The sadness and ethics of the gaming industry
moveordiegame.com
moveordiegame.com
THE AGE WHEN I can actually have fun with a game my way (even with glitchy goats or clumsy surgeons) without breaking the bank. Throwaway games are fine for $10 or less, you know?
THE AGE WHEN Activision, EA and Ubisoft aren't the only options anymore, and they have to change their ways to stay relevant.
THE AGE WHEN the content that would have just been cut from the game to make the release sane is at least available for a price.
THE AGE WHEN niche categories like roguelikes and adventure games are exploding because it's finally profitable to release (or remaster) them.
THE AGE WHEN you can buy nearly any notable game made in the last 25 years for a reasonable price and run it on modern hardware.
Don't get me wrong--there are things wrong with gaming right now, especially speaking as a quality professional.
The "release now, patch later" issue on console has been there (ignoring the "PC master race" for a moment) ever since Microsoft relaxed the rules on Xbox, but it wasn't a new thing. Those of us who bought Daggerfall and Battlecruiser 3000 AD have been well and familiar with it for many, many years. Talk to the folks who uninstalled Myth 2 and lost their hard drives to it.
Even on console, game-crippling bugs or flaws like the slowdown in Final Fantasy Tactics or any number of "corrupt save" bugs were just unpatchable, and you got stuck with a broken game with no hope.
And Metacritic, valuable as it is, has caused a race to the middle--for games on Metacritic. So the blockbusters are boring now.
But if anything, that's made room for people to come from below. Minecraft would have been awfully hard to pull off in that middle period where indie games hadn't hit and blockbusters still sucked. Companies like Stardock, ID, and Apogee were a rarity, and invariably as soon as they came along they either started repeating the same sins (looking at you, GalCiv2) or got bought by Activision, Microsoft, whoever to become just one of the crowd.
There's just a ton of rosy nostalgia going on here. This is the best time for gaming since probably the early 90s, when console, PC, and arcade were all viable and in-play; blockbusters were just starting; and games sold on fun factor, not strictly on marketing, with no expectation of making millions of dollars to cover movie-like production costs.
People aren't seeing the opportunity that's come with the hassle.