The gaming industry is in a great deal of trouble. If you have been paying attention for the past ten years, you may notice a few recurring incidents in gaming companies and certain game developers that have become a bit unsettling. Thankfully, through trial and error, the current gamers can arm themselves against these foul rogues who wish to pilfer your dead presidents straight from your bank account. There are red flags and signs to look for when dealing with games that look half way decent at first glance. There are also words that you should be on the lookout for. For instance:
Live Service Online Multiplayer
Dedicated servers are finite. A great deal of gamers know this and take this to heart when they are choosing their games. If your game has nothing but online modes, no single player aspects and the need to have a server of some form, then we all know that spending money on it is something of a massive gamble. At this point, what you are paying for is the experience of playing the game because it is either going to go away eventually or you will be walking the plains of a very empty game.
Some servers are dedicated by the company itself and they have the Massively Multiplayer capabilities, more power to them. There are games out there that have become self sufficient like this and some of them are still pretty fun to play. Then there's the other thousand titles out there that went straight belly-up.
When you look at the graveyard of servers being shut down after barely even two or three years, you need to know something is wrong by this point. Spending 70 Spacebucks on these titles that are blindly putting together these gum and ducttape online hosts is like throwing a rock into a volcano, hoping it lands on a ledge. EverQuest has been open since 1999, but it is the exception rather than the rule. Marvel's Avengers, Anthem, BattleBorne, Fallout 76, Rocksmith, City of Heroes, Gotham City Imposters and the list goes on; they're all either bone dry of players or you literally cannot even join a single game.
It seems strange that this has become something of a standard in some games' launch. Going full online has so rarely beared good results and yet putting in even the simplest Single Player Mode has given games life far after its release. Creating a game's AI should not be considered an inconvenience when it literally makes the game independent of developers or mods. Hell, Doom 4's multiplayer was so bland that it almost killed the game from the beginning. If it weren't for that game's exemplary Story Mode and continued Arcade Mode, Doom 2016 would be a forgotten mess of a Quake 3 Arena remake. We have Quake Champions for that.
Even Everquest requires you use mercenaries to group with because there's just not enough people online anymore. This applies to so many games now and spending so much money on such an unstable idea as games that are only online is putting your tuna under the cat's watch. It's only a matter of time.
Chasing Trends and Fads
There are times when two games that are just like one another could mean that they are very similar in quality and it's just more of a good thing. Wolfenstein and Doom weren't ultra violent because it was the trend of the time, but so many other games tried to copy that one trait and think that it made their game awesome. Doom was super violent because it had to do with guns and demons and they needed to make the blood as awesome as the game already was. Mortal Kombat was very much the same because they were going for visceral realism where Street Fighter was a bit more cartoony.
Throughout gaming history, many of the truly great games have come from an original idea or even some games that took inspiration from one game and then took the concept further (see Alone in the Dark's impact on Resident Evil). Where there are games like Overwatch that beat Battleborne or Dante's Inferno, that failed to be God of War, companies apparently don't seem to realize that catching lightning in a bottle is trickier than just throwing money at a product and siccing some random people onto it to make it happen.
This, along with the afforementioned Online-only gameplay made Destiny crumble and die multiple times throughout its very unstable original run. While the game was finished later (we'll get to that), many players remember sleeping through it and shrugging their shoulders when it was done. What happened? It looked like Halo, didn't it? We got the original developers of Halo to do it, what went wrong? Too much game, not enough effort, in a nutshell.
When Resident Evil reared its head, the sixth generation was marred with zombies, tank controls and shallow storylines involving worldwide catastrophies. When Mario made the conversion to 3D, it was in the best interest for some developers to take that leap but there were so many that had no idea what they were doing. Any programmer will tell you that switching over to a new format takes months if not years of preparation for a new gaming team and that was never an option. Chasing trends means that you need to stay on the cutting edge and if you fall behind, the business world moves on without you and studios didn't want that.
Studio Involvement
Alarming sales meant that studios would start to step into projects. Stories, character and gameplay began to take a backseat to what was popular at the time and timeless stories were being turned into watered down pop culture slogs or just mindless deconstructions that just made a great game into basic trash. From titles being censored to meet parental demands to outright changing the entire genre of a game already in development, studio involvement started to become something of the norm and it flatout destroyed projects.
The original Tomb Raider is probably one of the biggest and most obvious franchises to suffer from this. Lara Croft became such a cash cow for the studio that the need for the developers to keep turning out game after game became a point of real concern. They even went so far as to kill Lara Croft at the end of one of the games and sighed with relief when that was finally over. In the same breath, they turned around and the studio came right back and ordered yet another game. So, not only did they need to make a whole other title, but now Lara Croft needed to come back. Thanks to this, Tomb Raider was decimated as the creative energy and the market for the games both ran completely dry before the inevitable reboot in the later 2010's. They were even blamed for the second Tomb Raider film's failure. As if either thing had anything to do with the other.
The problem with studios is that they can only see the business side of things to the point where obvious concepts like character and story are lost to them. It all became about making games as much as possible and as big as possible with bigger graphics and more content. This became such a huge problem and the idea of "Crunch", or the act of creating a game at the speed and frequency to sheer exhaustion, became something of the norm. With studios at their heels, developers were pumping out more bland and dismissive titles with such regularity that many have compared it to working in a sweat shop.
That's not even to mention the titles that were unfinished and decided to finish themselves later. The biggest example of this was Tony Hawk 5 for the PS4. If you want to see what studio over-involvement, burnout, franchise fatigue and overcompensation looks like in gaming, look no further. Tony Hawk Proskater 5 lacked features that even its predecessors possessed in spades and they were all released more or less in their entirety from day one. Here is a game that not only cut every single corner right before release but continued to cut corners even AFTER the game's release into stores.
Tony Hawk Proskater 5 became the real smoking gun for everything wrong with gaming. While the game was being released, they wanted to give developers more time to keep cranking out hours. So, like smart people, they decided to make the day one patch an 8 gigabyte mega file, literally fixes for the entirety of the game that you are required to download before you can play. No, this is not a joke and no, this did not go well for them. Not only was this a tasteless, senseless gesture from the studio and a wanton show of uncaring egos amid an ocean of exhausted developers, but also didn't even fix it to the point where it was fun or even slightly enjoyable. Downloading it at all is a gamble now because the data is often reported to either glitch out or simply not load. The game itself is rated among the worst ever made.
Annual Releases
If creating one large game in a ridiculously short amount of time is bad enough, then creating one game every single year should be enough to make your brain rip in twain. This is an entire vortex of nothing but developing military shooters such as Battlefield or Call of Duty games. Count how many titles the two games alone have had, along with their spinoffs. The numbers get insane. Battlefield 4 is one of the earliest examples of unfinished AAA "modern shooters" games that were unfinished and released anyway to meet presales. Games such as The Sims, Assassins Creed, Madden keep coming out with such constant additions and expansions to their games. It keeps adding more and more expenses to the players. When gamers started to buy into this, the developers added on more and more DLC and microtransactions. Subscription costs and loot boxes began to crowd the market and all of it spelled greed.
They are trying to say that you can manufacture the experience by putting a number on the screen and have someone pay money to make that number go up. Looter Shooters, MMORPG's, they even put Loot Crates in fighting games and first person shooters! A lot of these games can be near impossible to progress in without spending some type of money or putting countless hours into the grind in order to need more downloads and more content. This made games a great deal of money until morality came into play and many people spoke out. Star Wars Battlefront 2 broke the camel's back in 2017 and since then, other gaming trends have reared their ugly heads but this should serve as a very good reminder of just how bad it can get. Kids were spending their parents' money without asking and spending thousands of dollars of their own money with no discouragement. Thankfully, an outcry of gamers and parents created enormous backlash for companies and there was even questionable legality at play.
It eventually got so bad that Ghost Recon Breakpoint, with an already ridiculous game store, sold game features called "Time Savers". You bought these things that made it to where you didn't even need to play the game, you just jumped ahead in experience and it was like you played the game, but you didn't! It's already been said by 2000 gamers, but I'm still going to say it: Why bother when you can just not pay any money and not play the game in the first place? You'll save the money and that Time Saver can be infinite! It's almost like time actually exists for free!
If you haven't noticed, not a lot has been said about the current Mortal Kombat games on this site. WB has been very guilty of the microtransactions for a long time and the idea that it's all cosmetic and doesn't affect gameplay doesn't help a lot. They're still the ones who brought out Injustice 2: Gods Among Us and Shadow of War. The idea of letting these people run a "virtual console" like Stadia and be given such control over your assets seems rather absurd.
Nothing good can come of encouraging shady business practices like these. If you want to see games improve, stop buying into the hype trains that come out. We need to stop blindly pre-ordering games that haven't even gotten finished because the experience can change at any point. They obviously don't need to discuss such a detail before they get your money. Wait for the reviews to come out online. One huge difference between the before times and now is that there are so many avenues to keep yourself informed of a title's pros and cons. Take advantage of this, it's basically free. It is important to not settle for mediocre garbage, unfinished games and blatant lies from corporations that will say literally ANYTHING to sell their product, turn around and do it all over again. Don't be afraid to want better quality and make sure they work for your hard earned cash. Virtua Ponder.
