Game Studios Are Turning Play into Work

That second link is particularly damning. It sounds like the rat race of working for a boss with unrealistic expectations.. but for kids. I'm shocked there isn't a bigger reaction to 12 year olds being set up to be put into positions where they get called an "underage sex doll" and can't say anything. As I hear many repeat nowadays-- I'm glad I'm not growing up in today's world. I may have had to worry about getting scammed on runescape(the biggest social game during my day), but that was about it.

Remember how grindy world of Warcraft used to be?

I mean it’s still grindy but remember how much worse it was?

Well let me tell you a secret: when it came out in 2004 people were talking about how it was turning MMOs into very casual play because of how little grind there is compared to EQ and others.

Games were always work. Not all of them, of course, but this isn’t a new thing. It’s just that there are genres of games that are better suited to the grind; they come and go.

I basically buy mobile stuff that have a retro gaming feeling and don't take GB of space.

But there are so many good games that have none of this bullshit. Check out Hades. It is so fun. And it is self-contained. The dev doesn’t even have interest in making an expansion despite demand because they made a fun, complete game and they’re done.

There are lots of games outside the pay-to-play arena, even AAA ones. The Playstation Spider-Man games are another great example.

Unless those get support, they may actually disappear.

Games aren’t a monolith in this respect. There are loads that don’t do this sort of thing at all.

What sort of games do you enjoy playing?

> Now, games are filled with pay-items which I guess some people enjoy, but it leads to not a lot of fun in some cases. For example, some games sell tokens that you can convert to in-game money. That essentially translates into a boring grind for 100 hours or pay X amount to skip that by getting enough money to buy the items you need to skip that content.

You are not looking in the right places, there are more great games coming out now than ever. Try Inscryption or Outer Wilds.

> I haven't bought a new game since 2016, and I'll never support the gaming industry ever again :)

Oh, come on… While there may be a lot of games trying strange monetization strategies, the majority of the industry is still great.

So many amazing and innovative games have come out in the last 5 years. Breath of the Wild, Half Life Alyx, Valheim, and countless others.

Gaming is the largest entertainment industry. Larger than movies and TV. You can’t just write it off because of a few bad eggs, there’s too much to miss.

Prior to Covid we had a strict “no free games” rule in my house because the free games were the ones with advertising schemes or paid items in them.

During Covid it became impossible to avoid the likes of Fortnite and Roblox so that my kids could still play with their friends. Not sure how to put the genie back in the bottle at this point.

Would love to hear someone narrow down the era "when games were fun".

It wasn't the 1970s and 1980s. Arcade games were designed to extract quarters from consumers. They were brutal. They heavily influenced game design for home systems, for years, so you'd expect games for the Nintendo Entertainment System to act like they're trying to extract quarters from you.

In the 1990s this should have been gone, but there are games like The Lion King (1994, SNES / Genesis) which...

> Disney actually told the developers to make the game so difficult that people wouldn't be able to beat it during a rental period.

After years of not playing a single game I picked up a Nintendo Switch a few months back and every title I have played is great. I’ve been playing Mario Odyssey for more than a month and it’s still a fantastic game to pickup and run around in for 15-30 minutes. Loved Link’s Awakening as well.

But at the same time, the non-AAA part of the industry is thriving. The amount of creative, original(!), quality games out there by 1-10 people teams is absolutely amazing. I'd go so far as to say that we're actually in the golden age of gaming. I for one blame nothing except my lack of time and energy.

If you’re open to a recommendation from someone who holds a similar outlook towards today’s games, Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch was one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. I recommend coop with a less gaming-inclined partner.

For what it's worth, I lost 2 weeks of my life to Metroid Dread on the Nintendo Switch. It's a 2D side scrolling action/adventure/platforming game that I enjoyed and not once did I have to deal with pay mechanics. Two years ago I played Breath of Wild (Zelda game) and again did not deal with pay mechanics.

There are plenty brand new AAA games and were of great fun to me!

Plenty of games without pay-to-play. Here are my favorites:

Indies: Celeste, Hob, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Factorio, Tesla vs Lovecraft

AAA: Returnal, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, Civilization, Nier: Automata

Just don't play anything from Ubisoft.

These days I only usually play old games and indie games. I heavily favour short single-player games, and find myself quickly irritated by repetition and filler content. I know there's a lot of people–particularly younger folks and those with less disposable income–that demand sprawling worlds and play times in the triple digit hours, and all this micro-transaction shit is ultimately in service of supporting the huge budgets those games demand. I'm so far past that now though; when I look at the Battle Pass screens for Warzone or Halo Infinite, I imagine it's how my grandparents felt when they tried to use a computer. Just utter bewilderment.

Part of it is having less time to play due to general adult life things, the rest is just having other stuff I want to do, be it other games or different hobbies entirely, but I would much rather spend my money on a polished 2-6 hour experience, especially if that means the teams working on it actually get to go home and see their families instead of crunching half to death.

I'm on the same boat: haven't bought AAA in years but am happy to spend thousands of dollars on indies. It's not just that AAA companies are awful, but the games they've been making are the same old stuff from 15 years ago. Sometimes lacking even the most basic polish.

This comment encapsulates what confuses me about commentary on the way videogames have evolved. I fully understand and support the idea that monetization has had a negative affect on many games. But the idea that "games aren't fun" to the point that you haven't bought a new game is beyond lunacy. I've continued to buy videogames over the last half decade, and haven't spent a single dime it had my experience compromised even remotely by any of these trends. They're insanely easy to avoid and still have access to a wide variety of high-quality games.

The level of moaning about how the very concept of gaming is ruined due to what some games are doing just reads as people who enjoy being miserable manufacturing something to complain about.

Nintendo still hits home runs in game design so don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

this is why i've grown to like fighting games, shmups and other arcade style genres so much. there is little to no padding between you and the core of the game and by extension, the most exciting elements.

There are so many games that are still fun, even for people who don't define fun as grinding away at a Battle Pass (which some people do indeed enjoy)

In the single player narrative space you have any Sony first party exclusive, along with games like RDR2 / Prey / Outer Wilds / Witcher 3 / Yakuza 0 / Disco Elysium / MGS: V.

For less narrative heavy single player games you have any Nintendo first party exclusive, along with games like Factorio / Hades / Rimworld / Carrion / Hollow Knight / Ori 1 and 2 / Stardew Valley.

And these are just the games I personally enjoy off the top of my head since 2016. I'm sure there's many I'm forgetting, along with many which aren't for me but might be for others.

The top level of games like CoD, Battlefield, Apex, and pretty much any Ubisoft game are MTX riddled Skinner boxes alright, but there are so many great single player MTX free games out there right now.

> I miss when games were for fun.

Recently I completed Outer Wilds (note not Outer Worlds), and also Incsription. Both amazing games I will always recommend playing to anyone.

Indie games are not corrupted as mass production AAA production run like a late stage capitalism corporations, who quite literally add cocaine to their game if they could. Companies run by people who never played games, dont like them, don't understand them have very low chance of creating something good.

There are good AAA games out there that are not exploitative, Marvels Guardians of Galaxy - everyone thought it will be awful ended up being great, God of War games, Ghost of Tsushima.

That said there are a LOT of exploitative games that child or teen should not play if they have any tendencies that can be exploited.

The indie world is full of great games with no paid content and if there are expansions, they are worth the money. I'm a gamer and I play on average one AAA every few years, rest of the time is indie only. I agree AAA is not sustainable, especially because the stuff delivered on average has a way worse gameplay than good indie games.

And by the way, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind forest (and the will of the wisps) is a slap in the faces of AAA games. Beautiful, amazing to play and in the case of hollow knight, really intriguing story.

I'm pretty sure that NFTs are just money laundering schemes.

My guess is most of these big dollar NFT stories are fake. People are making the claims or buying from themselves to attract attention so they can sell NFTs at big amounts to suckers

That's an optimistic take.

A more cynical take would be that content is expensive to create, and if players could just buy it, they wouldn't spend time playing the game. And if they stop playing the game, they stop paying for a subscription. Without something to "work" for, players would stop paying.

Which makes the title of this article ironic to me. As if game studios didn't invent grind decades ago. They turned "play into work" a long, long time ago. Gold sellers completed the cycle and enabled people to actually live off it.

I'll never forget spending like five bucks on the Real Money Auction House in Diablo III, only for it to completely ruin the enjoyment I was getting out of the game at the time. every weapon I'd find was substantially worse than the sword I spent a few bucks on. these things seem like a good idea at the time, but...

>spending $1000 on some gold/items/runs is not particularly impressive or notable.

It's specifically the real money investment too. I bought some Challenge runs back in my WoW days, but with Gold that I had earned playing the auction house. Didn't feel an less earned, just a different challenge. I imagine it would feel different doing so today with the solid wall between AH and Cash shop partially dissolved.

> The only saving grace is that the industry is growing so fast, there’s so much diversity, that there are also lots of games that don’t do this.

This brings up a very good point. There are alternate options now. We won't after the industry inevitably consolidates.

I agree with your thesis, and I dislike the direction the gaming industry at large is taking.

At the same time, it's hard to see where lines are drawn. The only thing that really separates 'Engagement' from 'grinding' is whether or not you enjoy doing it.

While I take a lot of time in considering what games are worth my time, and have a positive "feedback loop" that will leave me feeling satisfied rather than burnt out, I also have to ask myself what "genuine play" really does mean. We can point out the behavioural strategies devs use for reinforcing more play-time, but outside of the question of perverse incentives like NFT's, paid lootboxes and pay2win microtransactions, a game needs to feel rewarding in order to be played. Some just have this reward cycle more ouvert than others.

IMHO games are slowly becoming simply colorful Skinner boxes. I think we've always kinda walked the thin line between fun and exploitation, it was always a fragile balance, which now has tipped over to the exploitation side. If people accept it (and actually enjoy it) then there is basically no reason for companies not to do it. I guess an indie dev creates games for fun and art, especially in the beginning, but a job is a job and if it pays better, then why not? I wish gamers would move away from this and value more the subjective characteristics of fun and beauty, etc. but the truth is that we can't really control that.

It seems to be pretty harsh to call Animal Crossing toxic. Do you also call Minecraft toxic? I call Micecraft animated legos. I wouldn't call Legos toxic. Not sure why these games are considered toxic.

For me the games that push my "this game is too addictive" button are like simple solitaire (https://www.google.com/search?q=solitaire). For whatever reason I feel compelled to clear all the cards. If I can't I'll start another round. More than once I stay up 90 minutes past my bedtime playing. And even when I do clear all the cards I'll tell myself "just once more" and then it's another 45 minutes until I get lucky into to clear every card.

There's other similar games like Fun Towers (not sure it's real name) but they create the same itch. In the one I played recently you have a time limit to clear all the cards, plus the added challenge of what order your draw pile and stacks are. Every time I play I want to clear the stacks but doing so both in getting lucky about the cards, and doing it before my time runs out, don't know what it is but again I can easily lose 1-2 hrs

Basically I just don't play those games. But there's nothing really special the developer has done. Solitaire is the same with a deck of cards and has been for 200+ years.

I think this is just looking back with rose tinted glasses and assuming things have changed.

The game was always a rat race. As soon as you dug out of debt, your landlord would upgrade your house and you had an even bigger mortgage. That was in the original.

That said, the game is fun. Humans like feeling accomplished.

Nintendo is increasingly dipping their toes into gacha-style games on mobile, with Fire Emblem Heroes being the most prominent example. I worry that once they get a taste of the money these games generate the same mechanics will seep into their console offerings.

If you haven't tried Overcooked (1 and 2), it is definitely a game to get into. Good fun for the whole family and has only light mechanical elements with mostly puzzle/working together as a team being the focus.

That seems like a win-win -- it separates the XP-chasers from the "play for fun" cohort, so they don't annoy each other.

I have a lot of friends who play almost exclusively shooters and this kind of stuff is what's put me off of the genre. I really miss back when you could get a copy of unreal tournament or half life deathmatch and just drop in w/ all the guns unlocked and available and just rampage.

I know it's a different genre completely from the more realistic shooters like Battlefield and Call of Duty, but even still I miss the unfettered drop-in fun in those older games and there seem to be hardly any left.

XP gates weapons and equipment in the base game. You are literally not getting to do all the fun stuff if you don't grind some.

I think this is a result of adults making up a much larger share of gamers and profits to gaming companies.

I've noticed myself doing this and I can pause it if I try but I don't think I can turn it off. Playing games as a kid, it was all about exploration and doing fun things. I didn't beat many games but I played a lot of them. As an adult, I need to be setting goals and earning achievements. There always needs to be something I'm working towards.

It's fun planning/achieving at first but after a few weeks it just feels like i've given myself another job then i get burnt out and reset.

I haven't played battlefield 2042. I bet you're right that portal mode is fun but I'm willing to bet if I was to play I would probably start to express the same sentiment that there's no point in playing portal mode if it doesn't help me progress in the game. It's stupid and I have a hard time admitting it but it's true.

Sometimes I wish I could just enjoy a game for what it is and not be thinking about "what next?" or "what does this accomplish?". I think its just because we're adults (and probably because we have fully developed prefrontal cortexes?)

This is pretty close to ruining multiplayer in Halo Infinite, too. They totally botched the rewards system (it's really, really bad), so everyone is complaining about that. But the core gameplay is actually really great, among the best in the series. If the stupid, tacked-on reward crap wasn't there, everyone would just be enjoying a fantastic online shooter. Instead most of the buzz around the game has been negative because of their terrible rewards system. But it's hard to argue with Fortnite's success, hence all the braindead clones.

>If you read the forums or subreddit you'll see people claim to enjoy Portal mode, but also say things like "what's the point in playing Portal if you can't earn XP". It's an attitude I don't understand at all - the point in playing Portal is that it's a lot of fun! But most of the community seems to disagree with me and as a result Portal mode is empty.

I have a strong preference for rougelites over rougelikes because the former includes a meta-game progression. It includes a sort of XP that makes me enjoy the game loop more, even though the fun from the actual game loop would in theory be equal regardless of some sort of meta-progression.

I also enjoy fighting games with RPG mechanics over those without, once again because there is a meta progression system. It isn't just a matter of getting better, because you'll end up facing harder enemies who also are now better and the skill doesn't change.

I think these concepts are related to what you mention. Even RPGs in general have this sort of progression across a long span of playing that adds value to a game beyond what the minute to minute gameplay offers, despite enemies getting stronger and the net gameplay not really changing. When I play Diablo style ARPGs, same thing. I get stronger, but so do the enemies, and the gameplay remains much the same but I wouldn't play the game if it didn't have what I'll call potentially pointless progression.

I also think it is interesting to measure potentially pointless progression that becomes so pointless it harms player experience. Possible examples, and I say possible because the threshold changes per person, are Elder Scrolls games, especially Oblivion, and FF VIII. Both games are some flavor of RPG where enemies get stronger as you get stronger. Not enemies in new locations and often not even new enemies. You level up, the enemy you were just fighting also have gotten stronger. With a good build and knowing the system you can ensure your own level curve is higher and thus a real power difference happens that matches more classical RPGs, but it is also possible for those not min maxing to become overpowered by enemies. This factors into my fun even though it has little direct impact on my minute by minute gameplay (at least until one side really overpowers the other).

Video games have always had this sort of progression that increased fun despite not looking like it adds to the fun during the minute by minute gameplay. What has happened is that developers have found ways to tie these mechanics to other factors that can then be optimized, generally for the purpose of making money, though sometimes you see developers optimizing engagement for the sake of engagement. This sort of optimization can end up running counter to the minute by minute gameplay. Progression becomes so important that people sacrifice enjoyment of the gameplay so they can get enjoyment of the potentially pointless progression. While grinding isn't new, there was almost always some other gameplay as the goal. Now that has changed to grinding just for the sake of more grinding. In the past that would have been the sign of a bad game and people would not engage if there was no end payoff, but these days it has been optimized to just the right level to replace fun with compulsion.

It makes one wonder what is the ultimate game. Imagine a game that you plug in and then it fills the TV with light patterns that activate all your pleasure centers like some cyberpunk electronic drug. Is that the future down the path we are currently going? Was that always what was waiting us at the end of the path of entertainment even before video games existed?

For the XP example you’ve come up with, I think the more pragmatic reason why people were swarming around Portal XP farms was not that people were particularly hungry for just grinding XP, but because grinding them was the only way to gain access to the really important guns and equipment (which you need in order to enjoy the actual base game!) And the XP grind in 2042 is excruciatingly slow (although BF3/BF4 also had this issue and there were many complaints about it).

The thing is, most people actually want fun. I’ve never seen BF players play it solely for gaining the highest rank/level, since the real merit for BF is that it’s a sandbox shooter that creates all sorts of complex emergent situations and rewards you for dealing with it both reactively and creatively. But there are so many aspects of 2042 that actively tries to hinder this “fun” and are arbitrarily forced at the players (the XP grind, lack of server browsers, the difficulty of changing squads, squad size limits, no global chat, etc etc.), and players genuinely hate them. So I really don’t believe that “most of these players are mindless consumers who just enjoy skinner boxes, and they demand those type of games”.

At least those games give you some exercise rather than grinding you into sedentary ill health.

Yep. Squeenix really jumped the shark on this one. I have become an expert in disengaging. We're in an attention economy and I have wrestled back control of my attention. If they want a slice then they'll need to abandon dark patterns.

I know I'm not alone in this. The noise levels are at all time highs and people naturally have developed a sense of tuning out by default and carefully tuning in.

Exactly correct. Black Lotus is expensive because MTG is fun and the card is rare. Same for AWPs.

It really doesn’t matter what the technology is that’s used to store the transaction of these items, the most important thing continues to be that the game is actually _fun_!!!

Games with gacha mechanics (i.e. the ability to trade real money for tries at a random reward) should be rated 18+. I hope we get to a point where there's enough outrage that the ESRB is forced to act.

Video games are almost becoming video gaming(as in what they call those places where you play video slots in the closed off section at the back of a restaurant in my area). It is definitely concerning

Decent concept, but why Skyrim? I don't think I've ever found myself looking for money in that game. Hell, I mod it to reduce the amount of gold in the game.

The goal is not to improve them for players. It is to make money for the publishers.