Hey everyone,
I love playing games and I have played games since I was probably 7 or 8 years old, up until today I still enjoy playing games, but I have noticed a shift in game development which really concerns me.
But first a litte foreword from me
Everything I write here is my own personal experience and is not supposed to generalise every game developer or company which are out there. Any maybe to be taken with a grain of salt.
A jump to the past...
Back in the years of, welp let me think, probably 2008, you would pay for a game and the game would be a complete product, no real flaws and it would run perfectly on your computer.
We would play games like The Settlers on PC, Age of Empires and would have a blast cause these games were fun to play, offered replayability and when playing multiplayer there was no issues when networking with others.
Sure you would have a game developer push out a game extension for the game which would cost around €10, but these additions would add up so much good content to the game that the €10 would be well spent and you knew what you were getting.
Todays gaming market
Now look at today what the market offers you and what some developers are doing.
You are being charged €69,99 (which is around $74 or something) for some "Tripple A Game" which is supposed to be a finished product but plays like a buggy BETA or ALPHA version of the game.
Instead of playtesting, they release half finished products to the market with no effort and call it a "masterpiece" with supposed awards that were given at them for their, quote "Ground breaking mechanics" or "Ground breaking graphics", when in fact the only thing some games, such as Black Ops Cold War do, is break your entire console cause the code is written so bad that it literally starts bricking your console and you have to buy a new one.
Games used to be affordable, for those with litte money up to the people who had loads of money.
Nowdays you get charged fairy-like prices for games and don't even get the full game. It's all Season-Pass and the "Games as a Service" model which ruins the gaming industry as a whole.
Early Access
I really wasn't going to comment on the Early Access fiasco but I figured it would be important for people to know my standpoint on Early Access games.
While I think that Early Access can be greatly utilized to help developers fix bugs, polish their game and give people the feeling of helping the game progress, most developers just use Early Access to cash in and change little to nothing about their game in total.
Communities
Now let's talk about communities.
The core and fundament of any game is their community, I think we can all agree to that.
And the more it disgusts me when developers don't give a single thought about their players, their ideas, suggestions or anything they have to say!
I will now tell you a story of mine which still makes me angry up intill today and causes me to generally deny and reject any form of greedy and arrogant development team there is.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has one of the greatest and most awesome communities I have known over the years and I still love today.
Their playercount was up to 1-2 million players even till 2015!
That's great for a game and client which was released in 2006!
I spent days, months and years playing San Andreas Multi Player just racking up some cash as a mechanic on some road sides and it was the best thing I have ever done in my life.
It was so fun cause you had something to do, people were friendly and the overal athmosphere was cool!
Greed of developers
But unfortunately that era had to come to an end...
The developers of said SAMP platform decided to go full-greed mode and destroy the "Internet" tab of the client.
(For those who don't know anything about the SAMP Launcher, essentially the "Internet" tab was the tab where every game server would be listed, no matter how big or how small.
Then there was the "Hosted" tab. The Hosted tab was essentially server who would pay €50+(!!) a MONTH to get listed on their hosted tab page as some 'Premium Server'.)
This completely destroyed the community as smaller fun communities such as the dozen of SAMP Reallife/Roleplay servers would vanish and cease to exist cause nobody in the server browser would be able to find their server anymore. Sure people would still connect via direct IP, but everyone and that includes me too would use the regular "Internet" tab to get access to their servers.
What these greedy devs would do is, they would Mirror the Hosted Tab into the Internet Tab and only show the paid servers, completely ruining the existance of those who didn't pay.
They didn't fix that for FIVE YEARS! They didn't reply on the SAMP forums, they didn't even bother speaking about the issue! The whole community was messaging them saying "Fix the internet tab guys, please!"
Only when their Hosted Tab broke at some point being displayed as empty, some developer came out of a hiding spot and decided to "fix" the launcher.
The Internet Tab was fixed but the damage from over 5 years was already done. A once great community has died to the greed of developers.
It is up until this point where I have personally given up thinking that there will be any developer who still even cares about what their people have to say.
Big developer examples:
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EA spams out DLC to rack in cash with some of the most scummy business decisions ever to make.
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No Mans Sky was super hyped a launch and was a complete disaster at launch, then eventually fixed after some years.
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Cyberpunk was the most hyped game in decades, it was supposed to be this "ground breaking revolutionary, all you know about RPGs is nothing compared to this" game, which at release was SO BADLY BROKEN that it got taken of the PSN, mass refunds and the developers had to make an apology statement.
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Activision/Blizzard ruins their games by not listening to community feedback such as Black Ops Cold War being completely destroyed for dedicated fans with some of the worst 'Skill Based Matchmaking' there is.
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Behavior, with Dead by Daylight used to be a decent game, sure it had some flaws but it was playable.
It's community however was so superb toxic that it became unbearable to play due to the sheer amount of players just insulting, disrespecting and tilting each and another.
Now they released an update that completely broke the game and people hate it!
You think they care? Nope, they just go on a power-spree and post statements like "You people don't like the new update? Well too bad it's gonna stay". Multiple times...
Edit//
As I am writing this, I am getting warned by the Moderation team of the DBD discussion section.
"Naming and shaming is not allowed" when I was showing a twitch clip of somebody cheating.
Heavy censorship is a main tool of developers who can't take critique on their game.
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Miscreated - Entrada Interactive LLC
Oh boy oh boy... Where do I begin?
It's one of thise smaller game sudios who try to suppress criticism with either spamming positive reviews with bots or by banning everyone in their discussion section permanently who issue any form of criticism on their game.
Back in 2018 they released their game, I purchased it and.. HOLY COW It was unplayable!
It lagged so bad I could play a powerpoint presentation and get more frames from that!
So I went on the discussions, asked around if some other people had similiar problems and... My messages got deleted??
I then wrote a review about the game, didn't recommend it and instantly got downvoted by bots, just then to be answered by the same dev-plant who comments on every other review saying "It's you, not the game".
It doesn't take a huge IQ to understand that a person who hasn't played more than 3 hours in the game and is actively defending the game in the reviews, commenting literally any negative review there is issuing their almost generic, "It's you, not us" statement, then I am most certain that this is either some developer trying to make the game look better or some paid person boosting it's statistics.
I created a post on their discussions, questioning their ethics and asking why they do such thing, just to be permanently banned for "Slandering the Development team".
The current state of free speech is so bad, that you will end up getting banned, cancelled or censored for speaking a opinion your counterpart doesn't like.
Developers don't care about their communties anymore!
All they care about is cash, and it hurts my soul as a dedicated gamer to see these games I used to like and play, go down this spiral of greed, ignorance and disrespect towards the people who made their games great.
Communication / Voicechats
A whole different problem in modern gaming days is, the implementation of voicechats.
Like I said before, my greatest time was when I played SAMP. Some good old San Andreas Multiplayer with Text-Chat.
There was no such thing as Voicechat. Sure you could go onto the teamspeak and chat with people, but it was all text based, and people were friendly to one and another.
Now when you enter a game you hear people shouting and crying over voicechat, yelling at each other telling them how bad they are.
The era of voice-chat completely ruined the friendly and positive aura of gaming.
Sure, let's not forget that time changes, people grow up under different households, political ideas and philosophies and different opinions, but Jesus Christ.
Games today are SO TOXIC, you will always have somebody insult someone for literally no reason!
The best example of this is League of Legends.
You will start a game, things unfortunately don't go the way you plan they would go, and somebody instantly starts calling you out in chat with insults and tries to remember you of how bad you are.
"It's just a game"
Sure we all play games to win.
I would be a ignorant idiot if I were to say "It's just a game, why get mad".
Saying this is the biggest insult to a competitive person who loves and dedicates them self to gaming.
Take this as an example:
You spend hours and days playing CS:GO, you learn the maps, learn calls and eventually master weapon spray patterns.
You then eventually get to Supreme and it's your promotional game to Global Elite.
In your lobby you get some dude who is just trolling around, not giving a single care and just constantly calling you out "Why are you so mad, It's only a game".
These kind of people not only ruin it for the person who has been grinding up until this point, but they completely devalue all the work and effort the person has put into becoming the rank they are today.
Sure you can play games casually and have fun, but you shouldn't be ruining the competitive gamers experience just cause you think "Nah this is a waste of time, I'm not gonna bother".
Copying successfull business models
Instead of putting a focus on developing something brand new and revolutionising the market with a game that hasn't been seen before of that changes the way we used to play certain games, modern corporations and development teams would rather copy existing and successfull games instead of making something brand new!
Survival Games:
Back in about 2013 survival was THE gamemode everyone loved and liked to play.
It's a social survival experience which could be stressfull, rewarding and challenging at the same time.
You get to learn how people act under certain situations, you would have to adapt your strategy to survive and ultimatively had to fight against your biggest enemy. Yourself.
ArmA 2: Operation Arrowhead with it's DayZ mod was so successfull that Dean 'Rocket' Hall would eventually make his own standalone version of DayZ and put it in Early Access... Yeah we all know how long that game was in Early Access..
With the success of ArmA2's DayZ mod came the clones.
SurvivalZ, The Day Z, Infestation, Miscreated, and many many other clones.
People simply tried to cash in on the successfull genres and made either copycat versions or barely playable versions.
Battle Royale:
A little information about me before I get into why I am taking about this type of game like I will be;
While I am not the most social person in terms of speaking to people in random chats, I do like myself some good teamplay game.
I love it when you can get things done with your team and watch your work flourish.
The Battle Royale genre just builds on one scheme... Spawn, die, repeat. Eventually you will win, but that chance is small. At least for me it is.
Battle Royale is one of those type of games where you will start getting almost infinitely frustrated and start getting more and more toxic as you keep playing the game.
Your drive of competitiveness will eventually cause you to snap, insult people or destroy things in your surroundings if things don't go well.
Let's get to where Battle Royale all started.
Like all great things in life, it started in ArmA2: Operation Arrow head. Damn this game sure was a trendsetter...
More well known as the mod "Playerunknowns" the ArmA2 Battle Royale mod was basically what we all know as PUBG today.
I mean, literally, the developer of the ArmA2 BR mod was the guy who made PUBG.
Then eventually PUBG moved to Korea or something and got some heavy chinese influence.
Yada yada, 200000 microtransactions later the game became what it is today, a bot infested binfire.
Go ahead and what do we have today? Fortnite. Yikes
Fortnite cashed in on the trending and successfull Battle Royale PUBG game and combined what the children love: Cartoony graphics, building and quirky emotes.
Add some paid or sponsored influencers such as YouTubers to the mix and you have the perfect cash machine to rake in all the money you would need.
Now you may ask yourself, "But what about Fall Guys"?
Fall Guys is still a Battle Royale. Just with no guns, but It's still a cometitive "Last person alive wins" game. Wobbly Jellybeans who run from one side to the other may be interesting to watchn, and I would probably be willing to play it, wouldn't it be for the fact that there is Battle Passes and Microtransactions everywhere.
And here comes the thing I dispise the most, from what I have seen in my entire life...
Microtransactions
My god. There is NOT A SINGLE GAME in the year of 2020-2021 that doesn't include some DUMB Battle Pass or Microtransactions that will suck your whole money out of your wallets!
Developers lock almost LITERALLY ANTHING behing a god forsaken paywall or some stupid "Pay this to get some extra that!".
What happened to the games where you would pay for a product and the devs would DELIVER SAID PRODUCT!
Battle Passes are a sad excuse to grab in cash to sell you content that should have been in the beginning at the first place!
I didn't buy a game for €69,99 just for there to be only 3 maps to play on, and then you have the balls to tell me, "But you can have these additional maps if you buy the Battlepass."!
That is the most scummy thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and I honest to god wish that these people get the punishment they deserve for scamming so many people and kids for their money.
In the year of 2021 it is so easy for kids to get money to pay microtransactions with.
They can literally go to any store here in Germany, get themself a PaySafeCard (which is a Real Money into Digital Money coupon basically) and waste all their money on some Battle Pass, Microtransaction or Fortnite skin they like.
Developers actively pray on kids or people who are willing to spend hundreds or thousands of euros or dollars on cosmetics which will in the end gain them NOTHING. No better gameplay, no greater map selection or any new mechanic that rewards them for supporting the game.
They get some dumb cosmetic which probably didn't even take 1-2 hours to code or paint.
TD;DR
Gaming is as toxic as it never has been,
Developers don't give a single shit about what you have to say,
Microtransactions EVERYWHERE,
Unfinished products everywhere and people defending them,
Consumers deserve and have the right to demand a finished and working product for their money!
You wouldn't be happy either, if you were sold a brand new car for €32,000 and the engine would cease to function 3 days after purchase, would you?
Those are my thoughts on the current state of gaming and I would love to know your view on the topic.
Cheers,
Chiru
