Makes sense - the gaming industry, like Hollywood, has gone full monetization. A lot of the stuff is generic.
Why attend? Many AAA games are basically just rehashes.
Why attend? Many AAA games are basically just rehashes.
The last time it was remotely like this was the brown first person shooter phase circa 2005, but yet another walkfest with super high production values is no more interesting. If you happen to be into that stuff it is a golden age, but that is like saying the Marvel era of cinematic domination was a great thing.
The question really becomes if games were ever interesting to the mass market as games at all, or merely proxies for technological experimentation or storytelling, both of which can be done by other means.
Funny, I just played a game where you carry worlds within worlds and leap between them. And that's the tip of the iceberg of the games coming out these days. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1497440/COCOON/
I can't seem to find the relevant article, but esports is now topping viewership of other sporting events (e.g. the SuperBowl). I'm sure eventually, there will be monteization models that follow and it will inevitably be grossing more too.
If anything, it seems like video games are still on the upward trend, and the narrowing is somewhat natural to the maturity of the industry. AAA titles need to gross alot to be profitable, and they stick to well traveled areas most of the time, however one thing I have observed that the video game industry has that the movie industry is lacking is a far more flourishing indie side to the industry[2], such as Yact Club Games or the folks behind Undertale
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46746593
[1]: Mind you, the BBC article is from 2019, you can search for current year and get even wider gaps between the video game industry and the movie / music industry
[2]: With a proper addendum here, that its still, like acting in a movie, ridiculously hard to make it as a indie developer. Still, there is a flourishing of indie game developers
That's a hot take. It's never been a better time to be a gamer. In addition to most of the gaming backlog being available via emulation, it's never been easier for a small number of people to build a great game. So long as you're not extremely picky there's more good games to play than time to play them.
It obviously still happens. Lethal Company is a great example of that (1 developer, currently the top seller on Steam), but compared to the DOOM/Myst/etc era where ALL games were developed by small teams it's harder to establish a niche.
The fact that Steam exists and dominates the industry however, was not inevitable, and its incredible that we have things like Early Access and other tools to enable smaller developers to carve out their niche!
If by "backlog" your mental model includes even a hint of obligation... drop it. You have no obligation to games. You have no obligation to play them, you have no obligation to finish them if you start. They're just sunk costs. If they happen to be what you want to do, great, but if what you really want to do tonight is drop $30 on some new (to you) game and go to town, all that is costing you is $30 and the relevant time. It is not costing you $30, the relevant time, and the moral failure of betraying your backlog, because the latter does not exist. It is not costing you any more because you "wasted" the money acquiring your backlog, because, again, it is sunk cost.
Yes, it's obvious when I say it, but if you're anything like me (and most other people I see) it takes a few very deliberative passes at training your subconscious to really get this.
The good news, breaking yourself of sunk cost fallacy can directly pay off in your job, too. It's a pernicious little mistake that can sneak up on you, and it's one of the things that divides the engineers from the business folk in your company... and I gotta tell you, even as an engineer and with all sympathy to engineers, the business folk are 100% in the right on this one.
(Additionally, once you really internalize this, you'll also find yourself less inclined to buy something just because it's on a killer deal. The marginal value of adding one more game to my list of games I can play in the future for $0 may not be even $1 once I've already got a couple dozen such great $0 choices.)
Maybe not to your taste, but over 15m copies sold, second highest single player game of all time on Steam after Cyberpunk and very strong reviews (89% aggregate on opencritic).
There have never been this many good games coming out in a year. There also is more Call of Duty and FIFA garbage than ever, but I haven't found it hard to simply ignore it?
I think The Game Awards is a good refutation of this argument. They showed off a ton of upcoming stuff, most of which wasn't just FIFA/CoD AAA shovelware. A good demonstration that you can advertise all the other stuff too.
I think the real argument is that E3 was industry captured, had become a mouthpiece for the giants, and it was time for it to go.
The Game Awards has a similar but different format with a clearer purpose. And it is thriving and has largely replaced the games aspect of E3.
Look at console sales, says it all.
The breakdown of the show:
1% announcing the nominees and winners
1% speeches by the winners
10% Hideo Kojima
10% other celebrities
78% ads and game previews
This is a very funny line given that E3 for the longest time was an industry-only conference, and they only started selling passed to general public the last two years of the event.
What were they before, non-profit? The indy game scene is still going strong, what am I missing?
There are good new games, but there is also a growing attitude in big game studios to low-risk cash in old franchises.
Baldurs Gate is good, but it’s really not that much different than Divinity original sin.
Nothing is wrong with games being similar, same thing happened with movies. It’s just formulaic imo.