It went to shit because big corpos realized there was money in the games industry. It went to shit because capitalism took the reins.
Bu-but Asmongold and Kirsche Verstahl told me the problem was woke gamedevs! /s
No one I know can afford to buy a house because our generations been so royally fucked in every which way, yet somehow we are responsible for steering the entire game industry in our twenties. Right… lol.
Like they didn’t realize in the 90s
Institutional money didn’t take it seriously until the mid to late 2000s.
Big video game companies were already doing the same as today though.
Young millennial/zillennial AAA game dev speaking.
It is 100% a top-down issue. Most devs are talented people. When you’re incentivized by quarterly returns as management, over a long enough timeline you begin to care less about game quality and more about stock prices and net revenue in addition to whatever else you need to satisfy your bloated ego, even if you started out as a passionate dev initially. The Indie and AA space is currently thriving because these incentives don’t factor in as much for them.
Just like game design, it’s an issue with a series of carrots and sticks, not necessarily the people involved (although psychopaths do exist and tend to be overrepresented in c-suites worldwide).
tldr; Capitalism ruins everything.
Capitalism doesn’t ruin everything. Corporatization ruins everything.
Who runs capitalism bozo
the local coffee shop isn’t a corporation
The worse thing that can happen to your niche hobby is for it to go mainstream. US anime has been consolidated into the Sony/Crunchyroll/Funimation/Rightstuf monster.
^ ^ ^ This is true, but I also think it’s important to note the role repeated financial and cultural success has on one’s mind and ego when elevated repeatedly by both the market and culture. You are not only just financially incentivized not to innovate, but your ego continues telling you “my ideas are always good no matter what others think” after these successes, even when that’s not necessarily true and you need to be reined in by others so your good ideas can still shine and the bad ones can be challenged. This is how top-down cultural problems in studio disciplines calcify in addition to financial incentives. It’s important as a person(s) running a successful studio to not surround yourself with yes-men, which is not an easy task due to the previously-mentioned perverse financial and egoist incentives.
The funny thing is, I’ve heard about quite a few Indie studios that are just as bad. They do the very same thing we condemn AAA for - crunch, micromanaging, and even harrasment.
I was very surprised to hear that the person who lead the development on monument valley was a massive dick to his employees.(Repeatedly would use management tricks and neg people to the point of depression and feeling worthless).
So, I can totally understand the cultural success thing. Though I’d like to believe that we are better than the corporate management suite, I have to remind myself that anyone can be a dick. You can be a progressive left leaning animal lover and still be a horrible parent.
I have worked only in the indie/AA sphere, and my experience here hasn’t been all that great either. But, I had always believed the problem was in the work culture of my country itself, and that I would probably find it better to work with those outside my country. No, people are the same everywhere, just of different flavours.
Though I’d still prefer to work with like minded people vs those place capital over everything else.
Gamers gamify a system that can be gamed. More at 11.
It started roughly around the ps3/360 era, when corporate devs began prioritizing turning their games into skinner boxes that were designed to motivate players to keep playing, so they would be more likely to engage in microtransactions, see more ads, or continue paying subscriptions. Of course gacha garbage is a fuller expression of this kind of manipulation now days.
Still plenty of great games out there, and in some cases we have a real renaissance.
Holy shit, it was Microsoft. Microsoft ruined gaming.
Horse armor.
Frank Zappa ideas; paraphrased by me.
In the 1960’s the music execs like Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and had no idea what the kids wanted. They just threw money at the problem and gave contracts to anyone. The result was a vast variety, everything from Sha-Na-Na to the Mamas and the Papas to Iron Butterfly. When the next generation of bosses got hired, they looked at the one consistent moneymaker; Motown Records. Everyone at Motown had a similar look and singing style…
Oh man. Iron butterfly is just…
I have no words. They’re very special to me
Gaming hasn’t gone to shit.
Some of it is shit, but that’s true for literally all media and art across all of human existence.
Gaming is better than ever. This whole discussion is ridiculous, with everyone blaming this or that for something that just doesn’t align with reality.
I think the main difference is that we mostly forget about the shovelware titles of 20 years ago. Meanwhile the predatory monetization practices of the popular kids games of this current era will not be forgotten.
You can’t say that gaming is better now when Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Roblox are the most popular games for an entire gaming generation. There are still masterpieces being made today and there was plenty of shovelware back then but there will never be another year for gaming like 1998.
You get like 3 games worth playing a year now and studios that would make all timers year after year now release a game once a decade and sell micro transactions or 50,000 ports of it.
Right, and let’s not forget that Retro gaming is completely legal.
I certainly wanted to be a gameDev, and had shit ideas. It is my fault.
You probably don’t have shit ideas, you just need help making you ideas work. Even Tolkien had a group of people help I’m improve the Hobbit.
One of the things I wanted to make, is a pixel style build a vehicle game, where you earn parts for vehicles that you build.
Shit is subjective. As long as you love your own shit or the process of it, you are good.
I think people don’t realize that current CEO’s are still old. Many of them in their 50s. I don’t think those are millennials.
I mean, kind of, but not really.
It all started with Halo. Back in the late 90s and early 00s the movie industry was the big money maker of entertainment and there was actually a lot of anti-gaming rhetoric in news and politics. The weekend Halo 3 released it was so popular that it disrupted the box office numbers for a couple of movies. The movie executives decided to stop trying to kill the gaming industry and take it over instead.
So I guess you can blame millennials for playing Halo instead of going to the movies that weekend.
It’s the same in every industry. Rich shit bags move in and buy successful entities but have no idea how to run them. They slowly get shittier, so good employees move on and do their own thing.
There’s still amazing games being made, there’s just a lot more shit games you have to sift though. Follow great game devs, not who they work for.
Yeah, the industry seems to be changing again. There’s a push towards passion projects and those projects are seeing more success than the big budget games. I think we will either see a new cycle of conglomeration or, hopefully, we will see the executives take a more hands-off approach and let the games make money for them.
Just because you own a sports team doesn’t mean you should be head coach.
Unfortunately, it still influences everything that goes into it, if not for anything but the expectation to turn a profit.
A movie when I was a teenager was $3.25 for a matinee. Also, there were like barely any mass shootings. America is imploding. All these issues people bring up the outliers and they never want to talk about the root causes because it’s a contentious arena. Capitalism consumes itself until there’s nothing left and the wealth is all consolidated at the top horded and then World War. The cycle continues. Everything’s connected. Nothing in a capitalist society happens without money. If we want to understand the differences of then and now we would focus on the economy. I hate gaming of today. There are advances, but all I see is cigar chopping game execs as they pray on nostalgic millennials and children. I can’t even watch movies anymore because all I see is propaganda, mischaracterization, and the profit motive. All I see is rich people trying to mold your minds and destroy education and keep you hyper-distracted with short-term goals. It’s not that technology is evil, but anytime the Imperialist come up with some kind of new gizmo, it’s always a double-edged sword. I know people will think I’m overreacting, but I’m not. Once you realize how real life is, and all the mechanisms that go on around you, you start thinking about things differently. You change your behavior. Pearls before swine.
I’ve always found it deeply insulting.
You’re not wrong
Zoomer consumers accepting micro transactions in games
Excuse me, but a lot of passion han be found on the indie market.
Wait, gaming is shit now and it was great in the past?
I agree about the speed of progress, but someone is forgetting all the movie games on the ps2 (looking at you cat woman).
Also, I’m old enough to remember the angry video game nerd reviewing bad NES games, holy shit, you have no idea how bad it can get.
Rockstar made GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, Bully, Max Payne and Max Payne 2 in the PS2 generation. We are 5 years into this current generation and Rockstar has made 0 total games for PS5.
Yeah there was a lot of shovelware back then. We get barely anything now.
Movie tin-in games that end up being utter pieces of shit date back to the Atari 2600. The USA videogame crash was caused by ET, of all things.
Yeah, this seems like a case of survivorship bias and the fact that there are way more games coming out in the modern age.
There should be a list of actually good movie tie-in games. There’s probably like 20 of em and 2 of them are LOTR.
The LOTR games were so good!
Riddick has a good one, and I remember enjoying Shrek 2 on the 6th gen consoles.
That has to do with shareholders realizing they can make money out of the gaming industry. They basically ruined it like they ruined healthcare and housing.
When it was released in 1993, Doom — which was developed for under $1M USD — was earning id software $100k/day immediately upon release, in shareware registrations alone.
It’s no wonder capitalist leeches saw those returns and wanted to insert themselves in the process. Of course the more who latch on, the more value they need to extract by screwing over both the devs and the players.
Obviously the devs and players are actually the only two groups who are necessary in this relationship, and they’re the ones getting soaked.
PS by “devs” I mean anyone who works on the game to make it better.
It’s mobile games. It has always been mobile games.
A large part of the population is simply unwilling to treat games as a medium that requires quick reactions, precision and thinking. To them, gaming more like spinning slots in a casino. Until about 2012, these people didn’t realize such games existed on consoles or the PC, so we were safe. Eventually mobile app stores tapped into this massive market, got enormous returns and made everyone else realize how many people were willing to engage with a glorified skinner box.
Every fiscally responsible company now has to assess the degree of implementing these dogshit gameplay loops, instead of just not doing that like they used to.
The only AAA games safe from this are the ones that are extremely hard (complex) as a baseline. Stuff like Path Of Exile and Elden Ring.
I don’t think that is true at all.
Strategy games existed, adventure and point and click existed, puzzles, turn based rpg, even forgiving platformers existed since before PC gaming, and flourished with PC gaming. Many of the hits needed nothing of that.
Many of the hits today still need all of that and are competitive.
The market grew, and with it came more audience and genres.
If we all liked yellow, what would happen to blue?
The company I work for recently tried to make a mobile game, being a fairly informal studio with many gamers on staff we made something more like a mini linear rpg than a typical mobile game. Testers loved it but the publisher said it was too complicated for mobile and cancelled on us.
Those shareholders? Dentists. No love lost between them and the gamers.
Mostly or straight became indie devs or got they asses fired on AAA studios, let’s be honest indie and double A studios are what still keep this hobbie alive today
The executives, investors and accountants making the decisions that are ruining games are not millenials.
I am sure many are. Millenials are in their forties these days
The average age of a manager in gaming is 45 and the oldest millennial is 44 lol get mathed idiot
Dude chill the fuck out.
I’m not the guy you’re responding to, but seriously you’re the idiot here.
The average age of a manager is 45 that means there are several that are younger and several that are older. Some may indeed be millennials. Maybe not.
Get “logiced” idiot! But foreal just chill out. What did that other guy ever do you other than suggest some managers might be millennials?
You’re tone policing a shitposting sub but I’m the one who needs to chill okay sure
If the average age is above any millennial, they couldn’t be the majority group. It makes no sense to pin blame on a younger generation when the reins of power are being clung to by the elder generation across all imaginable contexts, not just game development.
That guy said “many are”. Not most or majority or anything like that. I suppose it’s possible they edited their comment.
Sure man I’ll give up on the tone policing. You’re still an idiot going around calling other people idiots for no reason. Check your ego bro. That’s all I was saying
So almost half are millennials then?
There’s actually a single gaming CEO that hasn’t been born yet, bringing the average down.
Mean and median can be calculated for uneven distributions.
To be fair, “generations” are bullshit anyway
How quickly the goalposts move, very convenient
But yeah, I generally agree, I’m not the one that framed the discussion that way.
The only meaningful lines of division are along class groups, as the upper class continually consolidates wealth and decision-making power. It’s just that most rich people are also old.
They’re Elder Millennials at best (born in the 80’s, maybe late 70’s). Or do they qualify as another generation ?
Late 70s would fall in Gen X.
Millennials start at around '85 depending on who you ask.
Generations seem to be more vibes-based than anything.
Edit:typo
Late 70s and the first few 80s years is a stretch, that’s Xennials. Elder Millenials and Xennials have an uneasy truce but we know the difference
The old ones, yes
Indie gaming is the best it’s ever been. AAA gaming was always going to devolve into cashgrabs.
I seriously have nothing to say to anyone who doesn’t see it that way. If all you play is big budget corpo horseshit and your first instinct is to blame a generational cohort, that says more about you.
AAAlways has been .jpg. Just look at literally every sports game since the Street series.
Btw kudos on the memetic payload that is your username, you monster.
Hell yeah
Explicit content? What could be so explicit about a back massage?
To this day, I still wonder if the massager that my parents had, and LET US USE ON EACH OTHER, was actually marketed as a massager. It was basically the wand from the image above, but instead of the little egg/tooth vibrating thing on the end, it was like a massive UFO shape with different contours cut into rubber around the edge, and was big enough that it would be the appropriate size if we used it as a mace. Like, were they the typical ‘too innocent’ to think about it as a sex toy types, or was it really meant to be a massager?
Thoughts I shouldn’t have at night for $500, alex!
AAA games are made by companies that have boomers and early gen x in charge
Indie games are more likely to be made by people actually doing the development, i.e. millennials & early gen Z currently
Indie games have been having a great decade, AAA keeps getting worse
Thanks for attending my TED talk
Yeah, as far as I’m concerned most AAA games might as well be part of a totally separate hobby that I don’t pay much attention to.
Also the craft of game-making has improved, so that even an average modern game is in many ways better than the best games from 25 years ago. For example, consider Diablo II. I played the remake a lot and large parts were as good as I remembered but what really stuck out to me was how boring the boss battles are. The height of skill is running in a circle around Diablo when he does his lightning hose attack. It’s far worse than pretty much any modern ARPG, not because the technology has improved but because people have learned from Diablo II’s mistakes.
Diablo II blew my mind in 2000 in a way that a better ARPG wouldn’t today, but that doesn’t mean that games have gotten worse. It means that I have gotten used to playing great games.
I’ve had a similar experience.
For me it was more accessibility issues like timely checkpoints and not forcing the player to button mash.
I realized that a lot of my childhood gaming was possible because I just put up with gaming mechanics that need a lot of time and patience.
The past: don’t know what to do? Spend an hour just trying things and if that doesn’t work, try again tomorrow.
Today: don’t know what to do? This game has half an hour to give me a hint or I’m moving on to the next game cause I’m here to have fun damn it!
It’s far worse than pretty much any modern ARPG, not because the technology has improved but because people have learned from Diablo II’s mistakes.
I was ready to argue you at the start of the sentence and then went completely agreeing with you. New games aren’t better because they are new, but they have a potential to become better by learning about what worked good or bad in previous games. And it doesn’t make classics look bad now, like, we don’t need to fix Chess for how wild the horsey is in it, but coming to any old game requires setting oneself into the context of when it was launched, and therefore we need to see any new game through the lense of past experinces and how they learnt on mistakes of the past instead of repeating them.
Some people got it right back in the day.
Super Metroid is a perfect game from start to finish. I still play it a few times a year I’d say.
Indie gaming now is great for players, but for gamedevs it is a saturated market and most of them don’t make a profit
AAA gaming shows the effects of late term capitalism on gaming.
And also, the rate of good AAA games coming out is still the same, it’s just they’re drowning by the see of identical boring cashgrabs.
It’s the same with all the other media, cool shit is still there, you just have to learn to filter the bullshit out.
