90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.
Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.
Fair, but given the degradation of gaming these days I think a lot of people who aren’t paying attention have an outdated and understated view of just how bad things are. A parent might be thinking: wow had a subscription, so this game with micro transactions isn’t all that bad, not recognizing just how tuned modern predatory gaming has become at extracting money and addicting its users.
WoW mostly addicted people to playing (consuming their time), you can go hours and hours of gameplay without inputting more money. But mobile games maximize extracting maximal profit for minimal gameplay. There’s no functional difference between a gacha pull and a slot machine pull. It’s an endless, mindless set of pretty lights where you just hit the buy button over and over and over. If you sat people down and made them watch (with a running cost total) most people would immediately see the resemblance to a casino.
I think it’s helpful to break things down into more granular levels of predation, just to help clarify how bad it’s getting, even if all of it is problematic.
I don’t allow myself to play any mobile games anymore. Spent like $300 on one of those idle games. Not worth it. I refuse to play any free to play titles at all, no matter the platform these days.
Haven’t played WoW in awhile, but do they now have ‘you can spend unlimited money’ mechanics? Previously it was just stuff like mounts and character transfers and stuff. I know you can also sell tokens for gold, but I thought gold kind of becomes irrelevant at some point. The best gear is bind on drop right? Theoretically I guess you can pay gold for boost runs, which probably counts as an endless money sink.
I kind of have a mental separation in my head between games with unlimited money sinks (like games with energy mechanics) where you can spend and spend and spend and it never stops, vs games that have a finite of things to buy.
It can still be way over priced, but there’s a maximum amount of money you can throw at the game. Even Diablo 4, with a relatively huge and highly priced number of cosmetic items has effectively a maximum price (though every new cosmetic increases that price). Vs Diablo Immortal allowing you to spend 10s of thousands of dollars and still need to keep spending. I think unlimited money mechanics should be outlawed or at least fully classified as gambling and regulated accordingly.
Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who’s going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?
I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
Honestly I just don’t think a lot of people will care. They’ll just get used to the lower quality. AI only has to be ‘good enough to still sell’. Do you really think that gamers are the consumers that are going to be ones to fight back against it? The same consumers that have rolled over to basically every other exploitative practice ever conceived of?
Agreed, VC have poured free money into excellent, but unsustainable businesses trying to chase ‘growth’ long enough that they can sell out just before everyone realizes that it won’t make money. It’s just a scam of rich people preying on other rich people.
Instead of trying to build a self sustaining company to begin with (which requires hard work to balance revenue against customer needs and desires) they build ‘free’ products that people love, but can’t make money, only to switch the company to crappy products that people hate, but now are trapped into using.
Our entire digital economy is built on these bait and switch companies and it sucks
I’ve basically never seen a free to play title cost less than a paid one (for similar content). Typically free to play has some sort of completely uncapped money-sink as well. Given that Sims 4 already costs $500+ for all content, I can only surmise that Sims 5 will cost thousands for the same amount of content.
I dunno. I kind of remember when it was hard to get on steam. I wonder how many cool games we have now that we wouldn’t have had of they had to go through some sort of arbitrary checkpoint. There always seemed to be some controversy over who and what got in.
Do those trash games even matter? I feel like I basically never see them unless I go looking for them specifically. Steam is far, far better at content discovery than Google Play is, despite both platforms having an abundance of shovelware.
Ya, I just want to get content. I don’t mind giving back to the community for it, but needing to figure out some sort of ‘system’ is too much. I’m not looking for a mini-game.
I hate the whole meta of private trackers. When I’ve joined a few in the past the whole focus on needing to keep up your ratio has been a larger barrier to downloading than leechers ever were on public trackers.
You can’t seed because several users have seedboxes with perfect connections and already have a billion-to-one ratio. I ‘theoretically’ have access to all this content, but I’m downloading ‘80’s workout video volume 7’ in the hopes that I can actually seed it for someone to get enough ratio to actually download something I wanted to watch.
I was on what.cd back when that was still a thing, I poorly chose my first few downloads and then never had enough ratio to download anything else ever again until I was finally kicked for inactivity.
Instead of actually fostering a working seed economy, most seem to just replicate a capitalist dystopia where a handful of users hog all the seed slots, earning more ratio credits than they could ever use while everyone else desperately tries to scrape together enough ratio to get something of value.