Gaming has been one of my favorite pastimes for as long as I can remember. Some call it a waste of time and others call it an art form, but just about everyone would agree gaming has become a titan of entertainment.
In many ways, this popularity is exactly what gaming needs because it brings profit and interest to a field that, for many years, was a niche hobby.
However, as with anything that begins to bring in heavy revenue, the gaming industry has become overly-saturated with titles that are not very inspired and business practices that alienate dedicated fans. In short, the video game industry has almost become too mainstream for its own good.
Is this the article where I finally come out as a hipster? Not quite, but being anti-mainstream does have a few legs to stand on. The first of which involves the laziness with which many major gaming franchises have handled their releases in recent years.
Gamers’ minds will quickly jump to yearly-release series like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and every sports gaming franchise in existence when they think of series in which originality is tossed to the wayside in lieu of maximizing profit. Tom Marks from PC Gamer said, “When you make games for a deadline, the games don’t get finished. Plain and simple.”
However, more beloved series such as Halo, Dragon Age and Mass Effect have also committed a few different no-no’s, and it is quite obvious that their reasons for mistakes are no more noble. Whether it is releasing essentially the same game on a yearly basis or pushing development so much that the game is broken from day one, game companies are getting away with practices that would tank companies in other industries.
Gaming has garnered such an audience that, for every person who pays enough attention to see how little care was placed into a game’s creation, there are 10 who buy the game based on name or hype alone. It is almost wrong to blame the developers entirely, because the nature of the industry demands they not take the necessary time to perfect their product.
Gamers are not patient enough to wait for new releases, which hurts the gaming industry as a whole.
The gaming world has also adopted the trends of microtransactions and overdone downloadable content because there are too many consumers willing to pay. Since $60 is not enough profit per buyer, a good percentage of major gaming franchises now release every game with a $20 or $30 “season pass” which includes all downloadable content (DLC) released in the future.
For some games, DLC includes things which should have been in the base game from the beginning, and for others still, the DLC is actually on the disk when the game is bought, but must be unlocked through paying more money. This is a blatant cash grab. It spits in the face of people who stay loyal to certain game franchises, but it is done anyway because companies make up for the money lost by game boycotters as a result.
In addition, microtransactions have all but ruined mobile gaming in the US before the industry even got off the ground, and the problem has started to seep into console and PC gaming.
Paying $2 to gain a level or unlock a gun might sound innocuous enough, but developers have realized just how many people will pay $2 repeatedly. In some games, it is a necessity to pay extra money to be competitive.
A survey from Gamespot states, “68 percent of people believe the pay-to-win aspect of microtransactions within gaming is unfortunate.”
To me, being mainstream only allows enough popularity to be profitable even when the games suck. Sure, there are modern games that obviously have the utmost care placed into them, but there are way more games that exist solely to make money. I cannot stand behind that fact, and while I will still enjoy gaming in spite of this, it is obvious this sad trend will only continue.
