console companies started to also turn away from free online service, though that would take a few more years.

And the bestsellers on the 360 were First Person Shooters which really hammered in microtransactions and literally the same game with a different name and campaign over and over again in quick succession, back to back, with little to no innovation.

You could argue that Microsoft actually used the success of Xbox to sabotage the console market with slop, turning players back towards PC and PC oriented gaming, something that may have happened naturally but taken twice as long otherwise.

And they were doing this on a worldwide scale by 2006.

But a consequence of that influence and that direction was they also lowered the bar for who could and would be working on games. They lowered the bar for what constituted a "good" game.

Marketing efforts go towards a wider audience. Games for everyone! With the next Xbox literally pushing for always online, which got pushback at the time, but they ultimately succeeded in pushing it onto consumers. And they did that, because they wanted to get more money, pushing to get rid of split screen shared gaming requiring each player to have their own Xbox if they wanted to play together. Not a universal even now, but so prevalent it might as well be. So prevalent, in fact, that a good portion of the youth hate splitscreen games because they're used to having the whole screen to themselves.

All corporate policy that didn't have quality gaming in mind, just profits.

It was never an all at once thing, and sure there's always been corporate interest in games that have made some game series more successful than others, but overtime and overall Suits in a board room with no connection to creation have been bad for gaming.

My eyeeeeesssss!

I aint reading all that

Heres an eyeball cleanser:

You ***!

That's just how the market is as consumer's standard gets higher.

If you are a creator in 1980, spent a few months creating a game as solo dev, you have a chance to become Richard Garriott. Because the game quality standard was low at that time.

But if you are a creator in 1990-2010, spent a few months creating a game as solo dev, your stuff aren't going to compete in the market. So at one point the creators have to work with investor's money so their stuff can be made with commercial standard. The investors became part of the creation.

That also means those people who invested money in the project wants to get something out of their money and creators must compromise for the need of every party. Otherwise nothing gets done.

I know that in 2012-2018 there was a strong growth in solo dev/small team market again. Games like To the moon, Undertale, Stardew Valley are solo dev projects that became a hit. But I feel the golden era of solo dev has ended already. Even indie market gets so saturated that most non-hentai commercial indie teams need funding for competitive quality one way or another.

To me it's not corporate "ruined" gaming. It's more like creators compromised and worked with the investors so their vision can be made. In the process something has to be sacrificed to ensure the project doesn't die.

Creators always had the choice to work without investors. But the market doesn't favor low budget games. They choose higher budget ones. So what you see is what has survived the market.

Also....Richard Garriott always have the choice to keep Ultima as his IP, but he chose money over Ultima. Why is that corporate "ruined" gaming if it's Richard Garriott's choice alone?

If you don't like how it is, maybe buy more games by small teams on Steam to support them. Don't buy anymore AA-AAA games, nor AA indie games with a big team. So low budget game market will grow and we can see more of games made by small teams with unaltered creator's vision.

Until that has happened, money will forever be a very important part in game dev process.

I would say that MS entered the console game market is one of the best thing that could happen in 2000s if you look at things from a wider perspective.

1) The most noticable difference is game companies FINALLY localize their games to more regions. In Japanese console era most games are either Japanese or English. Sucks for people who don't understand either language.

MS is the first console company that put significant amount of effort on localization and expanding game market to different regions. This drastically changed console game market in those regions.

So more players can enjoy console games when they couldn't in the 90s. This is a very good thing to me.


2) Xbox 360 was the console that started indie game bloom happened in 2011 and later, which lead to more unique games being made later on. Frameworks like xna published by MS allowed smaller dev make their own game for Xbox 360. That gave solo dev more chance to enter this market that was previously closed in Sony/Nintendo/Sega era.

Btw, Stardew valley was made with XNA frameworks.

Of course later on indie market grew even bigger because Valve allowed indie dev to sell games on steam, and other better engines like Unity became popular. But I would argue that Xbox 360 started all of these before valve/unity see the market potential and get themselves involved. Xbox 360/xbox market place/XNA pretty much paved the way for indie game industry today.

From this perspective, I would say Xbox 360 brings more positive than negative imo, IF negatives even exist.


And why would you even hate that? The more people work on games, the more titles we get in the market. And some of them gonna be creative ones.

We don't need anymore 90s era when only small amount of dev can enter console market while paying tons of licensing fee to Sony and Nintendo. THAT was bad for the market and the consumers.

This is why we are eliminating the department of education.

Afania isnt american tho.


Also I seen the Ubisoft rendition of 2B from last year. Yikes dawg.

https://youtu.be/WQW0t-fV620?si=QSQnY7xKwpAE4_rN

Thats 100% a man in a dress lol

Cringe. :(

Even if I am they still got the wrong target =.=. I am not a left wing socialist. Left wings are the target of American department of education elimination, not I....=.=

I think there's invisible tug-of-war that pushes and pulls back and forth. One side wants to deliver a great game for an audience. The other side ...is the relentless demands of capitalism to create more and more profit and value for shareholders. If Executives were told they could increase profit by 20% if people just gamers injected physical media into their veins...they would do it. The executives would do it SO fast, and make you feel bad if you chose not to do it.

On a smaller scale, modern games are great looking, but the depth of gameplay is somewhat shallow when you compare them to games of previous generations. I think that's another way they improve their bottom line. Why build chess when people are paying for (and playing) checkers? If that player base diminishes, give them candy land...simple, easy, not very thought-provoking and less depth than what we had in say, the PS2-era.

This reminds me of a post by Katsuhiro Harada, and how he fought as a rebel to keep Tekken alive (compared to Bamco's other fighting game IP: Soul Calibur). It's a good read & gives some insight into the corporat vs creatives tug of war.

https://x.com/Harada_TEKKEN/status/1805489285875089826

I was having this discussion a few days ago about completely different industries and the same thing applies here. It's widespread across a lot of industries.

It's also not just companies at fault, it's the general publics willingness to buy a shitty product, read something saying shitty product isn't actually shitty, and accept said shitty product. In some cases then go and defend shitty product to people calling it shitty despite having a lot of problems themselves. I know one guy who owned a bunch of cycling components from a brand with a lot of known QC issues, but he's more than happy to tell you how great that brand is despite the fact he keeps a spare on hand because his primary one fails so frequently.

We were discussing it in terms of product publications doing reviews in major magazine publications, where they review products higher that give them better affiliate link agreements. Their drive to make more money for their employer/publication pushes them to review products higher that they can make money off of, compromising their integrity to get paid, meanwhile most consumers are oblivious that the review they read is nonsense. You see the same *** in YouTube "reviews" for a lot of products. In my industry, companies have been sold shitty products and services for years that can't possibly achieve what they claim, but they scale well or development is easier when you do a shitty job, so they make claims they know the customer can't verify then the customer can just offload risk to them and, between that and not being able to know/verify, they just accept it and continue to pay for it. It's created this race to the bottom where people think they can get real work done for a fraction of the cost, but then can't justify more in the budget because they write off the whole industry as not working ("How can I pay more when what I got isn't working?") and do the bare minimum. In his industry, a common question is "why would I pay $300 for yours when I can buy something for $50 on Amazon that says it does the same thing?" when, in fact, it does not and is a safety hazard. The average consumer is too stupid and/or we've been flooded with too many false claims about shitty products. In the context of games, as you put it, why design and develop chess when you can sell someone checkers and convince them it's 4d chess, then they'll gladly buy it.

We struggle with this as a business also. How do we not compromise our own integrity and still provide products/services that actually make a difference and work, but in the words of another friend, "I gotta eat". The challenge becomes selling something people don't want, they just want the façade of it being the way that it should and think anything else is overpriced. Even if they do care enough, it's hard to sell something that cost 10x as much when you tell them the same things the other folks said and the customer isn't as knowledgable to see through it. In their defense, why should they? Shouldn't they be able to trust the experts who say "this is how it should be done" or "this product is great"? Not everyone can know everything and, even as a consumer myself, it's frustrating wading through the *** reviews, the actual reviews, and deciphering what the best thing is especially when there is soo much ***out there.

Point being, people still buy shitty products and that's the problem. Either they are too dumb to know, too cheap to pay for better, or they don't have the background to make a decision. In the context of gaming, I think modern games provide enough escapism for the average player that they don't really put as much thought into the depth of it and game developers know they don't have to cater to the audience looking for that depth, they just have to "convince" journalists to promote the product, a community of people will form around it to defend its flaws, and in the end they ease their development costs, the flip side being if a studio of that size were to develop it to the standards of older titles then the price would be so high, people wouldn't buy it.

tldr;

advertising and manufactured approval are cheaper than quality

Never blame the the people who sell, they have to do whatever it takes not to starve to death.

Blame the idiots who buy it.

I think when it comes to depth it really really depends on the genre. 4x games (like Europa Universalis) are pretty deep and there is still an audience for it. Europa Universalis IV has over 87k reviews on steam.

Other deep games includes simulation, strategy, base building and management. Another good and popular example is Factorio. Currently it has 156k overwhelming positive reviews.

And vice versa: the kind of game that isn't all that deep is generally narrative focused game. You sit there, watch cutscenes/dialogues/interactive movie and enjoy the story. After you finished the story you move on with life.


I think a lot of "AAA games" are moving towards narrative focused direction since the Last of Us and Uncharted 4 (Uncharted 4 is basically interactive movie to me). Then you see more and more other games like FF16 or God of War moves toward this direction.

So if you ever focus on AAA release, and only want deep games, then you may be disappointed. Because AAA interactive story games has completely different target audience from deep and complicated games like Europa Universalis IV or even crpg.

That doesn't mean "chess like" games are gone. They are still there on Steam, kicking and alive. People who are really into chess-like games still buys them. And people who are buying 4d checkers probably don't want to play chess to begin with.

Nor I think different design direction/target audience has anything to do with quality itself.

Buyer beware for sure, but you can still hold sellers accountable for not meeting quality standards. Otherwise there is no incentive to do anything but the minimum required.

Looking in retrospective, 2024 was a year with quite an amount of good games being released.

We should be grateful this year was this good.

That's capitalism. Do the absolute minimum to extract maximum profit.


As with all things, we focus on the negative. 10 games of varying quality come out, we play them, we watch them, they fade away. But the failures, we remember forever. We inherently focus on the negative and all the media knows negativity drives engagement.

This pretty much sums up why this thread even exist lol.

I can legitimately name a lot of overwhelming positive reviewed games from every single year, not just 2024. But would you go play them?

It's why when you're laying there at night and your brain isn't ready for bed it reminds you of that time your waiter said "enjoy your meal" and you said "you too".

Or you said "thanks mom" to your teacher in front of class.

It's how were wired.

Apparently complaining about games is more fun than playing games I guess......

Brb playing games. My backlog just reached all time high of 42 yesterday, and I personally enjoyed at least 85% of games that I purchased. I think I am about to become one of these people who only plays 1/10 of Steam Library because I bought too many games...