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, development time)
  • See the explosion of BattleBit Remastered after the release of Battlefield 2042 — practically the same genre, massive gameplay intersections, but with potato-level graphical fidelity
  • 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 difficult to dissect in order to find alternatives
• 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

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)