I mean yeah. Games are getting more expensive and we're not making more money to be able to afford them. Compound that with inflation of other more crucial goods (groceries, hygiene products, gas, etc.). It feels like anyone could've seen this coming lol.
expensive, 60-80$ per game+dlc. and Games are coming out half-assed for the most part. eg, switch game and the pokemon console games from swsh-current.
Are there even any really good games coming out this year?
Further, didn’t the Switch 2 already break sales records? 5.4 million consoles? 1.8 million of them in the US?
Looking at the roster of games that have come out so far this year, it looks pretty barren for genuinely quality games. Maybe people just haven’t bought a lot of the kind of forgettable titles? The only games that seem popular that aren’t remakes or re-releases of previous games are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Elden Ring Nightreign. Of those, only the first four listed score above 90 on Metacritic. Even stuff like Monster Hunter Wilds has been deeply panned.
I think it’s probably a mixture of high prices, lack of money, Switch 2 sales and waiting on better Switch 2 titles other than just Mario Kart World, as well as a lackluster roster of other quality games.
Games suck now. Movies too. Culture in decline. We (millennials and gen x) got to see the art form (gaming and at least short form video on youtube and vimeo and stuff) evolve from studios owned by people who were passionate about the craft to the current state of big business making “safe” investments. It’s not that only bad games will ever come out from now on, indie studios exist and some big studios take chances, but there will always be a sea of remakes, remasters, endless sequels, generic safe garbage, etc
Also data is about 18-24 year old spending. I bet a lot of switch 2 purchases were by people 30+ for their kids
I'm just at a point where so few new releases excite me anymore. The mainstream AAA industry has moved far away from my tastes, and when it comes to the niche stuff I like most, I've already got my favorite forever games so it's actually hard for something new to tear me away from grinding those.
On PC atleast, I hardly find it compelling to spend any money on games since you get a lot of stuff for free from promotions. I have a rule to spend only 1$~ on any one game and it has served me pretty well
Almost like there’s some kind of deeper generational economic divide, almost like all the people who own all the stock are retiring and starting to live off investments, and thus companies are pressured to payout ether in buy backs or dividends, so prices are rising while quality and pay falls, and only those benefiting from the record profitability can afford the new prices.
Sort of like the allocation of resources and labor are being redistributed to a retiring and wealthy leisure class and the burden to support that is falling on the younger generation.
Yeah no shit AAA games are $80 going forward, games from the past few years are $70 if AAA. $60 was the sweet spot for AAA games but then the greedy companies began littering paid games with macro transactions.
Indie is the way forward for gaming, the prices are actually fair and the devs are willing to support them far past when AAA companies will. That and modding for games has only been getting better and better. Last year we basically got a brand new Fallout game from modders, meanwhile Bugthesda can barely wipe their own ass.
As a writer, this is why I’ll never condemn cozy books with happy endings. This type of media, whether it’s games or books or music, helps real people get through crappy times intact, even if elitists sneer that overly happy stuff isn’t this or that. Usually people who are going through the worst times irl are the ones who need avenues of escape most. If you’re already living through crap, you don’t need media to remind you of the crap, you already know good and well that crappy things exist.
As a reader, that’s definitely why I do condemn overly negative books and other media. Even after reading all horror books available in the library as a teenager. Life’s complicated enough by itself.
As a reader, I say “not for me” and leave overly negative things there for others to enjoy. The way I feel better is not reexposing myself to a reflection of all the ills in this world that I’m constantly being shown can be awful. But some people find catharsis in it! One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, after all. I am sure some people would dismiss some things I like as too saccharine and not realistic aka gritty enough.
I’m trying to write a story, and I struggled with this, especially when confronting certain realities:
While fantasy, the story is meant to reflect some harsh political realities
Multiple villains are killed, but the heartfelt good guys live.
The ending has everything fixed and everyone’s happy.
I’m aware most stories don’t come anywhere close to a full happy ending like this. Every Batman story ends with Gotham still a miserable shithole. Every noir story ends with the case solved but everyone broken for it and the city still a dystopia. It generally has good reasoning, to reflect harshness of reality, but that’s a realm of fantasy I really want to venture into; one where things just work out.
I’ve not played harvest moon, but I found stardew valley and animal crossing a bit tedious… I guess people mean games that have a lot of small low stress tasks that don’t require much risk taking?
That first paragraph put me off from the article because it positioned the research on gaming violence as if there were a positive correlation instead of reporting that it is actually negatively correlated. It also did not mention the positive research that came from the studies on game playing and eye hand coordination and the many other benefits video games have been proven to have. The author made it sound like this was the first positive thing about video games.
To me it seemed to try to say that most research done so far on video games is mostly about how violence in games affects people, not the positive benefits. Which is probably true that the majority (for a while at least) was about that.
gamespot.com
Aktywne