Gaming's newest enemy has dropped

 Or a returning one?

So even though I am not of the country and pointedly never speak of it- I am very aware of who Donald Trump is and the goings-on of the Election he is currently barrelling towards with all the grace of an elephant riding a Big Wheel. Those yanks and their crazy conundrums are just across the pond from little old me, as such it behooves me to stay abreast. Not least of all because theirs is the home to 99% of the video game developers in the world right now. (Although it should be noted that many of the best are further afield.) As such when rumours start to spread that, according to the allegedly words of Donald Trump, that territory might soon be going to war with Video Games- I get a little worried. But not before I gawk at the sheer gall of such idiocy.
 

I get the need for incendiary rhetoric in a position such as his. The man is a hairs-breadth away from an election just clear of two assassination attempts that no one seems to care about and a supreme dud of a VP choice he clearly made when he thought his opponent was too much of a dementia riddled fading mind to notice. Now all of a sudden all of his directed attacks at age and how doddering Joe Biden is have bit him in the ass, and people are taking more notice of his meandering speeches that shed away the larger rally crowds, or the concentrated thirty minute dance break recess he took for absolutely no reason a week or so back. How do you convince people you're not falling out of your saddle? Double down on the rhetoric! Let people know you stand for things and hopefully it's the kind of things they will decide they care about- because that's modern democracy, baby!

Still, even with all that readily apparent in my mind- sometimes the targets he picks are so stupid you wonder if the man even knows where he is half of the time. To be clear, I'm talking about the comments Trump made about the "glorification of violence" in society which "includes the gruesome and horrible video games that are now commonplace." (I see that, once again, a popular dictator from a foreign country has slipped their rhetoric directly into his mouth- what a shocker!) Although not clear on any plan of 'banning' or taking any action whatsoever, making this not so different from his video game violence mix-tape from a few years back, he did foretell a need to "stop or reduce this substantially." Which falls just short of a promise so the man can happily forgrt about this the moment he waddles back into the Oval Office.

Now at no point does this actually rise to the point of being a 'ban', but this is the kind of talk that sends a shiver up Jack Thompson's little thompson. Still- let's take a look at this from an objective angle- shall we? Donald Trump essentially just demonised the number one pass time of a lot of middle Americans, at a time when he really needs every vote that he can score in a tighter election then anyone would be comfortable with. Then again his base is the puritanical Right- the kind of people desperate to find an enemy in anything other. Also the base that is rapidly getting aged out as they move into retirement age- mix with with a paranoia over encroaching gun control and literally anything can become a scapegoat. But let's take this a bit further.

Say Donald does start throwing down the legislature against the video game world- that would literally kneecap the single most profitable entertainment industry sector in the entire world: this from a candidate who lionizes their financial savviness. They claim that America is on the ropes and they want to revitalise the economy- though I seriously wonder how crashing a multibillion dollar industry would achieve that. Then again- I'm operating under the very weak belief that these guys are intelligent and think before they act. But uhh... well, that isn't really something you can take for granted, now is it?But just for fun, let's play out how this would go.

So first off, all of the big companies would literally just move out- basically feeding industry to other countries- not very 'American first' of you, eh Donald? Of course, you can bet that most employees won't be able to make such a jump, so this would result in a complete degradation of current industry talent- probably leading to a giant crash. Smaller to medium studios would be absolutely incapable of leaving the country and would be forced out of work. Perhaps their talent would filter into the tech sector- who can say. Either way Donald would end up making many of his own countrymen destitute in order to force a false scapegoat. And is anything more American than that?

Long story short, is Donald Trump the new bad guy of the Games Industry? Nah, but he's certainly much raking in the dumbest areas for a man who is apparently looking to score some last second votes. His base is locked in- they don't need to be catered to anymore- yet all in he goes making hairbrained promises that twist the vast majority of younger Americans out of his grasp. The further this goes on the more flabbergasted I become at the 'strategy' of the man, if indeed such a thing exists. Honestly some morbidly curious part of me would love to see what would happen if he does end up winning- watching to see if the man even remembers any of the enemies he made along the way... It would be funny, you have to admit.

"There's no more good games".

 

There's no mistaking the fact that the modern edge of the games industry can be a tough beast to wrestle with as it thrashes about this way and that spending way too much in directions that can often feel disappointing and regretful. I don't need to be in the room with Bethesda themselves to know that they probably don't feel proud of themselves for delivering Shattered Space and the weak gust of wind it ultimately ended up, but they did. But the great thing about this industry is the fact that thanks to the industrialisation of the information age, despite being a fairly new medium in the grand scheme of art- this hobby is chock full of product to keep anyone occupied for pretty much the rest of their life if they're willing to look. Those that truly think there's nothing interesting in game's as a whole are probably just looking for justification for dropping the hobby altogether- which nobody really needs: spend your time how you want to and cut out what you don't want to do, ain't nobody got the right to tell you otherwise!

Of course I'm not going to say that this is a dry spell for great games either. I've just finished my time with Black Myth Wukong and I have to confess that I totally adored by little monkey romp top to bottom and it's growing on me more and more as I look back and reflect on the whole thing from a narrative and artistic perspective. Teaching us lessons on the virtues that make the monkey king, mirroring the themes of Journey to the West without directly repeating them, giving us a story of resurrection that felt deeply engaged and purposeful- all with a solid action adventure boss slaying gameplay loop with over a hundred bosses and next to none repeat content. It really is a marvel for those who like those kinds of games and a simple must play.

But my time has been spread going back and enjoying other titles- arguably spurred on by upcoming missiles directly at my taste buds- but do I really need a reason to get into Shin Megami Tensei V? After wrenching my way through, and ultimately coming to begrudgingly like, Nocturne; playing the latest of the series was pretty much a forgone conclusion. And SMT V has some hyper attuned Megaten gameplay loops brought to their zenith. The steamlining in demon crafting- with entire new fusion categories that automatically pairs of demons from your compendium to offer up new fusions- feels like a godsend designed directly to put the 'Megaten Fusion tool' Github site out of business. (I still love you though, for all you've helped me through!)

Yet as much as I'm loving my exploration into Megaten, I don't want to overdose on a single style of JRPG, which is why I reached out to an old faithful to get a bit more traditional turn based action and keep my whistle wet. Hence Final Fantasy XII, a title I knew nothing about, entered into my rotation and my-oh-my: I forgot just how long it actually has been since Final Fantasy games were turn based. Which is to say- XII certainly isn't, and I didn't know that! (Coming to think of it, the original VII tries it's hardest not to be either. Modern FF games aren't really as drastic a break from the trajectory of the franchise as some insist.)

Final Fantasy XII's unique approach to gameplay takes some getting used to be eventually I settled into the routines of trekking around the world on foot, wondering why they bothered introducing the concept of sky pirates if I'm never going to actually use them most of the time, and then going on hunts for unique monsters in the lands as side content. But then that side content got me thinking. "Hang on, hunting big boss monsters? I mean it's fine as it is but imagine doing this with monsters that felt unique with all different attack patterns and weaknesses that you have to learn about and then counter with your wits and moveset"- and then I just ended up playing Monster Hunter World.

I've already played through most of Monster Hunter World on my Xbox years ago, but the beauty of an industry with a tail this long is that quite a lot of games are just good enough to sit down and play again- which is exactly what I'm doing on PC this time. And it really is a trip remembering just how addictive that cycle of hunting giant beasts, learning their pattern, crafting tools from their bones and then hunting something even bigger is. There's also natural dynamic-element to the gameplay built into the very style of game making another playthrough from scratch feel fresh enough: and I'm not even playing with people this time.

I'm even getting around to some of the smaller games I never had time for before like the cute little 'Wargroove' tactics game which kind of plays like a more cutesy and approachable version of Fire Emblem. I still prefer 5 Houses personally, but there's a charm to Wargroove simply in how easy it is to pick and enjoy without having to worry about unit durability or limited use items or any of the other meta-game stuff of more serious tactics games. Just slap me down for a brawl and let me waste some time- even if I'm actually no good at games like this and end up falling into obvious traps more often than I'd like to admit.

There never are enough games out there for someone with the freedom to just sit down and pick. I'm even trying my hands at games I'd never usually try like 'Crusader Kings 3' because finding something new that fulfils an experience I never knew I was interested in can be fulfilling all on it's own! And of course, if you are only in it for the new hotness- well, just look a bit further than your comfort level and see the big modern hits that come out every other month. Persona 3 Reload, Black Myth Wukong, Silent Hill 2 Remake- and I'm pretty sure ReFantazio is going to land with a splash of it's won too soon. So to those who claim that games aren't good anymore, or there's nothing for them left in the industry- well, that sounds like a Skill-issue to me.

Pathtracing and the graphical ceiling

 

The graphical chase is one of the most virulent races in all the games industry, as one of the very few tangible marks of progression across an otherwise largely esoteric art form. How do you really measure how fun a game is compared to how games of that genre type used to be ten years ago? How do you gauge success as a measurement of skill within a world governed largely by luck? How do you know that the industry is improving it's craft at just a glance? Why, you can look at the graphics, of course! The graphical fidelity of the best in our industry is a tale-tail hint at just how much horse power is kicking within the engines of some of our most beloved games and I'm sure I am not the first to scroll by a particularly slick looking product page and was drawn by the spectacle of it all. It's an easy selling pitch, provided you can crank out such graphics to begin with.

In the relative few years that the technology has been around, fidelity has soared in it's mastery to points beyond what most through possible only a scant few console generations ago. I used to collect hobbyist gaming magazines that dreamed, misty eyed, about the heights of the industry- and the kinds of fidelity they were touting were about as advanced as Detroit Become Human achieved. Nowadays I think there are games which surpass even that, and actually have gameplay/ challenging narratives to boot! (No offense David Cage. You just could've tried a bit more.) Nowhere is this more apparent than with the path tracing technology which has, for the first time ever, given us the ability to render static material in a matter utterly indistinguishable from life.

Humans- not so much- but textures? Oh yeah! Metals, stone, masonry, pavement, puddles, wood- the secret to nailing them all this time was realistic light that catches and bounces and refracts and enriches- pathtracing is that final step to photorealism that games have been chasing for the past five years now. And it's tech beyond our means. Or rather, it's tech beyond current means. When it first launched as preview technology for Cyberpunk 2077, the thing was out of playable range for even the most advanced of hardware. I tried it out at 1080p, figuring my set-up had no problem running Ultra Cyberpunk at it's base- needless to say I almost had to turn off my whole computer in order to force the program to close- your average player isn't going to be enjoying the benefits of Pathtracing for the next few years at least.

But that doesn't mean the technology is in any danger of slowing down. Dragon's Dogma 2 recently launched with dormant and unfinished Pathtracing inside of the shipped game- not quite ready for public consumption by there within the hidden settings. Showing that developers are thinking about the tech, they're maybe even considering future proofing games by prepping it's implementation maybe as soon as a single console generation down the line. But here's a question I think bears asking in situations like these, where we're on the plinth just before that impossible zenith. The question that everybody hates to ask for how it seemingly undermines us all in our greatest moments- what then?

The race towards fidelity is a linear path- games can only strive towards the path of growing more true to life, and those that try to be 'realistic but stylised' are often noted for their 'quirky art direction' but never taken seriously as true avenues for future expression. Always Call of Duty wants to know how they can make their war torn streets feel more real, GTA wants to push the boundaries of booty-out car riding Floridians, Cyberpunk wants to figure out exactly how many surfaces they can bounce light off before their player's computers turn into actual explosives and detonate. What happens when we reach that graphical ceiling?

Graphics have already grown into something of a compounding problem in game development, with the development of assets taking up more and more of standard budgeting, reducing the creative scope of some of the most visionary ideas out there- and the general trend towards 'realism' does somewhat limit how wild modern developed games can really get. On the absolute other end of the spectrum, you'll find many indie games like to ride the coat-tail of nice looking, but decidedly 'antiquated' art styles that are much more manageable to develop within. Even Baldur's Gate, a gorgeous as the game looks, doesn't step on the toes of the industry at it's top most- and that is the higher tier of the indie space as it is. What about the others?

What about Blasphemous and it's 16 Bit call back visuals, within which a vast otherworldly psycho-religious twisted scape is formed? That game veered in another direction entirely! Or the recent Zelda games with the cell shaded majesty so light-weight that they can run deftly on a Nintendo Switch? Are any of these games graphical disappointments? Of course not, they're expressive, they're alternative, they are 'honestly' more visually memorable than the top most graphical 'masterpieces'. What is better remembered? The cutting edge fidelity of Modern Warfare 2 (new version), or the shadowy majesty of the impeccably crafted Hallownest from Hollow Knight? And which will continue to date whilst the other grows more beloved?

The next time the talking point is raised about how expensive it is to develop games, perhaps an eye might be cast to what exactly time and money is being spent upon. And if a significant chunk of those resources are being fed into 4-8k textures that the team aren't even going to bother compressing before launch, then maybe there's something of a buffer to cut back on before you start chopping down the employee roster like usual. Maybe great games don't need to blur the edge between reality and fiction in order to be great. Maybe visuals have become something of a crutch for great game design. And maybe Ubisoft should be criminally sanctioned for the brain-rot they've inspired in the open world development space. Valid points all, I say!

Don't forget to tip!

Dupont would be proud.

Mike Ybarra is a bit of a scapegoat. He was dragged into his role as leader of Blizzard following a sexual abuse scandal that left the position as toxic, and then he was thrown out of the role when Microsoft took over as an example of the change that would be coming to the brand. Now that would be a pretty significant position to hold, a shining example to stick in one's CV, had it not followed that whole 'sexual abuse scandal' that I just mentioned. (Bit of a red flag, that.) As it happens the man was a stop gap between the Blizzard that had to be doused for it's PR and the Blizzard that was incoming because the Blizzard deal was being cooked up for an age and a half before he even swore the oath. (They have an oath of office at Blizzard, right?) But do not get me wrong, despite his relatively brief tenure, my man has quite a few achievements under his belt!

Why, he marched into the office and demanded he needed to see everyone's pearly teeth in person else he just couldn't quite get in the 'working mood'- or at least that's what I can assume would be the logic behind a 'return to office' order... for a technology company. (It just isn't the same unless you're typing on our keyboards!) He scrapped the annual profit-sharing bonuses that the company had run on for years, essentially meaning that when the company had achieved well because one department excelled, everyone would benefit- and he did a bunch of other little stuff like downplaying the importance of QA teams and other stuff that actual developers who make the products consider antithetical to a healthy environment. The dude was a Looney Tunes character brought into a role that had an expiration date upon signing, scrambling to try and make enough changes to stick on his over-inflated CV so he brag about all the nonsensical changes he made and how much of a 'trend setter' he was!

Mike's a moron, basically. Which is why it should come as no surprise to anyone that the man, enjoying his time out of the big seat for now, spouted cringe on main when it came to single player games. Yeah, that thing which Blizzard doesn't do anymore because they can't figure out how to squeeze it for every cent it's worth, single player games? Mike is playing them now. (To be fair, Blizzard never really made any Single Player games, it's just that the reason behind that these days is a bit different to how it used to be.) And Mike is using the internet's dirty dumping ground, known as Twitter, (or some other name I can't remember) to tell us all about his further revolutionary ideas which, much like the actual policies he affected as a CEO, clearly did not churn around his little walnut of a brain for longer than it took him to evacuate his bowels that morning.

"I thought about this idea for a while..." he claimed, likely referring to the particularly stubborn 'log' he struggled to shake off just an hour previously. "When I beat a game, there are some that just leave me in awe of how amazing the experience was. At the end of the game, (Unnecessary comma alert) I've often thought "I wish I could give these folks another $10 or $20 because it was worth more than my initial $70 and they didn't try to nickel and dime me every second." Now barring the severe irony of the man talking about being 'Nickel and Dimed' when he was CEO for the release of bloody Diablo 4- is my man seriously advocating for tipping game developers? Because that is either an insanely naïve idea formed by a severely delusional idealist or... no, actually I won't give the benefit of the doubt- that's all it is. Naïve.

Now to be clear, this man is not talking about indie games on Itch.io- (as you can likely deduce from the $70 comment) because obviously those games already have a tipping feature, built into the service. He's talking your mega games, your Red Dead Redemption 2, your Baldur's Gate 3, your Horizon Zero Dawns. He thinks these are the kinds of games that simply demand much more than that painful '$70' price tag, which is already raising a debate on 'value proposition' lately- why? Because he wants to pay more, damn it! And the developers deserve a bit more of a kick-back! You mean... that they deserve... Bonuses? You think people should be rewarded for success with bonuses, Mike Ybarra- famous scrapper of bonuses? I wonder why he didn't use the common term 'bonus' and instead conjured up some bizarre 'tipping' concept. I wonder...

But lets' throw our heads into 'La La' land for a second, ignore the waltzing Ryan Gosling and pretend this was a real thing people could do. Why in the hell would you ever think that extra money would see developers? What has happened since games shot up to $70? Where has that extra $10 gone? To the sacking of half the AAA industry, whilst profits shoot up for the suits! So where do you think your tip money would go? Right into those same pockets. See- that's why this whole 'please give us more RRP for our poor hungry developers' is a bunch of absolute barnacle paste! When you're talking about multi-million dollar studios who are balancing whole empires in their balance sheets- you have to realise that the only barrier to developers being paid solid wages, are the companies themselves. There's no lack of money flying around the industry, there's a lack of standards on whom gets paid what. Unless we're talking about implementing some sort of 'royalties' system but- let's be honest, Mike didn't think this through- of course he never considered 'royalties'.

All this is without taking into account that Mike Ybarra is actually talking about reward games with more than the above full-price standard for the sheer magnanimity of not 'Nickle and Diming' us. My man has such low esteem for the consumer caste that he thinks we should wheel out the parades and circuses every time developers doesn't go to the nth degree to clog up their games with endless Microtransactions, bloat out progression to encourage time skipper packs, lock day-one content behind ludicrously over priced special editions and... well, do everything that Ubisoft does. He basically wants to Pavlov the game's industry for not becoming more like Ubisoft. That's kind of like the bare minimum, Mike. I thought your generation was supposed to be so far removed from the 'participation trophy' mentality! Turns out that's because your more into the 'You've made it out of bed, here's my credit card details' meta!

Tipping comes with a strange change of the dynamic between consumer and product, and just like every single 'revision' to that relationship I've ever read over the course of the past year- no one really thinks past the basic implementation of their insanely short sighted idea. I read one Metro contributor propose every game being free-to-play for the first few hours with people paying access to the content they want to play, thus circumventing the exorbitant buy in prices. Totally ignoring how that would influence all game design to front end the most explosive content to try and trick people into investing for the back half of lazier stuff. (Which is already a quiet meta worming it's way through design.) Or the whole 'pay per hour you play' model I heard brought up, which would totally assassinate all slower paced games which encourage you to enjoy the journey and see the sights such as Red Dead Redemption 2. Mike Ybarra kind of slides neatly into that cadre of clueless 'ideas guy' people who throw around half-baked shoot-for-the-fences concepts without putting any of the gears upstairs to work trying to think their ideas through. Thank god he's no longer a CEO and those ideas no longer have a human cost!

It's not a phase, Industry parent!

 

With the modern age it has become something of a hallmark for games to suddenly decide they're worth the $70 price tag. It's something more of a American problem I've noticed, as many English games that are sold locally retain their £60 tag when brand new, but digitally purchased AAA games do tend to be 69.99- which is a lot more than $70 when we take conversion into account! But whereas studios are determined to enforce that this is simply the way things have to be whilst they pose shirtless, bulging nanomachine-fuelled muscles glistening above an upturned Metal Gear- I must take my hat off to the consumers who are, for perhaps the first time ever, voting with their wallets entirely unprompted. It seems that when you ask the average consumer to throw up an extra tenner, in the middle of a global recession where people can't even afford to pay off their weekly shopping bills, suddenly the luxuries in life become the least of your concerns. Meaning- those games just get brushed past.

Now I'm not saying that there's been some massive exodus away from the recent released AAA market, these games are still selling enough to be profitable- but they're also losing enough of those week one interest purchases by having a price tag just large enough to trigger the absolute worst thing you can in a potential customer- pause. The very heart of sales marketing, for those lucky enough never to have been employed in the field (I envy your innocence) is to become the mind of the consumer. You speak to them as though you're on their side, put into their mind the feelings they should have, voice then undermine their considerations and guide them to the purchase before they ever know what happened. The very second you allow for free thought, independent consideration, the deal wavers and sense breaks through. People start asking if they really want to spend that sort of money on a new game, or just replay Red Dead Redemption 2 again. (Which I have been doing recently by the way, it's still great.)

None of this is to mention that two of the biggest break out success stories of this year has been, lo and behold, much cheaper games fronted by smaller studios who have burst out of their niche by being just so darn accessible to everyone at a $20 price tag! Palworld and Helldivers 2 are the bells of the ball that no one has to really think about picking up because they're just such easy scores. Who doesn't want to rock around online with their friends in this game that costs a spare note in your wallet? It makes for an easy recommendation, which makes for an easy community to build, which makes for an easy grass routes word of mouth movement, which makes for a potential sensation. If this is the direction that the game hype audience is going, then by all means- I'm all for it!

Of course, the talk about 'rising development costs' and the 'poor reduced costs of workers' has absolutely nothing to do with the price increase as I've been insisting all this time. $70 doesn't magically grant all the profit these companies were lacking to pay their staff properly and afford these games, these publishers were already juggling tens to sometimes hundreds of millions in profits and making a poor job dishing it out to staff and development- if they couldn't be trusted with less money, how is giving them more going to solve the problem? Why are we actually endorsing Reganomics in the games industry? The real truth behind the price tag is simple. The industry projections tell us that growth is stagnating, so these desperate fools are trying to skew their income to create the illusion of growing profits- hence the short-sighted and illogical firing of copious members of staff. Look forward to them wondering in a year or two why their future games are taking so much longer to make!

Now we have other leaders of the video game industry, like Saber Interactive, declaring that the $70 price point is just a phase that the industry will grow out of. That CEO believes the price point in unsustainable, and ultimately companies are going to need to shop around for ways to price cut in the development process if they want to have a chance at building themselves back up again. Pricing themselves out of the market under a myth of 'Premium Pricing' just isn't going to end up lasting them as long as they pray it will. Sony may insist that their games are worth any penny, but what is that worth when Skull and Bones debuted for $70? A game that currently has 111 viewers on Twitch at this very moment- it launched a couple of months ago.

Reports are coming up claiming that bigger swathes of the currently gaming market are engaging with games that are up to seven years old rather than splurging out on newer titles. And sure, a lot of that is going to be your Counter Strike or League of Legends crowds, but there are going to be those Cyberpunk lovers who look at the market and see nothing really worth spending the money and significant time investment over! Personally I don't think I've played a single game released this year, although I have brought Infinite Wealth which I hope to get around to eventually, that's more the exception to the rule. If a diehard like me can't find himself capable of stomaching new releases, what does that say to your average hobbyist?

Again, we know this to be an aggressive course correction strategy, but there's an old analogy about medicine and bad cures I think might be pertinent to the discussion here. I just think it's telling that the most lauded and award strewn gaming developer of the 2020's so far, Larian, is going around lambasting the industry for the direction their going. Swen is calling out the short-sighted layoffs, the doomed to fail crunch cycles, the bottomless-pit content holes- and he's doing from the high horse of the company that did everything right, pleased it's audience and made absolute gang busters with a single player game that regularly sees upwards of 50,000 concurrent Steam players. Is there any higher a horse to preach from?

At the end of the day, to slightly alter a quote from Kanye West before he lost his mind, goddamit they're killing this sh**. And I don't mean that in the positive connotation! Promising developers are being forced out of the height of the industry, aspiring artists are being scared away, customers are being outpriced, and books are being all but cooked in a wild dash to record profits. And the big question mark hanging precariously over everyone, like the swinging Sword of Damocles specially enchanted with +5 vermin damage, is what happens this time next year? Who do you cut when there's no one left to cut? What prices do you hike when your consumers stop showing up at the door? And who do you blame when investors start seeing the leprechaun bucket emptying? 

The future is safe!

 

The information age is a wild thing, ain't it? Where the vast divide between the classes from the before times no longer maintains is an aura of mystery and exclusivity which has allowed the idea to germinate that the tops of our industry are manned by some sort of intellectually superior being that sees the world far more complete than us mere plebs do. Nowadays we can see what these executives are doing, what they are saying, observe the same information they have to make their wild decisions and marvel at the fact that these would be the kind of people who would get arrested trying to siphon gas with their mouths at a petrol station if they lived in the real world. I'm taking true misfortunes of evolution, doomed for the compost heap if they were not lucky enough to land a good spawn in life. And it's these people that guide out industries. 

We saw a glimpse of how this plays out in the Gaming Industry whereupon following the GDC, several articles discussing the dour mood of the heads of the industry have bobbled around detailing the doom-and-gloom attitude of the modern day. As layoffs are reaching a fever pitch and the industry forecasts are developing a stagnation in growth and publishers are getting more and more desperate to squeeze out some mild illusion of growth in a market that- facts be facts- is not currently growing. Suddenly it's the end times for these people- they're seizing up their loyal teams built up over the course of years and imagining raw legs of roast, waiting less than half a day without food to start breaking down society. The way you see people acting these days you'd have thought the unified world government just banned all video games by December- instead we're seeing a bunch of games industry 'professionals' experiencing a hump in growth and freaking out.

Now of course, there is the very real fact that all industry is built on the backs of Shareholders that put in their money and want it to grow for them in the background. When a company is in straits about how to proceed, they are typically legally liable to look back on the best interests of their investors and making whatever decisions best benefits their money. That is the extremely narrow lens through which we can view some of the actions of the recent gaming world with some vague aura of understanding. Although, you know, anyone mature enough to genuinely understand the term 'economic realities', instead of just parroting out something vaguely intelligent sounding as some form of pretentious get-out-of-responsibility free card like Xbox's management recently did, perhaps matters are not so black and white. (But we'll get there eventually- have patience.)

Per Bloomberg, Executives who made the, honestly considering all the enemies they've been making destroying livelihoods all last year, genuinely dangerous journey out to the Game Developers Conference spent a lot of their time bemoaning the state of modern game design. Rising development costs, stunting growth projects and a mountain of expectations to deliver world shattering hits has led the industry into a holding pattern of 'playing it safe'. "It's harder to take risks" said a Tencent Vice President- which blew me away for a second because I can't remember Tencent ever achieving anything innovative, or even attempting to. (Maybe he has history working at a real developer in his back log.) Budgets are starting to skyrocket and as the film industry mirrors- bigger money means bigger risk, means less chances taken.

Every company is consolidating, cancellations are being made to multimillion dollar projects, hundreds of workers are losing their jobs and being forced out of an industry that isn't hiring anymore. These people will also insist that it's the audience pushing these extremes out of them. The high demand for greater and greater graphics requires exponential growth on time and effort spent on building ever more assets for these massive games, they also want games to feel fun to play which is... well, that's less of a scaling problem and more of a conceptual design one- although don't tell these publishers that or they'll throw a fit. And then there's the Service-style games which are growing in popularity although demand so much time and effort for continued production. Wait, what was that last point?

Uh, yeah- apparently the growth of Live Service games are largely responsible for compounding costs... except... that's mostly publisher driven, isn't it? I mean you could call it meeting demand... you'd be wrong, but you could call it that. Destiny 2 and The Division 2 remain the sole examples of Live Service games that have seen consistent successes. All others have either struggled, died or are actually MMOs that are for some reason calling themselves Live Services- TESO. (I get that the content development models are similar if you put a bag over your head, but they present largely different payment models, attract a different audience and seek a different relationship out of it's consumers and how they interact with the product. But other than those fundamental aspects of design- sure, throw every currently living MMO on the list of working Live Services.)

All this of course means that the Games Industry is going to have to sit on it's hands and go safe! You know what that means? No more creative leaps of faith, no more expanding on your team in order to pursue the development of new mediums and the next hot thing, no more being artistic in this art-based industry. Games are becoming too expensive to develop. And it has nothing to do with the fact that most major companies are salivating over a genre type that is notoriously expensive and failure prone, to which they commit so moronically that when one such game launched with a successful first few weeks- Helldivers- hair-brained executives started puffing out their chests and declaring that title as evidence to why the Live Service train will never stop. Don't look at the multi-million dollar disaster product which released earlier that same month! Nor the several over the past few years! Nor every Live Service fresh from the last five years! Just look at the one success! 0.01% success rate? Those sound like winning, safe, odds to me!

But here's the wicked irony to it all- this pivot is what is going to start nosediving the industry. As it was coined itself during the conference by a mysteriously self aware producer, nobody says "that was a fun, safe, game I just played." As the industry becomes more and more concerned about not taking risks because of the ludicrous costs they enforce upon themselves and then blame gamers for, the more versatile AA games will shoot out making original ideas and become the 'Helldivers' for that quarter, or the Baldur's Gate 3. The irony is that being a submissive shrew, kowtowing to the whims of shareholders without any pushback, you are worsening their investment prospects and worsening the chances that they will be happy. With a little bit of leadership, these studios would know that investing in the studio, keeping a great team of creatives on board and maintaining a reputation as a place that true artists can go to have a career- that is the path to success in an art-driven medium. One year of growth stagnation will only compound if you make that prophecy come true- how's that for 'economic realities'? 

Is the Games industry stagnating?

 

As I pose this query I want to be clear that unlike as it is often raised, I do not present my own view on the world of gaming as reflection of the larger trends of the gaming world. This isn't a "My life has started becoming more busy and I have less time for games, that means gaming is bad now and it was better when I was a kid!" I'm a far too terminally dissociated with myself to form a view like that on the gaming world. Hell, I suspect I'll probably not even notice it when I die, my mind occupies myself so fleetingly. What I mean to address is the perception I've heard anecdotally quite often, albeit from everyone not in the industry itself- that the games industry is headed towards a dead spial. And the evidence is both in the direction of the industry and the nature of the medium itself. 

Now it's hardly any great philosophy to posit on the coming crash of the AAA market- that seems all but certain at this point. Giant studios are sinking insane amounts of time and money into projects that fans end up not wanting and not buying, leading to them firing developers and cranking up prices, that results in worse games with prohibitive prices that ends up driving people into the arms of the indie market. The AAA scene pretty much has it coming at this point and I- honestly think that when the bubble bursts and the wreckage clears this could end up being somewhat healthy for gaming. Once the focus shifts from the giant 'sink everything into this/too big to fail' meta- attention will settle back on the surrounding miasma of thoughtfully developed games by a plethora of varied and clever studios. We'll find it less easy to see the obvious trends of profitability influencing our games and genuine passion will rule the roost. It seems we're already trending that way in the age of surprise mega hits we currently reside within. 

But what about the supposed 'false growth' of the gaming market? We know that gaming is the most profitable entertainment medium in the world on good years, swapping back and forth with the other heavy hitters on less stuffed years, but it also cannot be overstated that the majority of that recent millionaire growth has come in the rise of the mobile gaming market. Yes, all those bite sized snippets of bank account draining trash which suckers in the busy offices and soccer moms who have neither the free time or the interest to look at what proper lovingly made modern gaming is. These are the products designed to psychological wire it's players in becoming perpetual spenders- draining the life out of themselves before they even know what's going on. This is the medium that suckers hundreds of millions out of the public. Is this the success that props up the games industry and makes us seem more mainstream than we actually are?

I read a theory that genuine gaming itself is a stagnant medium wherein the audience of console and games buyers hardly actually expands every year. The same sorts of people buy within their groups and slowly age out of the hobby or pass it on to their kids or stay hooked for life- wherever it leads them- but no new outside people are brought into the fold. The societal wall, the learning curve, whatever the barrier is- normies just don't become gamers. The article I was reading posited the problem was the complexity of game controls which has come to normalise the standard without remembering to keep friendly to newcomers- but I find that a little bit of cherry picked complaint. (Not least of all because the article then went on to reference the author's troubles getting to gripes with the modern complexities of Baldur's Gate 3- a game based on rules that are almost fifty years old at this point.)

When we take our eyes to the projected numbers, we can maybe draw some statistics to support this- namely that in the coming year there are expected to be less people engaging with the console market than there currently are this year, just as we predicted last year. This marks a point of contention for investors and interested support parties who buy in with the expectation of constant unlimited growth, without which the security of the medium becomes questionable. That is the trajectory which has lit a flame under Sony and their desperation to attract new customers and Microsoft's recent boneheaded and shortsighted sacrificing of the market for short term bursts of finance. This is the apparent doomsday hanging over the industry.

However when you actually ask some of the people worrying under this, they seem pretty confidant we're not looking at a permanent trend. I mean sure, if you work in the industry it's within your best interest to be optimistic about the future of your own job prospects, but it helps no one to be delusional in the face of destruction. You'd think if there really was no future in the games industry, or if no one truly saw any chance of the hobby growing, then we'd see more companies make the permanent switch to mobile- wouldn't we? Afterall these are businesses, run by people trying to score the most amount of profit possible, wouldn't it be the end-goal to fire every bust a skeleton team of 15 developers to run a mobile app with an established brand slapped on top? What stops them?

Well perhaps it's because the downturns we're seeing are, in fact, temporary as they insist. The most charitable way to look at the recent layoffs around all the tech space is that this is the consequences of the overhiring that came during the Pandemic times- but we haven't really explored the effect that would have had on the market as well. Video gaming would have no doubt exploded in a time when everyone had more off hours and were stuck in their homes all day, and in the years since as work-from-home is being weeded out- those same people are going to drop off as gamers. Fast forward a couple of years later would it be sensible to believe we're still seeing the drop-off from that reset to equilibrium? Is this the momentary ache from the ultimate snap back to market realities?

The only real stagnation of the games industry that is totally without contention would be the stagnation of opportunity as roles are slowly dropping off the face of the earth. Just like with every aspect of the Entertainment industry that is slowly beginning to cater more to the money men, there is lest fostering of the next generation of creatives and it's leaving a divide in talent. People are working their way up to leadership positions and that means less creativity entering the top fields of the profession. That is a stagnation worth analysing in a blog all of it's own. As to whether or not this hobby is slowly choking to death on it's own vomit? I would give us a few more years before jumping to those conclusions. Let's see how the 'number of active world wide gamers' looks like when GTA VI drops.

500 live services

 End me

There is something insidiously broken about the products known as 'Live Services'. Time hungry always-games that endeavour to become stable hobbies of everyone's lives even more so than gaming itself, swallowing up every bit of free will and personal responsibility until that person is a machine spitting out notes with abandon. Or at least, that is the future that the purveyors of the genre type are shooting for- and as many have pointed out it's a fools goldrush. There are only so many hours in the day and a successful Live Service needs an insane amount of traction to justify it's own existence- so the more that come out, cannibalising the genre's player base, the less chance they all have of succeeding. It's the MMO spiral all over again, proving that lessons are never learnt and trends rarely chased in honour and good will. Thus when it all falls apart, it's predictable.

But... they just won't stop. With all the failures, screw-ups and ill-fated nowhere projects- still this pursuit remains nauseatingly popular. Let me be frank- some of the most horrendous financial failures of the past few years in the games industry have been a direct result of Live Service attempts that have slid cleanly off a bridge. Marvel's Avengers, Babylon's Fall (had to look up the name again) and judging from early player numbers and how they're stacking up against similar genre games that also flopped- Suicide Squad kill the Justice League! In an industry that is increasingly being flagged as 'high risk' by studios who complain that they can't figure out a way to make these ventures profitable, whilst smuggling millions in bonuses purely for management, they insist on trying to cram their foot in the most crowded doorways on offer. So who is the real problem here- players not buying $70 disappointments, or publishers nuking themselves in the foot?

Of course the promise here is immense. When we talk 'high risk high reward'- the reward does not get higher than becoming one of the couple dozen Live Services that don't tank to oblivion. Just look at Fortnite- the billion dollar property that is pretty much single handily financing all of Epic Games' flights of fancy. Epic wastes millions giving out free games trying to tempt people to their mediocre store- but with Fortnite footing the bill they can waste ten times that and not even worry about annual overheads one iota. But therein lies the problem. There already is a Fortnite. Joe Schmo off the street isn't going to rock up and develop another one. You can't just leap frog the industry leader like it's nothing- they aren't really pushovers- how do you think they got to being leaders in the first place?

Then again, isn't a failure of a launch just the perfect excuse for layoffs? Who wants to readily admit to overhiring during the pandemic, making a logistical mistake that reflects poorly on your own judgement abilities, when you can instead push forward a doomed-to-fail product with far too much funding behind it and then use the fallout as a smokescreen excuse for mass firings? I mean I would never go so far as to outright accuse any company's of doing that exact thing- all I'm saying is that if I were in the position of an executive who had tipped the balance sheets the wrong way and I knew about a landmine of a genre just waiting out there for me- well, I would weigh up either option. Either it's a smash hit success in an extremely unlikely twist and I never have money problems again, or it bombs as it's most likely too and the spotlight is no longer on me. Makes sense, no?

Which might just count a little bit towards the results of a recent survey reported on by Games Industry in which 537 development studios had their future endeavours sized up. The report found that 95% of these studios were working on developing or were currently maintaining, a Live Service game. Which is a horrific stat to just throw out there. That is a vast majority of modern studios within this survey committing to this over-served and underloved genre type with nothing but failure in their immediate future. And to be absolutely clear- this is a commitment they are making. Live Service games are the only types that shackle parts of the team to it's development indefinitely, making them choking not just to players but developers at large.

Just take Naughty Dog, for example- peons of 'the house of Sony' that are very much the golden boys of single player narrative led story games. As Sony found themselves bitten by the Live Service bug, they tried to squeeze new shots at the big boys table with all of their first party studios, even getting Naughty Dog developing their own Live Service game at one point. That was until the studio recently publicly cancelled the project citing the incompatibility of the project and it's requisite management with their general model of sinking every scrap of effort into making their upcoming games as good as they can be. Can't be their absolute best when a portion of their developers would be off supporting a poxxy Live Service at all times, now can they? And if Naughty Dog, Industry leaders, can't make sense of this model- what the hell chance do the rest of them have?

And it's not as though Live Service games are particularly fulfilling to uphold. Just like with MMO's before them- the very nature of an online-centric ingame-store support game limits the potential of design. Suicide Squad characters have to reduce their iconic abilities to gun toting- because that fits into the needed griding formula better, Metropolis can't focus on individual world details as much as the last Arkham game did- because the game needs to be able to render four simultaneous players at once. You'll never get a live Service farming sim to the level of depth as Stardew. Nor a colony management game like Rimworld. You're pretty much limited exclusively to open world action adventure games and RPGs. Because god knows we don't have too many of them yet- right?

I want this to stand as exhibit A whenever the counter arguments arise to the steeply rising price of games. Those that complain that we are being entitled little cheapskates that want the developers to starve on a pittance of nothing. Please remember, that not only are the producers the one's writing the cheques that embezzle millions into their own coffers, and that unjust ratio isn't going to suddenly stop because they're making more money now- but that these numbskulls are content gambling entire productions on a jackpot they will never see. Every side always blames the other in sessions of conflict. But for real- it is their fault!  

Game Preservation has changed!

 No longer about Nations, Ideologies and Ethnicities. It's an endless series of proxy server deactivations conducted by cost cutting boot lickers and corporate economists!

Reviewing Reviews

 The Review

The democratic world is based on the unshakable belief that the voice of everyone has power, the worth of the individual is paramount if only the seize the right to wield it- from the lowly peasant to the prominent magistrate. Of course, even in the mythical birthplace of Democracy, ancient Athens, the intellectual class had their reservations about such an ideal, hang-ups about giving power to those who don't understand the responsibility of wielding it or some such elitist sounding drivel, but regardless the basic model of Democracy has been replicated and shared the world over and generally regarded as 'positive' until the finale of Game of Thrones Season 8 where their little flippant joke repulsed the world so much I think we'd all rather live in a dictatorship just to spite that awfully written line. But if there's one thing which makes me personally surrender all hope for the world back to the mind of the philosophers of ancient Greece and their generally shared belief that 'rulers were the one's meant to rule', it's the free market of entertainment reviews.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that professional reviewers are some higher echelon of being built and bred for the art of critical examination, in fact our standards in the games industry specifically have dropped off so much that game reviewers are typically no more than loudly opinionated, and sometimes maybe a little opiated, gossipers with a paycheck. Just look at my own work whilst subtracting the paycheck! Still- at least the idea of a reviewer is someone who fairly reviews a piece of art based on it's merits and the standards of the time, weighing it's pros and cons to provide a balanced guide for consumers to decide how to spend their money and time. That's- I mean that's how it starts, right? That's the minimum critical bar we expect people to clear and we hold the world accountable to. But then we have User reviews.

Because the everyman has an opinion too, correct? Why should the stuffy suited professionals be the only one's to share their heavily biased and jaded viewpoint, maybe people are best served hearing from their fellow casual enthusiast as well! And you know what, I've always liked that idea. It's true, casual observers of entertainment have different fresh-holds of taste compared to professional reviewers who are more commonly bombarded by oversaturation, cliché trends and genre pieces- professional reviewers typically prefer to be challenged and surprised, whilst casual enjoyers like to be entertained and satisfied. It's a fine balancing act, one slightly done a disservice by review aggregate sites on the Internet but what can really be done about that? We live in an age of instant gratification, no one wants to sit down and read hundreds of reviews by every Tom, Dick and Harry in the world to figure who's tastes best align with your own and thus who's opinion to trust. Round it all up with a number of 'like' versus 'didn't like' and call it a day!

Yet you know how the adage goes, 'power corrupts'; and nowhere is that more true than for people not used to it. How many times have you spotted a review from a non-professional source who clearly has no idea what they're talking about throwing around lofty accusations about how a tiny factor of the work, be it a game mechanic or a certain character, justifies a 10 out of 10 or a 0 out of 10? Do you really think nuance and balancing really went into that evaluation? Of course not, they don't care about the impact of their reviews, they're driven by spurs of emotional outbursts, they aren't even slightly concerned with effusing into cold-hard sense. And those are the 'earnest reviews'. Recently I've noticed an uptick in the amount of amateur review stock who seem emboldened by the promise of a score decision with a comparable value of the masses around them to promote nonsense vendettas. 

Much has it been lauded how often a games reviewer will throw their professionalism at the wall in order to rant about some perceived slight on their person; throwing the Harry Potter game in front of a bus because of the views of the franchise creator who had no hand in the game itself, tutting about the PC port of Spiderman for being... cop-aganda (which is genuinely nonsensical to me, there's so much police corruption in that narrative it isn't even funny) or harping on Days Gone because the protagonist is... well... a biker who acts like  a biker in ways that the author found uncomfortable. But such flights of silliness are not exclusive to the professionals, no you'll plenty of irrational takes powering decisions from the public too- including some so wild you'd never see a professional reviewer going for it!

I've seen games get 0/10 from a member of the public because they see the game is reviewing well and they want to knock the average down. Sometimes it's literally from people who like the game, but just don't think it's as good as other people do, so they give it a 0/10 to skewer the average. That alone is so adverse to the spirit of public discourse you feel a person like that needs to be taken aside and explained how special the gift of freewill is, because they're wasting it! You'll get vice versa situations too. As well as people who watch gameplay of a game and don't like it so then think it entirely within their prerogative to review the game they haven't personally played, kind of missing the point of the 'interactive' part of this medium a little. All these transgressions whittle down the special artistry of the review and what we can learn about consumers and their relationship with modern trends when everything runs smoothly.

And, of course, as I've mentioned the last time I touched on this topic: these people don't really seem cognisant of the effect their reviews have. Knocking down the average of a game might seem 'fair' in the ethical deluge that is the average consumer's mind, but development studios base their sales targets not only on figures sold, but on review scores as well. It's a potential kick at the livelihood of developers to go for the review score, all for what- internet brownie points that exist only in your head? That bizarre popularity contest is what has started skewering development too, where the pursuit of high audience scores can lead development to fan-service style features that might spark infantile backlash if left out. "Does the game have fishing?" "Can I pet the dog?" Et cetera.

The reviewing process is an inherently important aspect of any entertainment industry outlet. Playwrites have been know to threaten people's lives over reviews in the past, it's serious business. (Why is it always playwrites too? Weird people.) The way to grow as an artform is by examining our work and those around us, seeing what works and what doesn't and, most importantly, identifying directions that haven't been taken before and daring to be brave. When we whittle down that process with inanities and pettiness, we rob the nurturing food of our industry, that's what it needs to consume in order to grow stronger and more firm. With every new aggregate site, the standards become muddier and people lose sight of exactly what a responsibility it once was to offer your collected and reasoned thoughts to another. But by all means keep it up with the silly Steam reviews, those are funny.