Pl4t0
Active Member
So in the past few months, we've seen enough "remakes" of classic, non-shooter titles brought into the modern era of gaming with FPS reboots, Syndicate and XCOM the most notable among them.
On top of that, we've seen a goddamn tsunami of sequels, most of them 3's, with several 2's mixed in (Serious Sam 3, Resistance 3, Gears 3, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Red Orchestra 2...need I continue?). Almost every high-profile game to release this year has been a sequel or attached to a franchise in some form, the single notable exception being the announcement of Dishonored, a new and promising title that is nevertheless a first-person action game.
We're seeing the gaming industry follow the movie industry suit: remember Transformers 3? No, because your brain blacked out the travesty and rape that was being committed before your very eyes, because it was that terrible? Okay, well, Micheal Bay made this movie, this really dumb action movie, with lots of explosions, and because explosions are easier to follow than, say, amazingly well-executed but cerebral layered-dream sequences (*cough* Inception *cough*) people were happier with the dumb but flashy high-budget movie than the intelligent but slightly harder to follow high-budget movie...
Basically, since Call of Duty went big we've been seeing the same thing happen with gaming. Like it or not, gaming is mainstream now - you're hard-pressed to find a kid who doesn't own a console or gaming-capable PC in some fashion or another. And that brings a whole new market to the table from the perspective of the publishers, Activision was simply one of the first to capitalize on this, and capitalize they have. They've taken what the unwashed masses want (fast-paced, macho-adrenalin fueled linear action romps with no plot and dumbed-down mechanics), and done what soulless corporations do best: sell the same product as many times as possible to a placated audience.
In a word: sequilitis. A bad, bad case of sequilitis has gripped our industry in the past year.
Pre-Order Incentives
So, with that said, my first point:
The AAA industry is a different animal now. It's splitting up its games, dividing them into chunks and spreading these various chunks over a variety of different pre-order incentives. If I buy it early from Best Buy, I get extra guns, if I buy it early from Wal-Mart, I get more XP for the first two weeks...and so on, ad naseum.
I find it annoying. I'm not too up in arms about it, because it's a goddamn video game we're talking about, but it still gets me a bit riled. My question: how do you feel about it?
Remakes
Similarly, how do you feel about the recent glut of "remakes" of classic strategy and genre titles being rebooted as FPS's? X-Com was not an FPS, it was (and is) one of the best instances of turn-based gaming ever envisioned. Whether or not it will work as an FPS has yet to be seen, and I don't mean to come off as "old man gamer" here, ranting on about those young whippersnappers defiling the sanctity of the old days, but clearly these are just cash-grabs using established brand-names as the jumping-off points for another artificial cash-cow trilogy? This, if anything, gets me a bit angry.
Where we stand
Where does this leave the gaming industry? You might ask yourself, what sort of future do we have in an industry dominated by these soul-crushingly numb and unfeeling corporate enterprises? From here on out, it's only speculation.
My personal opinion: we'll be OK. In fact, more than OK. We'll come out on top of this.
The great thing about capitalism is that it works more or less like a very turbulent phoenix; meaning, it goes through rapid periods of growth, destruction, and rebirth. We see this happening right now with the current recession - a period of rapid growth and expansion, followed by a defining crisis, the aftermath of which will see many companies dissolved and replaced by more capable and effective ones. More or less, survival of the fittest (on paper, in any case). The gaming industry is no exception - we're entering one of those defining periods, during which the massive growth and expansion of the current AAA publishers (namely EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and THQ) will either begin to listen to its customers and avoid collapse by catering to all sides and offering quality titles (like Valve does, bless their hearts) or cave inwards under the weight of their own dull, repetitive franchises.
Also, the Indie scene is incredibly strong and prolific on the PC right now, even extending so far as Xbox Live and PSN (but not nearly as strong as on the open-ended freedom the PC offers its developers). You can subsist on a thousand free indie titles a month, on a PC running Windows '98 with hardware to match. If the gaming industry as we knew it ended tomorrow, an army of Indie developers (crowning Notch as their king) would march forth and claim the promised land that is rightfully theirs, delivering unto us the variety and quality we should demand from the AAA developers.
And let's not forget, some developers (Valve and Blizzard especially, even despite Blizzard's ties to Activision, which are actually minimal) actually care about gamers!
Thanks for reading this incredibly long blog, you are a real trooper if you reached this line without skipping or skimming. Tell me your thoughts! I like nothing more than stimulating discussion/debate.
On top of that, we've seen a goddamn tsunami of sequels, most of them 3's, with several 2's mixed in (Serious Sam 3, Resistance 3, Gears 3, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Red Orchestra 2...need I continue?). Almost every high-profile game to release this year has been a sequel or attached to a franchise in some form, the single notable exception being the announcement of Dishonored, a new and promising title that is nevertheless a first-person action game.
We're seeing the gaming industry follow the movie industry suit: remember Transformers 3? No, because your brain blacked out the travesty and rape that was being committed before your very eyes, because it was that terrible? Okay, well, Micheal Bay made this movie, this really dumb action movie, with lots of explosions, and because explosions are easier to follow than, say, amazingly well-executed but cerebral layered-dream sequences (*cough* Inception *cough*) people were happier with the dumb but flashy high-budget movie than the intelligent but slightly harder to follow high-budget movie...
Basically, since Call of Duty went big we've been seeing the same thing happen with gaming. Like it or not, gaming is mainstream now - you're hard-pressed to find a kid who doesn't own a console or gaming-capable PC in some fashion or another. And that brings a whole new market to the table from the perspective of the publishers, Activision was simply one of the first to capitalize on this, and capitalize they have. They've taken what the unwashed masses want (fast-paced, macho-adrenalin fueled linear action romps with no plot and dumbed-down mechanics), and done what soulless corporations do best: sell the same product as many times as possible to a placated audience.
In a word: sequilitis. A bad, bad case of sequilitis has gripped our industry in the past year.
Pre-Order Incentives
So, with that said, my first point:
The AAA industry is a different animal now. It's splitting up its games, dividing them into chunks and spreading these various chunks over a variety of different pre-order incentives. If I buy it early from Best Buy, I get extra guns, if I buy it early from Wal-Mart, I get more XP for the first two weeks...and so on, ad naseum.
I find it annoying. I'm not too up in arms about it, because it's a goddamn video game we're talking about, but it still gets me a bit riled. My question: how do you feel about it?
Remakes
Similarly, how do you feel about the recent glut of "remakes" of classic strategy and genre titles being rebooted as FPS's? X-Com was not an FPS, it was (and is) one of the best instances of turn-based gaming ever envisioned. Whether or not it will work as an FPS has yet to be seen, and I don't mean to come off as "old man gamer" here, ranting on about those young whippersnappers defiling the sanctity of the old days, but clearly these are just cash-grabs using established brand-names as the jumping-off points for another artificial cash-cow trilogy? This, if anything, gets me a bit angry.
Where we stand
Where does this leave the gaming industry? You might ask yourself, what sort of future do we have in an industry dominated by these soul-crushingly numb and unfeeling corporate enterprises? From here on out, it's only speculation.
My personal opinion: we'll be OK. In fact, more than OK. We'll come out on top of this.
The great thing about capitalism is that it works more or less like a very turbulent phoenix; meaning, it goes through rapid periods of growth, destruction, and rebirth. We see this happening right now with the current recession - a period of rapid growth and expansion, followed by a defining crisis, the aftermath of which will see many companies dissolved and replaced by more capable and effective ones. More or less, survival of the fittest (on paper, in any case). The gaming industry is no exception - we're entering one of those defining periods, during which the massive growth and expansion of the current AAA publishers (namely EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and THQ) will either begin to listen to its customers and avoid collapse by catering to all sides and offering quality titles (like Valve does, bless their hearts) or cave inwards under the weight of their own dull, repetitive franchises.
Also, the Indie scene is incredibly strong and prolific on the PC right now, even extending so far as Xbox Live and PSN (but not nearly as strong as on the open-ended freedom the PC offers its developers). You can subsist on a thousand free indie titles a month, on a PC running Windows '98 with hardware to match. If the gaming industry as we knew it ended tomorrow, an army of Indie developers (crowning Notch as their king) would march forth and claim the promised land that is rightfully theirs, delivering unto us the variety and quality we should demand from the AAA developers.
And let's not forget, some developers (Valve and Blizzard especially, even despite Blizzard's ties to Activision, which are actually minimal) actually care about gamers!
Thanks for reading this incredibly long blog, you are a real trooper if you reached this line without skipping or skimming. Tell me your thoughts! I like nothing more than stimulating discussion/debate.
