LogFAQs > #972334297

There's a lot that's very, very wrong with the industry, particularly as pertains to worker mistreatment and predatory monetization, but I neither have nor foresee any difficulties finding something I want to play at any given time, so I can't say I really have any complaints at a personal level. Gaming as a whole gets 10/10 in terms of my personal enjoyment, but the industry gets like a 1 or 2/10 for being evil. Dunno how that should average out, if I need a single number.

Zareth posted...

It always was always about squeezing every dollar out of the gamer, they just have more ways to do it now

Yep. The crash of '83 was a consequence of publishers shovelling out piles of uninspired garbage in an effort to sell as many copies for as little effort as possible. Surprise surprise, people didn't actually want to buy 47 different Pac-Man clones, so the industry crashed. An actual crash is profoundly unlikely in today's market, given how much larger and more diverse the industry is now, but the current mass extinction event facing live services is no different from that: Too many companies tried cashing in on a get-rich-quick scheme with a hard limit on how many different companies could cash in on it, so the model is crashing. The same thing happened with MMOs in WoW's heyday, or rhythm games when Guitar Hero and Rock Band were releasing three games a year.

That's not to say the particularly egregious examples of greed shouldn't be called out for what they are, and there are plenty of harms specifically associated with lootboxes that require specific attention, but as a whole the industry isn't really that different from how it's always been. If a good idea pops up, the AAA industry latches onto it and humps it until it's everywhere and everybody gets sick of it, then they move on to the next thing.

I've seen some speculation that the Next Big Thing (tm) for the AAA market will likely be "cozy" games (the Animal Crossings, Stardews, and Unpackings of the world), since a concept's success in the indie market usually closely precedes the AAA market latching on to it. That's going to be an interesting one, since so much of making a game "cozy" relies on it having enough of a soul for playing it to be a comforting experience, and that's kind of flagrantly at odds with making soulless cash grabs that try to milk money out of players at every opportunity. I'm sort of looking forward to watching the AAA industry struggle to reconcile that contradiction.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Arguably there are a few worthwhile indie game gems here and there, but most of them are in genres that appeal to me, and most of them are on PC where I don't actually game, so they might as well not exist.

Sounds like you should consider gaming on PC, if that's where all the games that might interest you are. Loyalty to any specific console has never made much sense compared to just going where the games are, and excluding PC is entirely included in that. Indie games don't exactly require a particularly robust PC, so it's not like hardware costs are likely to be prohibitive. You might even be best off just buying a Steam Deck over whatever console you're considering for your next purchase, since it's pretty much just a console that plays PC games.