For me the issue goes beyond the gaming industry, it's all that "business" culture which is killing progress and creativity in every area.
In the gaming industry we have:
1-Half a dozen HUGE companies creating AAA games. The priority of such companies is to have profit above all else... the product cannot be "too good" as this adds to the final cost, in addition the product cannot be "too innovative" as there is no way to predict if it will return the investment. Considering AAA games may cost tens of millions, the risk is deemed too great. So we are stuck with a lot of similar games, which are delivered as barebones as possible (and only if it's deemed profitable, receive more content/fixes, etc.), reusing assets, engines, microtransactions, buggy, etc...
2-Thousands of small studios, which have more room for creativity, but in the end are just companies trying to survive and end up forced to resort to the freemium model with advertising and microtransactions (not that the AAA games don't do that, they do a lot). The game is usually built on top of a business model, and not the other way around.
3-Millions of indie developers, which thanks to the much better game creation tools available can get more creative. Problem is that the market gets flooded with games, 99.99% of which are not that good.
As consumers, the options we have are:
1-A few AAA games which look and plays similar inside its genre, are expensive and incomplete. You only get the promise of having more stuff added to it in the future (not for free, of course), and only IF the game succeeds.
The game may also very intrusive DRM to force you to be online as it helps in its profitability, which in my opinion is not because of piracy, but to be able to monitor your behavior in-game. This can be used to extract usage data from you so they can make a better decision on their next DLC, or just sell it as it can be used for directed advertising (or both, why not?). Some of those pretend to be free, but once you start playing the game nags you on every screen asking for money in a way or another, note that the game is already making a profit from ads and probably your usage data, so the microtransactions are just an extra.
2-Millions of indie games which can be amateurish crap, cheap copies of big tittles (those usually made by desperate indie studios trying to cash in the latest trends), or some real good and creative game. Unfortunately you need to search too much to find something worth your time, to the point the search itself is not worth your time.
Not to sound dramatic or anything, but for me the gaming industry grown too large for its own good... games are too expensive to make, and due to the cost they are designed to be "safe" for investors. On the other hand we have a single guy trying to create a cool game, but simply cannot do it alone as a game requires multiple talents to be made. Personally I'm not making any effort to support it (i.e. by consuming or buying the same game again and again) because I just don't care if it collapses. I know that the industry revenue throughout the years its growing steadily, but keep in mind all this money is going to fewer and fewer companies each year.
ZellSF wrote on 2022-06-22, 13:50:
A lot of the things mentioned doesn't even do that...
However, "AAA market" != modern games. Conflating those two is very much misinformation.
Also, very much demonstrating my point that people here just are not knowledgable in the subject of modern games, if they can only talk about games so heavily pushed by marketing practically everyone knows about them.
Edit: Quoting your comment as I though it was interesting. You are absolutely right (myself included as I don't have a clue about modern gaming outside the AAA market), unfortunately it shows that the AAA market seems to be only thing that exists as their advertising budget is probably far more than the budget of all the non-AAA games combined.
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