I used to love video games, I did. There once was a time where I would stand in line at Gamestop or whatever local gaming shop was closest to me, coffee in hand waiting for the clock to hit 12am.
Midnight launches were amazing and fun. I used to love video games, but now I’m bored and nothing seems to hold my interest long enough to fight off that boredom. Sure, there are some embers, little sparks of hope that upcoming releases will somehow re-ignite that childish passion I had for games. (I am seriously looking at you right now Casey Hudson), but for right now, I can honestly say nothing that has released as of late has really blown me out of the water.
Let me be clear about this for a moment, there have been bright spots, moments if you will that have held my interest for a bit. It seems as of late either I’m phoning it in or the gaming industry is, because one of us is no longer fully committed to this relationship.
There are some exceptions to this current malaise that I feel is permeating the space, Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, is a game that’s been so successful that it’s only seen its player base increase since it’s full launch in 2023.
It is also a game whose success led to other studios saying that gamers shouldn’t expect this level of RPG, and that it was anomaly? Why? Why shouldn’t gamers expect an immersive, rewarding, and re-playable experience from a game they are spending 70 to in some case over 100 dollars on?
Why shouldn’t we expect new takes on classic systems, why should we be satisfied with carbon copies of tired tropes. Or repeats of the same game, just under a different title because the studio no longer owned the rights to the original. Yeah, I’m pointing my finger at you Callisto Protocol.
Studios have gotten lazy, or comfortable depending on your viewpoint, and rather than push envelopes or the boundaries of what games can do, they’ve settled on remasters and remakes, a strategy that in some cases has proven successful. Dead Space and the Final Fantasy VII remake come to mind, but in most cases these updated releases of older games feel like nothing more than a cash grab.
The other side of this coin is the possibility that studios seem to have gotten scared of or apathetic to their fan base, after all, how you feel if every time to you tried to do something new, or introduced a new character into a franchise, your social media got flooded with death threats, and other awful messages.
Honestly with the amount of hate studios have received from anonymous keyboard “alphas” out there, I’d be very surprised if there aren’t some game industry folks out there that said, “eff this” and went and found something less stressful to deal with. I mean, why even try to make something if all you’re going to get for your effort is a constant barrage of hate from a bunch of incels with nothing else to do?
At some point, we as gamers need to stand up, and start pushing back on the bullshit. Developers get it enough from corporate suits and shareholders that don’t seem to understand that when you rush a game just to get it out on it’s initially announced release date you’re basically self-sabotaging your investment.
Games take time to develop, a concept it seems a lot of these bigger publishing houses have seem to forgotten about. I miss the days when a developers response to the “when is this going to release” question was “when it’s ready.”
Blizzard was notorious for this and I loved every minute of it. Sure we’d grumble about not having a date, but at least we knew that whenever the game launched that it would be pretty much 99.9999% polished. Now we get games released that are half done, buggy, and all require a 15 gigabyte update patch on release.
Shareholders and corpo suits aren’t the only ones that need to understand the development process takes time. We as gamers need to understand this too and honestly calm the hell down.
There are absolutely zero valid reasons in the entirety of existence that a writer, level designer, digital artist, or anyone involved in the development of game should be receiving death threats because some jackass doesn’t like the main character being a woman, or the current trend of calling any game that doesn’t have a white, square-jawed, lone wolf male protagonist “woke.”
Games are for everyone, and everyone deserves the ability to play out and enjoy their fantasy, and really, if you’re that hard up for a game that ticks off your requirement that all protagonists are straight white dudes, then the door is open for you to make your own game. But this attacking developers for making diverse games needs to seriously stop, it’s getting old folks, really, really, really old.
So how do we pull out of this nose dive the industry seems to be in? It’s not going to be easy, and everyone involved from the ground up definitely has their own work to do, starting with us, the fans. The hate, death threats, and total disrepect of the people behind the scenes that make these game that we fall in love with needs to stop. We as fans should be supporting these devs, not tearing their shit down because of a decision made by someone in a board room. Dev’s don’t set launch dates, people that don’t understand how long it takes to make a fully pollished game set launch dates, a fact made obvious by how often AAA titles get delayed for “polishing” reasons. We as fans need to react with some understanding, and show a little support, instead of immediately grabbing the torches and pitchforks. Honestly, at the end of the day, it comes down to the simple adage of don’t be a dick, because if we as fans continue with the threats, and hate, and ugliness that some out there direct at the folks behind these games, at some point, they’re going to stop making them.
Now, on to the studios/publishers. Stop chasing GTA and Fortnite numbers, knock it off, those games are anomalous phenomenons, and seriously have caught lighting in a bottle, you as compainies should be looking at those games, the way you told us as gamers to look at Baldur’s Gate 3. Seriously, the big publishing houses really need to go back to the table and really take a hard look at what they consider “successful”. For example, it’s been estimated that the budget for 2023’s Deadspace remake was about 30, to 40 million (this is an estimate, turns out, unless you work for the studio, finding the actual budget isn’t easy). The game itself sold 2 million copies world wide, and sold for 60usd, Motive made EA an 80, to 90 million dollar profit with the remake, and EA labled that a failure. In my mind that is absolutely ridiculous.
Along with re-evaulating what the benchmark for a successful game is, publishers need to stop with the specific launch date, instead of “Novemeber 2025” just say coming in 2025, and then as things progress, narrow the date down a little, or in lieu of a launch date, go early access, give your dev teams time to really cook their games, and work with the fan base, I keep going back to BG3, but their approach worked, and it worked well.
For this gamer, it all comes down to the fact that we used to be a community, a family, an acccepting group of folks that shared a joy for sitting down and living out our fantasy, or action dreams for a little while, and celebrating each other’s wins, and creations. Video games were, and still are our outlets, now it seems we’ve forgotten that, on both sides of the house.
Maybe it’s time we try to remember that.
Featured image courtesy of nikita kachanovsky
