A reader muses on the current state of the video games industry and how people’s indifference for the well-being of developers is causing real harm.
Having been a devoted gamer since I was a little boy in the mid-to-late 90s, I have played all manner of games and enjoyed a lot of what the industry has to offer. However, I have started to see that while the games industry continues to delight us with new and exciting games, it is also distracting us from the destruction it continues to wreak on the livelihoods of the developers and studios responsible for the games we love.
Like many people, I am prone to the nostalgic banality of thinking that video games were way better 20 to 30 years ago, but there are more and more reasons why this is becoming the case. Yes, games today are technically more impressive and larger than they have ever been, but they are also chore-like and teeming with risk averse stories, characters, and gameplay features. I don’t blame the developers nor the publishers though, I blame our culture.
It is our culture that dictates the direction video games are going and steers the mindsets of publishers who prioritise getting the games they publish into the hands of as many gamers as possible. The stories that are told, the ideas that are forged and the auras are all linked to our culture, and this is why gaming today is the way it is, as well as why I personally find it to be overbearing and harder to enjoy than ever.
It’s not that the quality of games isn’t great, but there are simply too many, which means we choose our favourites and stick with those instead of playing everything. So, for me personally, I love playing all kinds of games, but the industry is making it immensely hard for me to keep up.
Remember the 2022 Saints Row reboot? How we absolutely hated it with a passion! You know why we did? Because it wasn’t the Saints Row we used to know. The way I see it is we got the Saints Row we deserve because of the culture we cultivated. Volition et al. just wanted to make money by capitalising on a changing audience, yet we rejected it due to our nostalgia for the way things used to be.
I’m not defending Saints Row 2022, but it is clear it is a game of our times, as they are now. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is another example. Love it or hate it, The Veilguard exists because EA are on the pulse of what our culture is becoming. Yes, many of us hate it, but we’re responsible for it.
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As wild and ludicrous as this may seem, I can’t help but see an industry paving the way for its own extinction, along with the collapse of this culture of ours. Again, it is easy to believe that all I am spouting is a load of nostalgic rhetoric and nonsense theories, but looking at how straightforward, easy and accessible things were then, to how choice-riddled, overbearing, and excessive things are now there has to be a change of course or this bubble will burst.
We are responsible for the state of things now, and we are the change that can turn things around. I posit that it is really difficult to crusade for the justice and wellbeing of game creators because we continue to think if the games are great, the developers are doing well.
However, once they underperform and fail to reach the ridiculous sales demands of the publishers, they’re in danger of getting axed, and that is truly dreadful for an industry we love so much. I still want Bizarre Creations and Evolution Studios to still exist, as well as Volition, but sales numbers continue to matter more than anything else to publishers, and that dilutes and restricts the industry.
By reader James Davie
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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