Videogame woes.md

I’m sad about the state of the videogame industry today. Being the change I want to see, here are a few guidelines I follow:

• Prefer “indie” games as opposed to “AAA”, since “AAA” are generally very much not worth their asking price without some very steep (>70%) discounts, based on the amount of fun they deliver
  • The fact that the “AAA” comes from credit ratings (Wikipedia) should be very indicative of priorities in development of such games
• Avoid gaming-only hardware (primarily game consoles) in order to get more out of your hardware and software and to save living space
  • “Well, you can do multiple things on a computer. At once even. Can you Photoshop on an Xbox?”
• Be mindful of the monetization model
  • For single-player games: no payments outside of the initial purchase (be it of the base game or DLCs)
  • For multi-player games: no payments outside of the initial purchase or fixed pay-to-play subscription (I don’t really play anything that requires a subscription anymore)
• See whether the game in question uses invasive technology that requests effective full control over a system, like anti-cheat systems, it’s a serious security threat in capability
• See whether the game employs advanced DRM schemes like Denuvo
  • They’re a performance hog, so far the only claims to the contrary come from the devs behind it, 3rd-party outlets tend to confirm the difference; amusingly, this results in pirates having a better experience than legitimate customers
  • They severely limit what you can do with the game, by design: getting in the way of preservation and modding
    • Search for games becoming unplayable due to their DRMs rendered inoperable

General grievances

• Graphics has developed deep into diminishing returns for the end consumer, both in terms of gaming hardware (PC GPUs, memory, disk space, consoles) and game production (engines, assets and development time for higher resolutions all impacting the purchase price)
  • See the explosion of BattleBit Remastered after the release of Battlefield 2042 — practically the same genre, massive gameplay intersections, some odd advantages (up to 254 players per battle, wut), but with potato-level graphical fidelity easily reached comparable popularity
  • See ULTRAKILL’s almost religious following: it put an even more aggressive and fast-paced spin on DOOM-like (2016 reboot) already aggressive and fast-paced weapon-swapping FPS combat, but features PS1-level graphics
• Brand/franchise loyalty is immense and every franchise is perceived as something so unique that nothing else can fill its role adequately — which is not true, but games are rather difficult to dissect into specific desirable pieces in order to find alternatives
  • Future installments of an existing franchise are also not guaranteed to follow the path of their predecessors, especially if there’s been a change of leadership in the development team — it might in fact follow, but you can no longer assume that it will
  • A good chunk of The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe covers this topic marvelously (finding the starting point for it might take a while, and the topic is spread out across different sections of the game, so if you can’t spare the time to play it yourself for the full experience, feel free to watch a playthrough such as this)
• Games becoming abandonware shortly (a few years) after release is a widely accepted phenomenon, with the alternative approaches mostly being either remasters or games-as-a-service; older games are rarely patched to support later systems
  • Amusingly, when remasters do happen, they don’t always retain the functionality of the original (one especially bright example would be “Warcraft 3: Reforged”, which fans sometimes refer to as “Refunded”, which not only wasn’t feature-complete, but came with revocation of the original game in digital stores!)

Game consoles

This started out as a general grievance, but spiraled out into a whole new section because of just how much wrong there is with them.

Compared to PC, most game consoles of today are utterly pitiful.

Mainstream game console manufacturers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) are ruining the industry. They insist on investing immense amounts of money into creating walled gardens with:

• fixed function hardware that just plays games and does little else outside of it even when similarly-priced hardware can, in theory, perform the same functions and more of less-demanding tasks
• no compatibility across companies or even generations of the same company, be it in the consoles themselves or peripherals (for consoles as well as more open platforms)
• minimal and lagging innovation in game controls
  • very visible in adoption of VR, which is probably the biggest leap in immersion of this century so far:
    • Oculus spearheaded PC VR back in 2012, in 2016 HTC joined the competition with its Vive headset, in 2019 Valve released their Index — with other companies constantly catching up in terms of features and specs and compatibility mostly preserved
    • Sony released PSVR in 2016 and never improved upon it until the release of PSVR2 in 2023 (!!!) that is not compatible with the former
• acute hostility towards innovation from outside sources: digitization of older generation media, game modding, new types of controllers, new features afforded by larger available resources (picture post-processing from older platforms, saving/loading at any time and free synchronization of save data across devices)

All this results in:

• gaming being generally expensive
  • the cost of GPUs for games does not justify the value it brings in games it can run
  • hardware longevity suffers, since games tend to run at “peak performance” that the hardware allows (increased wear) and portability is routinely sacrificed every few years, obsoleting prior purchased games
• tons of e-waste that in restrospect didn’t need to exist
  • old hardware (consoles, controllers)
  • game media (cardridges, disks, memory cards, etc.)
• lacking and stagnant user experience
  • severe lag between a technology becoming available and it being adopted for use in games
  • features deliberately held back and hardware actively locked down to prevent their implementation (see Nintendo’s cloud save support)

Release dates are meaningless

There’s nothing wrong with releasing an unfinished game, so long as the customer is informed of it. Proper releases coming out with a level of quality below prominent Early Access titles (such as No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 76, Starfield) beg the question: what’s a release anymore?

I’d argue that it’s now an arbitrary date when a game becomes playable. Not necessarily that it’s done or ready.

You might have noticed how some of the biggest releases end up getting postponed, at times more than once. Every time it happens indicates an internal mismanagement within the development cycle and causes a lot more than just delaying the release, as additional resources have to come from somewhere, and investors’ patience can be thin. So the games might undergo feature cuts and content cuts to a point where it’s no longer the same game. And the more it happens, the farther the game ends up from its intended vision, compromising with realities of development that could not sustain the original vision. Whether the vision for the game can sustain such a cut depends on the leadership’s ability to see what’s critical and what isn’t. And when done too many times, you get Starfield, which was relentlessly mocked for being unbearably bland.

Publishers might try to artificially inflate the impact a release date has on consumers through things like pre-order bonuses, but these bonuses can’t be too big without hurting the game’s long-term financial performance — what’s left without these bonuses at least in the future has to be compelling enough for people to keep buying the product going forward.

As Frost concisely puts it in Cold Take: “I’m essentially paying the most I’ll ever pay for a game in the worst state it’s ever gonna be in”. With a significantly lesser incentive to improve down the line, since by release date the money is already on the table. No Man’s Sky had a hell of a comeback and Cyberpunk 2077 eventually reached maturity 2 years after the release. Whether or not you want to take that risk is of course up to you, but there is such an abundance of games on the market nowadays that you can certainly find a more refined way to scratch your particular itch. It’s worth the effort.

Fun games are unsustainable

A career in videogame development was something I had my sights on for the longest back at school. I’ve made some significant progress in this direction, acquiring many skills for the area.

Eventually I made it to a major game developer conference that conveniently happened to be arranged in the exact city where I lived. And that’s where it went sideways and I decided to switch tracks to a less exploitative industry.

I’ve learned that professional game development, short of rare gems, practically relies on investments, exploitation of players or both. The gaming market back then was already full of high-budget garbage, and unfortunately these kinds of games are the only ones where you can assume you might have a consistently high salary.

Said rare gems are mostly indie hits made by relatively small teams that don’t need much for sustenance and thus can afford to not compromise the fun of their game for the sake of their survival.

I’m not really blaming the industry for being like this. The way I see it, it’s a consequence of the way our society works right now. Said indie hits seem to emerge either as side gigs, projects funded out of pocket, rare publishers that specialize on indies and attach very few strings or similarly rare circumstances, and even most of those just die off, caving under financial pressure and never seeing release or agreeing to an exploitative compromise.

I don’t know what might be a solution to this. But until there is one, I have recused myself from ever working in that industry again.

See also

• Stop killing games, a movement started by Ross Scott aimed at stopping game developers and publishers from, well, killing their games: rendering them inoperable when actively supporting their infrastructure stops being sustainable, which outside of subscription-based MMOs ends up being a highly surprising move for customers that didn’t see an expiration date on the box at the time of purchase (because it wasn’t there)
• Cold Take (previously on Second Wind, earlier on The Escapist… it’s a long story) by Sebastian Ruiz is a fantastic series of videos on various unpleasant aspects of videogames, some of which are necessary evils, rudimentary traditions or straight up nonsense