Well, it's looking kinda dark for the video game industry, but it's also nothing we haven't seen before. Obviously, priorities got crossed somewhere along the way and now the big AAA industry has proven that it has lost its way. Indie games, on the other hand, have continuously given us surprises and challenges that we are enjoying. Not only are they more fun and inventive than the corporate garbage being pumped into the silo, but they are cheaper and more care has been given in considering the customer. How the industry has taken such a nosedive isn't really a huge mystery. Now that social media is more readily available and individuals have more access to communications with the general public, it has become something of a first grader's view on how to handle that freedom.
The point of Public Relations is to hype up the game and sell it to the player. That's it! There should be no other reason to talk to the buying audience than to show off what the game can do and what their experience will be like playing it. It is not a platform to berate and chastise the public for not wanting to buy your game. Once the buyer has decided that they don't want to spend the money, you have lost. Rubbing salt in your own wound and blaming the customer should never be on the agenda. Why do they allow these devs and publishers to speak on their behalf, with their name in their profiles as a constributor to that business? They are literally calling the public names and preaching at them like children, and it is only driving their own name into the ground.
Reputation is not just "who can look the coolest?" It is the way your viewing public perceives you. If you use your business to try and scam your players into purchasing your game, you are showing that you do not have our best interests in mind. You can have the most amazing game with every feature under the sun, but if you start throwing in microtransactions, modern politics and extremely horrific characters both in design and personality, it really should come as no mystery why no one bought the game. If no one cares about the game or likes how it looks, doubling down and speaking against the audience is not going to make anything better.
Well, it has already reached a boiling point. Customers are looking at indie games and buying them by the truck loads. When you have a game that is only 20 or 30 spacebucks, you're more apt to open up. When a more graphically appealing but mediocre looking game comes at 70 or 80 virtua clams, it's going to be a much harder sell. Their wallets speak for themselves and nothing will change that.
The indie developers comment very little on a personal level, besides taking jabs at the industry. They are getting lukewarm reviews by so-called "gaming journalists" but it's obviously because they don't have bribe money. Oh, don't think it's not obvious that gaming websites have been dealing under the table with their reviews. They will obviously prop up the most atrocious trash because they lined their pockets, while games that stand on their own get 5's and 6's.
Gaming Awards are some of the biggest jokes still left from the old days. They actually meant something at one point, but now someone can just plant a game that agrees with their political views and they're the ones in the running. They continuously snub games that don't go along with their narrative, but the joke is that those are the games that are actually selling. Numbers do not lie and neither does Steam when it comes to the player counts and overall sales of a game. The mere fact that this angers the AAA industry goes to show how trustworthy they are. This whole "Oh, it sold gangbusters, trust me bro" got old and outdated years ago.
Honesty is in short supply with the gaming industry. So, now if a developer or publisher shows some humility in both pricing and game development, they are drawing the crowd. Not all indie games are even real indie games and the public is snooping out their lies as they comes. It really goes to show how insulting the public's intelligence does not bear fruit. With games taking 5 to 8 years to come out, they are missing extremely glaring problems in their development as the companies rarely keep an eye on public interest. So, when the game comes out and the hundreds of millions of dollars are already spent, the game will often not meet any sales figures and the development team usually goes with it.
With this very puzzling industry standard, it's obvious that they will start weeding out the teams that are not meeting sales. The development teams will go under and the team will split into more development teams. At some point, this should get the less productive team members to find other types of work, but that is a much longer process than it really should be. Still, the more money they spend on flops, the more we will begin to see the tides changing. How hard will it crash in the meantime? That's really hard to tell, but it's going to come down one way or the other. Everything has a natural order and these dry periods are only going to get worse before they get better. The great thing about indie developers is that they don't quite play by the same schedule, so we may see some games from them sooner rather than later as the AAA corporations either die or wake up to reality. Only time will tell.
So we don't end on a downer note, though, I am happy to announce an idea that came back to the surface. I had an idea for a series a long time ago called AAA vs Indie and I made three articles about it. These articles ended up becoming their own singular entities when I loaded them to this website, but the Sonic Spectrum article, Survival Horror article, and Mighty Number Nein were all part of this series. It's going to pit interesting tidbits and events of the industry fighting between the two ends of the spectrum and see who comes out on top. It's not really a level playing field, but that's never stopped some developers from dominating as the underdog. So, let's take a nice little journey as I introduce yet another series because I feel like it. Virtua Boss.
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