The state of modern videogaming is a shambles. It seems like no one ever releases a complete game anymore; they just work their development staff to death over the course of 3 months, then release whatever was finished, with an apology about game-breaking bugs and the promise of releasing a patch to fix everything. Game features that were meant as selling points are held back as premium DLC, requiring players to buy again, and again, and again. The sobering truth is that, if GoldenEye 007 had been made in the modern day, the Antenna Cradle map would have been a $10 DLC, Aztec would have been a Steam exclusive, and Egyptian a Microsoft Store exclusive. Some people don't even try at all, they just put out a throwaway gacha game that is, really, less of a game than a fruit machine, and for what? You don't get anything for spending all that money, you just get a fat-ass credit card bill at the end of the month. Without irony, the state of modern gaming is this: players give publishers large sums of money in exchange for nothing. There are no games anymore, just a cute anime girl telling you to spend $1, $10, or $50 to continue playing.
It is my considered opinion that...
A. Games should not cost more than $45. Games often cost, what, $70 now? How much of that is going to developer residuals and how much is just sheer corporate greed? Well, the games industry conducts itself exactly like the TV industry, and there's a Writers' strike on right now, so that should give you some idea.
B. No game should take more than 3 hours to play through. We have Nintendo to thank for introducing in-engine cinematic cutscenes to games. Increasingly, games are driven mostly by scenes instead of gameplay. Those kind of games were called "interactive movies" back in my day.
C. No game should be developed by a team of more than 10 people. This was how many people it took to make Doom, the most computationally-demanding game of the early '90s. Actually, the engine was developed entirely by 2 guys named John. The rest of team was composed of artists and level designers. These days, games are being made that are far less demanding than Doom that have development teams larger than major motion pictures. And for what? Streamlining UE4 a little more? There are huge storehouses of free and open-source 3D models, tools that are designed to create realistic-looking 3D terrain, and, of course, open-source or cheaply-licenseable 3D game engines. Really, anything better looking than id Tech 3 is an extravagance.
D. Games should not be sold only as a downloadable installer. Somewhere around 2010, someone-- I think it was Google-- decided to try and gaslight people into believing that no one uses physical media anymore; CDs, DVDs, BluRay discs, even flashdrives; mostly because they didn't want to have to build optical drives and USB ports into their chromebooks. Software as a Service strips a computer user of her agency to make decisions about her own technology and compels her into either paying for the monthly subscription or not using the software.
E. No game should contain any kind of premium DLC of any sort. It used to be, you unlocked things through gameplay. I spoke of GoldenEye 007 earlier; this game had about 2 dozen unique cheat options, all of which were unlocked by speedrunning levels on various difficulties. In another game, The Sims: Bustin' Out, you would unlock new furnishing objects by completing tasks in Story Mode. None of that happens anymore; now it's all relegated to a pay-to-play model. And, more to that point...
F. You should never have to buy a game more than once. The whole institution of "pay-to-play" is unfettered corporate greed. When a game tells you to pay for more playtime, that's when you should stop using the game and uninstall all software published by that company. I keep coming back to GoldenEye 007; this was a game cartridge that you would plug into your Nintendo 64, switch on the power, and play for as long as you wanted. In an hour, you could come back and do it again. The next day, the next week, the next year, the next 20 years, you could come back and play for as long as you wanted, because you had the entire game right there in the cartridge. Nintendo had no expectation (back then, anyway) of ever seeing another cent from you in regards to GoldenEye, because you had already bought the game. Maybe if your cousins stole the game cartridge when they came for a visit and you had to buy another copy, then and only then would you give Nintendo another $45.95 for that game. But now, you buy the game, then you buy the end of the game, then you buy some equipment for your character, then you buy another save file, then you buy an expansion pack, then you buy the unlock code for the expansion pack, then you buy a subscription to the game's online host, then you buy, then you buy, then you buy, buy, buy, spend, spend, spend. No. Stop. If a complete game cannot be bought once and used forever, it's not good enough to even think about anymore.
G. Game designers should not be businesspeople. Games are being treated as a growth industry all across the board, and it's affecting replay value. Games really should not be considered an "industry" at all, because that immediately diminishes the work of everyone on the staff who is not an executive and opens your development company up for malicious venture capitalists to take a majority stake in the company and immediately sell it to Microsoft.
The worst part about the state of modern videogames is that the corporate feudal state has convinced people that this is just the way that it is and we've all got to get used to it. It's not as though we passed some magical barrier several years ago that prevents game companies selling physical copies of their games, it's just that these 7 companies have decided it makes them more money if they don't have to deal with DVDs and game cards anymore. If there's no physical media, there's no ownership, and the company can put the customer into a subscription situation. Buy the game, then buy a subscription; if you don't subscribe, you can't play the game, and they'll laugh at you all the way to the bank to deposit your nonrefundable $70. At first, it looked like people were finally going to get wise after EA released the lootbox festival, Star Wars: Battlefront II, and national governments across the world started to examine a causal relationship between gacha-style games and gambling addiction... but that didn't last long. Eventually, the furore died down and people just accepted it as it was, and EA turned up the pro-lootbox lobbying a bit more.
It's not as though this is a particularly difficult issue, either. It's only these 7 companies; namely Nintendo, Microsoft, Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Epic, and Valve; who put the pressure on their first-party studios to release incomplete games as quickly as possible at the highest possible profit margin. All it would take is one development company to say, "We're releasing this game on a 4-disc set and there's nothing you can do to stop us," and others would follow suit; the subscription-driven model would fall into ruin within a generation.
Of course, this is only relevant if game companies want to continue making money. Frankly, I'm perfectly happy with the idea of corporate game development ceasing altogether and everyone starting to pirate the big-name franchises. Spend no money at all-- that's always a better option anyway.
--21 May 2023--