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.
I haven't bought a new game since 2016, and I'll never support the *AAA gaming industry ever again :)
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.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-THgg8QnvU4JEVov1tMl...
I'm sure there will be other indie games, but Supergiant's combination of excellent music, art style, and unique, well polished gameplay is not something you see a lot of.
Maybe it was the HR departments that killed them. Maybe it was, in shifting from art to product, they unlearned the basics of how to make fun. Either way, nothing interesting will come from it for a long time.
I barely even play indie games and I have literally never interacted with any of the much-maligned monetization schemes that people complain about.
That doesn't suggest they don't exist, nor that complaints aren't legitimate. But the idea that they're impossible or even non-trivial to avoid is idiotic.
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.
Steam also has a fantastic collection of titles. My favorites this year are all older, but great (and work well on Linux, by the way):
- Journey (I liked this way more than I expected to)
- Donut County
- A Short Hike
- Inside (from the makers of Limbo... an amazing game)
- Limbo
Each of those is pretty different from the rest, but they're all great, in my opinion, and come loaded with near-zero BS.
I haven't found myself feeling much motivation for games over the past 5 or so years. I'm getting old. Everything feels so predictable and boring (to me).
But Inside.
That game touched something new and nostalgic and gorgeous. I've played through it a half dozen times now just to feel it all again.
Highly recommend.
EDIT: I see now GP recommended Limbo already.
Given the amount of games that release, you got it the wrong way around, it's not "a few bad eggs", it's "a few good eggs" in a basket full of bad eggs. I mean that in a proportional way, and gladly the egg basket is very big, so the few good eggs are enough to have a good time without bothering with the bad and predatory ones.
I would really enjoy to something even close to evidence that shows this to be true, because this sounds...far from correct, to put it nicely.
The majority of games by most metrics being crap rings true to me, but I have relatively little evidence.
My gut instinct (yeah, not evidence) is that the games that have the most players, either by total playtime or absolute numbers, are mobile games. Things like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Fire Emblem Heroes, and other addictive mobile games that are effectively slot-machines.
I'd argue that these are the most predatory games in existence, and probably have the largest total play time total due to their addictive nature.
I would also guess there are more total mobile games than console or PC games due to the android play store being so easy to build for and publish to, and consoles/PC being relatively hard to build for with a smaller total playerbase.
If you search for numbers, you will find wildly large download numbers for these mobile games (which are probably not valuable, since it's free and many people download & delete I'd hope), but you'll also find very large revenue numbers, and fairly large player bases.
Do you think there's obvious metrics where traditional "buy once, pay again never" games are more prominent than any other type of game?
(Micro Transactions)
Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Destiny 2: Beyond Light, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, The Last of Us Part II, Fallout 76, … and it just keeps going that’s plenty to say it’s infested the AAA space.
Don’t get me wrong I understand the revenue potential, but I want a freaking warning label because any micro transactions is an instant pass for me.
Lots of Sony first party IP is along the same lines - God of War, Horizon, etc - probably because they're invested in the console ecosystem rather than total revenue from individual titles at the expense of others.
Personally, I thought the game was clunky but I know plenty enjoyed it and it’s clearly a AAA title.
However, they “removed” micro transactions from the game very late, but it still infects early gameplay with a forced very slow start based on real world delays for the first 2 weeks.
We are talking about a somewhat subjective topic here, so first you'd have to establish criteria to measure this, which works the other way around as well. Do you have evidence to show that the majority of games are "amazing and innovative"?
However let me try to make an argument: The example I replied to claims that "So many amazing and innovative games have come out in the last 5 years", the examples are games that stand out specifically because they are pretty different than the main stream.
Let's take a look at some numbers: in the years 2015-2021 a total of 49527 games released on Steam [1] alone, now to make a proper point for what I've said we'd have to make the number more accurate since I added some characteristics to my statements.
Nonetheless, imagine 49527 + total games released on console and then remove, let's say duplicates (re-releases, games released on multiple platforms etc.) from that list. Are you trying to tell me that if you take that resulting number that a significant percentage of that number are amazing and innovate games and that the number of "bad eggs" will be insignificant enough to deserve the classification "a few bad eggs" in a large pool?
I think that is a topic absolutely worth discussing, especially with a bit more time to spend on refining and looking at more numbers (like only AAA released, released with monetization etc.) and I find it absolutely possible that I am wrong in my sentiment, but so far I believe that your claim sounds "far from correct", or should I say "further from correct". And listing ~5 titles isn't enough to convince me, even if I add the very very good games I have played in the past 5 years (and I can certainly come up with a few dozen myself).
If every company has a certain chance of selling out every year, then by the time you get old most companies you grew up with will make bad products.
That's a pattern that happens with everything, and it's the one of the reasons why being loyal to brands is bad. There are a lot of newer studios that make non-predatory games that you should give a chance over the ones you played a decade ago.
While it's possible to separate wheat from chaff, it's also OK for someone to move on from an entire category of things because of the chaff.
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.
Imagine if instead of a quarter granting you an extra life, it gave you a power-up that let you clear the first 10 levels in 2x the speed. That is the design we have reached.
More quarters never made an arcade game easier or different, it just got you more time to play the game. The game design principle of arcade games was to make progression difficult but still possible by playing MORE. Pacman has some RNG, but the rules are there and aren't circumvented at the whim of the developer when a player starts to excel.
New games seem to have espoused the principle of pay more to play LESS which is almost an opposite goal and in the parent comment I think "fun" refers to playing the game, which they might feel is warped when people pay to avoid the playing aspect.
Console exclusives drive console adoption, which incentivizes better games.
App Stores undermine the console market, and simplify micro-transactions.
I think the point of the article is about making games less fun and more grinding, preying on gambling addiction, the gatherer-hunter instinct (gotta catch'em all), and the sunken costs fallacy (if I stop playing I lose all my efforts).
Take Pokémon Go, which is free to play, and the transactions are optional and not completely pay-to-win. The main game mechanic is mind-numbing repetition, the same actions done tens of thousands of times for meager rewards, and the occasional good reward, chasing the moving goal post. That game is not fun by any stretch of the word, it's a grind designed to keep players trapped for years.
Paying quarters for having fun for 15 minutes was better than not paying for mindlessly grinding. Games are supposed to be fun, not exploitative.
So even with AAA gaming starting to go downhill around 2009, gaming as a whole did actually quite well.
There are plenty brand new AAA games and were of great fun to me!
Nintendo in particular has been experiencing somewhat of a golden age with the Switch. It goes to show you don't need high performance to make fun games.
Really excited to see if the Steam Deck results in a similar boon to PC gaming.
To a now casual gamer like me, all of gaming is as good as it has ever been! That Steam Deck does look tempting but I have a tendency to dump hours into games. I'm planning to talk it up to friends so one can get it and I can maybe borrow it once in a while.
You are not looking in the right places, there are more great games coming out now than ever. Try Inscryption or Outer Wilds.
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.
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.
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.
I want to say Brawl Stars falls in that category.
I’m sure there are some good free games out there, but for the most part the dangerous patterns I’ve seen in game design happen in free games.
This sentence sums up my entire parenting experience for age 5+.
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.
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.
Back then MMOs were very grindy, that much is correct. However you have to take a moment to think about the reasons for that. One of the main reasons is that in old school MMOs socializing was a very major part of the appeal and made up large portions of your gametime, you were required to cooperate and coordinate with people manually (form groups, guilds, trading etc.).
WoW is a good example, because it was very similar back in 2004, but made many aspects, especially playing alone much easier than e.g. EQ.
So what does it mean when people say that modern day WoW feels more like work than oldschool WoW? The reason is that many many social components are gone from modern day WoW, it now has automatic systems in place for pretty much every aspect of the game, most content is soloable, and the parts where a group is required offer systems to automatically search and find players etc.. In short: basically no manual communication is required in WoW nowadays to see and complete almost basically everything the game has to offer. There is one exception: there are versions of parts of the content that is just harder versions.
What makes modern WoW feel more like work than oldschool MMOs? The reason is that the game design intentionally keeps you locked in a very tight loop, many parts are designed in a way to keep them from being completed too quickly, many parts build on "daily quests" that can be completed exactly once per day/week, but no more than that. There is much more nuance to this, but in short it can easily create the feeling that you have to show up to play certain content you don't enjoy and if you don't you lose progress/time you can't catch up on. Think "oh no I still have to login today to get my daily quests done...", players typically complete missions/quests like that not because they are fun, but because they are working towards a reward.
But since ingame mechanics have killed the need for social cooperations and interactions (this is not strictly a negative thing, and a hard problem to balance) it creates an atmosphere that is a very different flavour of grind than back in the day, which is closer to some kind of work obligation as opposed to a virtual world you go to to adventure and meet with other people.
That said, while MMOs were always a class of their own I don’t think it’s unfair to compare them to other modern games. There are many of their aspects that just moved to other games. Their social aspects moved to actual social networks (which didn’t really exist back then), their grind moved to mobile apps, and the whole virtual world moved to more sandboxy games such as Minecraft and its cousins.
People spend orders of magnitude more time playing them, mainly socializing. Which means they need a lot of grindy content to keep people occupied while they chat.
If a game isn't 100% FUN 100% OF THE TIME then the designers have failed. I shouldn't have to do X amount of things before I'm able to get to the actual game, and if somebody says "well once you get past the first couple hours of the game it starts to get fun."... then I won't even bother.
this is also one of the reasons that I tend to prefer carefully crafted narrative style games (8-10 hour experiences) that are shorter in length then huge open sandbox worlds that you play for hundreds of hours.
Game designers know that you have to splice in boring moments into their games so that the next dopamine shot has more impact. You can't do 100% fun all of the time. This is why god of war is peppered with puzzles to break the sequence.
MMOs specifically need a social experience, and if you're 100% engrossed in the fun there will be no time for the socializing.
> If a game isn't 100% FUN 100% OF THE TIME then the designers have failed.
For high highs, you need lows as well. My personal highest, most epic moments in games I played are from beating and besting truly frustrating and difficult challenges.
Knowing how to design challenge and frustration is a difficult exercise. There are many different types of difficulty you can use as a designer and some are better received than others. The best games make you feel like you can beat the challenge, and it is entirely within your reach as long as you learn.
Twitch games (as in reaction games not streamer-friendly games) are an excellent example. Geometry Dash is immediately difficult but also immediately approachable and if you don’t have fun the first few minutes, the game probably isn’t for you.
Beat Saber is another good example. It can be incredibly frustrating, in the same way that trying to beat your personal best 100m sprint record can be.
Making something that literally every person finds fun all of the time is completely impossible. For example I have friends I don't play a lot of multiplayer games with, because I have the most fun when things go sour, while they just get frustrated.
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.
Asking because my son is pretty good at games, and we're about to start this one in the next week.
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.
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.