Company's don't care about players, 2022 edition

And everyone claps

Your favourite game company doesn't care about you. That seems like a fairly sensible and acceptable statement to make by most people's standards, of course they don't care about us- they have themselves to worry about. This is a silent and selfish world, everyone's out for themselves, it would honestly be anomalous if a development company suddenly started to care about the well being of their audience just because we squeezed out money for them. But what if I told you that for some developers it goes a step beyond that? They harbour not just apathy, but disgust. Genuine and acute disliking; all for those they claim to be creating entertainment for. And that might seem like a stretch and perhaps a somewhat unfair extrapolation, but the revelations of early 2022 certainly do paint that exact picture nice and clearly for us all.

There have been several iterations of brand new schemes and meddlings that various gaming companies have lauded in the past few weeks, few of which truly push forward our lovely little medium of gaming in any way that will improve, you know; the games. Instead, we're looking at new ways we can pump up the coffers of our favourite development giant in the hopes that- gee I don't know, maybe that trickle-down economics will finally kick-in after all this time? One of the most embarrassing of which has been the whole 'live service model' which has bitten companies in the ass so many times, but still they insist it's the future. Releasing a bad game and telling us it's good but give them 10 years to make it good is wearing a little thin, but don't just my opinion for it. Lets look at Babylon's Fall. That's a game which looked pretty bad, even with big names like Square Enix in the producer's chair and Platinum Games suffering the developer's whip. But worry not for how it looks, because it is a live service! Everything is subject to be improved, the beginning is not the destination, yadda yadda yadda... How did that work out for them? Well the game is currently looking at a player peak on Steam of just shy of 1,200 players. And a average of around 300 at this current moment. Hmm... okay but what about the free demo they put out? Average of 30 players... Yikes, there really is no spinning that one, huh? I guess players want good games. Weird.

But that's just one scheme. Recently I've noticed an influx in subscription mania setting in as game companies get all hot and bothered about the prospect of shackling us all to unending repeating payments. Seems fair enough. The only thing being that they can't really figure out the point at which they make the subscriptions worthwhile. You know, something I'd actually want to dish out some coins for. Take Rockstar: (I wish someone would...) they want us to pay for a subscription to GTA Online. Yes, the very same GTA Online which as been around since 2014. Now it has a special plus subscription with exclusive apartments and cars and- I'm sorry did we all do something wrong to you, Rockstar? Did we all collective kick out your windows in a past life and this is your way of 'getting back' at the world? It's just that, as far as I can recall, GTA Online makes hundreds of millions each and every year. It's paying itself off by the truckload. Yet they need a new revenue stream out of it? Why? How does an 'aura of exclusivity' provide value to your favourite cash cow? Needless to say this was mocked to the high heavens. And even more needless to say it'll go through anyway. Because Rockstar doesn't care what you think, because the players don't matter. 

Oh and what's this? Call of Duty is apparently flirting with a subscription model in the near future and just what are we even doing anymore? Why have our development studios dedicated their lives and souls to whittling down the product but upping the cost on consumers? Haven't they already decided to try and ramp up the base purchase price by £10 this generation? Isn't that enough screwing about? How about blaming this all on stagnant inflation, whilst simultaneously dusting off their 100 dollar special edition versions and asking why we look so insulted? So say that COD gets a subscription service; what does that offer? A recurrent COD experience? We've already got that, it's called Warzone. Or is this going to be Warzone 2? Or maybe just exclusive bonuses for Warzone? What about the core package on offer has been improved in order to justify a recurrent price over a flat buy in. And if the answer is 'nothing', then why are we allowing this to happen?

Of course, I've just been dancing around the true Dark Horse of this whole affair. The villainous plague infesting the minds of overwise sane business men across all industries, the dreaded letters: NFT. I know that the Ubisoft debacle was technically last year, but some of their responses were made this year and I just can't forget about them so easily. Making NFT helmets in Breakpoint, an already dying game, in order to ensure it would become toxic to any prospective newcomers? Paying bonuses in NFTS to your employees? Committing to an NFT powered future, despite the fact that only a fraction of a percentage of cryptocurrency users even partake in the scam-ridden practice? Talk about a neon self-waving red flag and several halves. It's like a litmus test to see which developers still have normal pupils in their heads and which have had their sights surgically replaced with comical dollar signs; because no rational, clear seeing business focused individual could look at the numbers around NFT and see that as the incoming wave of the future.

And nowadays it doesn't even have to be an established video game giant who slides down this path. The grift is so ubiquitous with the industry that people are approaching games industry careers with it in mind. Just take Dr Disrespect's idea which has itself a hair brained, NFT fuelled scheme to try and suck money out of potential fans before the game is even made under some guise that 'everyone is an investor'. And absolutely not just a way for Dr D to abscond with funds from people too poor and dumb to successfully sue him. Forget that gaffe of accidentally nicking one of Cyberpunk 2077's screenshots; the very concept of his company is a worse plague on the industry. He's asking from funding in order to hire the development talent! How can you start a game studio that doesn't even have the development staff until after it gets money from it's customers? Revolutionary? Perhaps. The most suspicious framework for a development studio ever? Absolutely.  

So then with all these backhanded scowls shooting back and forth across the industry, one must ask; what does it take for a company to actually appear to value it's fans in todays age? Is there such thing as a games company that doesn't take advantage of their audience? Well I'd argue there are some, but they're becoming fewer. We just need a company who is communicative about changes which the public need to know about, who focus on making a game worthy of the monetisation strategies they intend to implement first, before putting the game out. A company that respects their audience's time, and who isn't asking them to commit 12 hours a day for several concerted weeks in order to get the most out of the game. Oh, and a company that doesn't try to sell their entire fanbase down a fad speculative investment scheme would be kind of nice. I'd certainly like that last one!

In conclusion, the video game industry is fraught with deciding what it even wants to be to the people it caters too nowadays. The entire medium has rocketed forward in the past forty years, moulding and shifting its core structure to rocket in line with traditional media and now it's slipping past itself into something unrecognisable. There are still people making great games for reasonable asking prices and solid returns; but they're starting to feel like the fringe old school against a wave of anti-consumerist bile. Up until now it's been one or two schemes that the big boys in the industry have rallied behind, pushing the big one forward whilst sneaking the smaller one into games at the same time so that the big one draws all the ire. But now the approach is scattergun and I don't know where all this is heading. All I can say is that gaming looks to a potentially drastic landscape in three years time.