LogFAQs > #972339306

Zareth posted...

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

To be fair, that goes all the way back to the era of arcades where they'd crank difficulty up to artificially hellish levels just to keep you pumping quarters in.

The problem is, there was a long span where gaming evolved into squeezing money out of people by producing actual worthwhile games that people wanted to play. Whereas for the last decade or so there's been more and more emphasis on ignoring quality in favor of doubly down on manipulative gambling mechanics, fee-to-pay mechanics, and psychological tricks that encourage recurrent spending.

So it's very easy to say that the current climate is far worse than it was 10-30 years ago (and maybe even longer). Especially as the value of some exploitative models is encouraging publishers to double down on others.



adjl posted...

Surprise surprise, people didn't actually want to buy 47 different Pac-Man clones, so the industry crashed.

The problem wasn't even "Pac-Man clones". It was that the Pac-Man clones were BAD. Compare the arcade version of Pac-Man (that was always popular) with the Atari 2600 port and it's blatantly clear how exploitative it was. That, combined with abysmally bad games like ET that were shit out and left to die on the assumption that people would buy them due to the brand alone is what helped trigger the crash. Once the initial wave of major failures began, investors panicked and companies tried to pivot to the growing PC market (see also the Coleco ADAM and the Atari ST), and that's what killed them.

Which actually goes back to support the argument. When the games industry sacrifices quality for the quick and easy buck, it tends to backfire on them. It's not just monetization that's the issue.

The main difference between then and now is that the users have grown accustomed to greater and greater complexity and sophistication from games, so the bar for what is considered "quality" is much higher than it used to be. Which makes the threshold for failure much higher as well.



adjl posted...

But the current mass extinction event facing live services is no different from that

Ironically, it may be very different than that.

A number of insiders have suggested that publishers knew full well that the live service model was unsustainable, and that the more games came out using that model, the more it would divide potential income and inevitably kill those games. They were essentially built around the idea that they would only be viable for a short time, so publishers all scrambled to rush their own half-assed live service game out the door early, because the initial games would probably wind up reaping significant profits. It was only the latecomers that were destined to lose money.

In other words, it was more like a pump-and-dump scheme on the stock market than it was ever intended to be a long-term stable investment.

Basically, publishers learned from the MMO bubble, where the first few games out drew HUGE money, but eventually everyone wound up trying to be the next WoW clone and the genre as a whole withered to a fraction of its former value. So now everybody wants to be "THE NEXT BIG THING" first, so they can exploit the market before the bottom drops out.

In that sense it's very different from the Crash of 1983, which the companies really didn't see coming because they were blinded by their own hubris. They couldn't see past their own success, so they didn't know how to cope when that success dwindled.

Publishers now know they may only have a limited time to benefit from any exploitative practice or trend-chasing, so they try to maximize profit as quickly as possible before moving on. They've become predatory beasts that hunt the landscape and kill everything in their path (which used to only be EA's MO!).



adjl posted...

Sounds like you should consider gaming on PC

I really shouldn't.

My issues with PC gaming far outweigh any issue I've ever had with consoles.

My comment that "there are a few worthwhile indie game gems here and there" doesn't really mean there are a ton of games on PC that are appealing to me (because I am only just now noticing that there was a typo in my post - "but most of them are in genres that appeal to me" was supposed to be "but most of them aren't in genres that appeal to me").

It's more acknowledging that there are indie PC games that other people may enjoy/love/etc, and which potentially show the industry as a whole isn't completely devoid of talent or passion, so that some people may say "Oh, gaming isn't dying! I loved Plate Up/Wildermyth/King of the Castle/Starbound/etc". And for them, that's awesome.

But I'm not seeing a ton of games even in the indie scene that appeal to my tastes, and even the ones that do spark a little bit of interest aren't interesting enough to offset my 20-year plus bias against PC gaming. It's also not helped by the fact that after years of mainly gaming on console, my standards for games have gotten unrealistically high, so the jank and weaker graphics of most PC indie games tend to detract from the experience for me.

For me the best case scenario is for a game I do kind of like to get popular enough on PC to eventually get ported to consoles, which is where I usually get around to playing it (which is basically how I played Minecraft and Stardew Valley).



adjl posted...

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.

Steam is at least part of my issues with PC gaming though, so that's not really an option.

If I was ever going to switch to PC gaming to a serious degree (which I almost certainly never will), it would almost have to be through a service like GoG or via digital five-finger discount. But even that's not all that appealing to me.

I just have a deep-seated, visceral dislike for PC gaming. I know that's not a hip or trendy attitude to have on this site (where the push towards PC gaming has been strong for the last decade or so), but it is what it is. At this point in my life I honestly don't see me ever really putting in the effort to try and overcome it. Nothing is so fantabulous that I feel like I can't live without it, and there is more media out there than any single human can ever consume, so there's always something else competing for my attention. And it's not like my OLD games are going anywhere - I've been playing Minecraft again lately, and before that I was replaying KotOR.

About the most I'm willing to budge is playing the occasional story-heavy Ren'Py game (which scratches my itch for narrative games), but even those are few and far between when it comes to ones worth playing.