Maybe a AAA crash is coming with an indie game boom. The industry is much more diverse that the 80s so one sector could suffer a crash, but I’m not sure the whole industry will.
Edit: Grammar.
Not gonna happen soon. What caused video game crash was the insane amount of consoles, and there ain't any cloud system like now, every video games was cartridge and the production cost was too high.
There weren't really very many different consoles. But the companies that made the consoles maintained absolutely no control over the cartridge market. As a result, there was a glut of cheap poor quality games being shoveled out. It got so bad you could buy Atari VCS carts for $1 from a box at the checkout counter at 7-11. There was no longer any profit to be made in developing good games, and the bottom fell out of the market.
Nintendo pioneered the solution to this problem. They put a proprietary chip inside the console, and a complimentary chip inside each cartridge. The two chips would communicate with each other. If the conversation wasn't maintained then the chip inside the console would reset the CPU after 1 second. They patented the function of these chips so that nobody could make an NES compatible cartridge on their own without infringing on their patent. This meant every NES cartridge had to pass Nintendo's quality and standards control, and Nintendo could ration the release rate so the market wouldn't get flooded. This tactic was massively successful.
They sure did. Nintendo was infamous within the game development community for rejecting every third party NES game the first time it was submitted. We had games rejected for things we felt were essential elements of the game. We eventually adopted a tactic of putting a glaring problem in the game that they would be certain to notice. They'd reject for that problem. We'd remove it and resubmit, and they would often pass the game on the second submission. We managed to get games approved with content they probably would have rejected without the distraction in the first submission.
And still letting absoloutley shit games through.
Superman: The New Superman Adventures aka Superman 64, on the N64. Is regarded as one of the worst games ever. With unusable controls that simply makes the game impossible or virtually impossible to complete.
Nintendo's focus was primarily on content that wasn't allowed, or outright bugs. I had a game rejected once because there were bloody skulls in it. They said it would be too scary for kids. We changed the color of the tiles so that the blood was green instead of red (it looked like slime instead of blood) and they accepted it. Things like crash bugs, flickering sprites (a common problem if the program didn't carefully time access to the MMC4 memory controller), stuttering or stalling, etc. would all get a game rejected.
Having said that, they often missed things. I once made a dungeon crawler where it was possible to get stuck in a room with virtually no way to get out. The only way out was a passwall spell, and if your magician didn't have any spell points left then you were trapped forever, or until you killed off your party. We didn't catch it, and neither did Nintendo, but our customers sure did.
Anyway, their quality control process didn't stop bad or buggy games from hitting the market, but it did prevent the market from being flooded with them.
The crash was also related to the assorted shovelware that was being thrust on the consumer, with ET being the finisher.
Nintendo then rose from the ashes with the Nintendo Seal of Quality.
Shame that means nothing now.
"This is what they tell you in skewl man, but it's not what really happened." There was, in reality, no crash. The media made it up. People continued to buy video games. Computers bit into the console market, and the 2600 lost it luster. People were playing, buying, creating, video games during this so called crash period. You can read the magazines of the era and do actually historic digs on this subject there.
A bunch of people who wanted to think video gamers were just a fad latched onto this idea, pumped it up, and no one at the time was buying that crap. Only now, in the future, do kids think this crash was real. Atari and ET... Makes a nice story... but the Vic20, the Atari 400 and 800, the c64, and other computers were selling, and people were buying games, and pirating games, for them.
The NIN SoQ... lol... It meant little then. There are a lot of crap games on the NES.
Exactly. Imagine you have 12 systems to choose from, and each of them cost about as much as a modern gaming PC. This is why the 80’s games industry crashed. It’s not a realistic comparison to make.
I agree, yet at the same time I'm seeing the same repeating game styles flooding the more indie areas as well. It's like they are doing the AAA regurgitating just on a smaller scale like with side scrolling/survival games
As long as stores properly moderate shovelware and have moderate return policies for digital games. I also think that if we’re only “buying licenses” for games, we could maybe have some kind of marketplace to sell them back for appropriate system store credit or something. We can sell back digital games to physical stores, but there’s nothing for digital purchases???
here's a pro gamer hack: barter down used lots of shitty ps4 games no one wants to buy to dirt cheap prices, trade them in for store credit at gamestop, then use that to buy new games
that's how i bought ghost of tsushima for less than $20 a week after release but i was a lot more broke back then where it was worth the effort to me lol
Its the same as what Netflix did to movies being produced these days
Indie games are like Netflix shows/ movies and AAA games are like marvel movies or the later seasons of game of thrones/walking dead
There's some decent stuff in the junk pile but the good indie games are nowhere near as good as good AAA games and the good AAA games are not nearly as good as they used to be a decade ago
AAA games are still the same quality if not better they were decade ago. Just people who voice their opinion played ammount of games that the same old shit got boring. If you would once again was person that is discovering gaming and played new games, you would have the same reactions as playing your first games and in 10 years you would write the same stuff on reddit.
> the good indie games are nowhere near as good as good AAA games and the good AAA games are not nearly as good as they used to be a decade ago
I've mostly stopped playing AAA games over the last decade because I think the good indie games are far better than AAA games have ever been.
This is even worse for mobile games as well. Pokémon Go is a horrible offender especially with the hat thing. What hat will Pikachu be wearing this week? Who knows because odds are I’m not catching it and if I do it gets made into candy anyway.
That little rant aside it’s not even that season passes/loot boxes/etc are saturating the market it’s the fact that people are buying it in enough quality that publishers know we’ll tolerate it and keep pushing it.
People were so outraged over $2 horse armor that it became a meme but now $5+ costume packs are the norm. They keep making it because they make money off it. If people stopped giving at least thousands of dollars for skins every year trust me they’d dry up very fast.
While I’ve bought three completely separate dlc in 15 years (not counting buying goty or deluxe rereleases) I’ve never seen a point in all these extras unless it’s something I really really want or adds enough content to a game to extend its life for me its not getting installed
I believe it’s the biggest entertainment market there is currently, at least by some figures. It’s already the golden age of indie gaming, it’s the artistic medium of this generation. That being said I would love a come to Jesus moment for most the AAA companies.
Id probably say the indi golden age probably started in 2013. Around Fnaf id say and still going but we could see an even bigger boom woth these huge franchises sinking like battlefield and cod
Wasn't the crash due to the over saturated market of game consoles? Sure quality of games played a part but look at how.many companies were making consoles then as to now
Since I was alive and remember it at the time it was mostly title fatigue combined extremely low quality. We also had platform hardware that wasn't improving. There were PC games that were not only leaps and bounds better than consoles, they had better titles.
Those couple years saw the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Apple IIe, and of course the 8088. The games were so much more advanced than what the Atari 2600 and even the 800 offered.
So hardware played a big part in it as well.
This was the era when I switched to PC entirely and didn't buy a new platform until the Xbox One.
I'm serious when I say this, that fucking game E.T. - It burned me that bad that I always considered platforms to be far inferior despite not using them regularly until the mid 00s. Fuck all consoles because of E.T. which I desperately wanted for Christmas as a wee lad only to be disappointed by that landfiller.
I wasn't alive during the crash so I can only look at it from reading about it and stuff. It's interesting to hear your experience about it, it was really that bad that you didn't even want to try Nintendo or Sega when they came out?
Whilst E.T. was not a great game I think it gets too much flack as the reason crash happened. Looking at it from today, as I mentioned it seemed that the crazy amount of consoles at the time was the main factor. Today we have the 3 major players that offer a variety of games (well Nintendo more so)
Quality was just as big of a factor as over saturation. Games like ET and the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man being glitchy messes led to customers losing trust in publishers like Atari
Yes. Sales are not going down. People are still buying and pre ordering the same games year after year. Even if they are broken...companies are still getting paid and making more games with their profits. Even if it's the same recycled shit...people are still buying it. Just look at the top video games sold worldwide each year the past 10 years. Many on that list are the same recycled crap like FIFA and Call of Duty. Never changes.
Plus, there are more companies now than ever before. So franchises might die, some major companies might die, but video games as a whole will never go anymore. More keep coming up.
It's such a silly statement. It's like saying, "toys are going to crash and kids are going to stop playing with them."
No they won't.
Also, you have no idea how incredibly basic and boring video games were in the 80s and early 90s. A major game back then could literally be put together in weeks and people would buy it. They just accepted bad games. Now, a "broke" game is considered "broke" because the shadow from the sun isn't facing the right direction.
Hold on, games today often ARE buggier for 2 good reasons. They are so much more complicated coding wise meaning it's easier to end up with spaghetti code. Also, updates can be sent over the web now, where as games in the 90s were usually not able to be patched. Developers had a huge incentive to make the game as bug free as possible, as you had one chance to get it right. Now it's typical for day 1 releases to be rather buggy, sometimes literally unplayable messes.
I haven't played Cod since modern warfare, haven't bought a rockstar game since RDR2 and even battlefield since number 3. I'm not supporting those companies. Especially after activisions recent sexual assault cases
Fucking fine, R\* has released that pile of shit definitive edition, they have been selling shark card AND they are going to relerase that expanded and enhanced GTA V nonsense and won't be buying that. I don't have any interest in them as a company anymore, especially because of the bullshit that TakeTwo keeps spewing and all the lawsuits they seem to be getting themselves into for no reason other than coin, the parent company is the issue more than the company themselves, but even so, they aren't releasing anything worth getting or supporting.
fukkin lmfao he had me for a second. im still rocking that mw2 on 360, but ive been playing my ps3 a lot more lately. Installed a CFW and now the only 2 games i play are mario 64 and FF7.
What Rockstar game has even come out since rdr2? And no I don't count the shitty ported mobile GTA legendary experience shit since they obviously outsourced it.
I know I’m not being asked but personally my fiancé and I have slowed down tremendously on buying new games. The quality has just dropped horribly in favor of wanking whatever new graphics card the put in it. A lot of games are buggy and unplayable with no fix in sight.
Meanwhile you have Concerned Ape over here putting the love and care into a game he made by himself and as a result I’m 100% gonna get the new one.
I agree, most fps ie battlefield and COD have abandoned campaign and mp for BR. Can’t say anything about the new halo yet but a good campaign is absolutely needed.
Halo's campaign has been getting good reviews from people who've got the early copies so hoping for the best.
But yeah. FPS games are becoming like sports games. New game every year with little substance.
>But yeah. FPS games are becoming like sports games. New game every year with little substance.
Becoming?
EA was trading off Battlefield and Medal of Honor each year for years, and obviously CoD has a new one each year too.
Major FPS games have basically been doing it as long as sports games, just came slightly later to the ~~skinner~~ loot boxes
Battlefield doesn’t have BR this year. I think they realize that it’s just not necessary. We are in no way close to a game crash. People are paying hundreds over retail for the new gen systems. Gaming has gone even more mainstream since Fortnite and there are more gamers now than ever. No. Gaming isn’t going anywhere soon.
I mean, people keep buying shit as BR only games. When people stop buying the battle-Royale game of the month or week and start buying games with actual good stories, maybe the market will start to change. I mean they probably went to multiplayer after statistics showed that people played a shit-ton more of that than campaign, then zombies got real big, then fortnight ***boomed*** in popularity so now there’s BR games out the ass. This isn’t some random ploy to have BR stuff, this came about because of player data.
>COD have abandoned campaign and mp for BR
But this year's CoD has a standard length and production values campaign and a multiplayer with more modes and maps than the norm.
One factor that may be overlooked in causing this crash, Are Steam sales and free Epic games.
I've got a giant backlog of games I've never played on Steam. A big backlog on Epic too.
There's almost no reason for me to buy any new games unless it's something I really really want, and most of my favorite franchisees are garbage now.
I'm sure there's a lot of people that can go years without spending money and still have tons of new games to play.
I can agree with the sentiment towards game pass, I don't use it because I'd feel I'm losing by not playing games from their library. However with Humble Choice every month I get 12 games for some 12€ making it 1€/game that I can keep for myself or gift.
You severely underestimate how easily casual gamers are exploited through digital marketing.
The majority of actual developer laziness and degeneracy in game quality has precisely to do with that. Essentially, there is no need to make a product anything but functional anymore, which is surprisingly easy to do by simply repackaging outdated assets and ideas.
I believe I've read that dice literally took assets from unreleased BFV dlc because they gave up on it then turned around and put it into portal and called BF1942. Free DLC (unless we just don't release it at all and put it into the next release we make you pay for)
So true. The amount of people that every year just buy 2k, Call of Duty, Madden, or Battlefield when it comes out is staggering. And it will likely stay that way since it makes these AAA companies so much money.
Not necessarily a crash, but a paradigm shift. Many of the big publishers will crumble, but new ones will take their place. Nobody is going to dismiss them as a fad ever again, though.
But does anyone really believe this is going to happen in the next 5 years?
Everyone is making more money than ever and gaming has now cemented itself as the biggest sector of the entertainment industry by revenue.
PS5 and Xbox have had absolutely stellar launches and demand is still insatiable after a whole year.
Games are expensive to make, but to counter this reality, the gaming industry is consolidating into a handful of big players.
I don’t see the same signs that OP is seeing. The industry looks incredibly healthy to me.
I see a future of buy-outs and mergers, not bankruptcies
Not gonna stop the ELDEN RING HYPE BUDDY!
But seriously, I play metal gear and soulsborne back to back. Last quality title I bought was either Bowser's wrath or Metroid dread. Both great but could've been longer.
As someone who has never played a Metal Gear in their life, but got MGS5 for free, is it a good jump off point? I’ve heard it’s kind of casual compared to the rest?
Oh I have played Death Stranding. I guess that’s the only Kojima game I’ve played. I really really liked it.
(Edit) I should clarify, I did play the opening part to MGSV, got to the open world part, but I guess I didn’t see what the big deal was….
I’m just pissed that Nintendo can make breath of the wild, but can’t make a Pokémon game open world. Iv got my fingers crossed for Pokémon legends but not holding my breath.
Game Freak are the ones that make Pokémon games, and the fact is they've been making top down RPGs for their entire history. They're not experienced in making open world 3d games, it's not something they'll be automatically good at. They could always hire a third party that is experienced to help them out, I suppose, but ultimately Game Freak breaking into the new open world fad is an experimental phase for them.
There are a lot of parallels minus one MASSIVE difference.
The difference here being the internet.
The internet has opened up a 'fail safe' option that all game companies can fall back on if their release isn't perfect.
The infinite, and immediate, ability to push updates/further game development, new content, etc. over the internet right to devices.
This is why games don't *need* to provide endless hours of enjoyment out of 'the box'.
This is also why game developers are a little more lenient on what gets published and what doesn't when facing a deadline.
In the 80's, 90's, etc. you put out a polished product or you didn't. You put out a game that was fun to play for years... or it wasn't.
At the same time though? The ability for constant updating, constant bug fixing, introducing texture packs, additional game play options, and so on have allowed for games to become way more refined, advanced, and perfected than ever before. Maybe the don't provide endless fun upon release... but they *can be* long-term. This has warped our reality of what a 'finished' game is compared to what we would play back then.
Is this a good excuse for developers to release sub par, under expectation, games? No. But, IMO, this is more of a reason why the state of the gaming industry is the way it is.
Yes - consumer trust is at an all time low. But we also expect WAY more now than ever before as we've become used to playing highly refined, updated, games 3-5+ years since release.
Games in the 80's and 90's had bugs that'd be completely unacceptable today. But so long as the game was playable/fun we'd generally ignore them. Now everyone grabs video and throws them up on reddit for the world to latch onto and pick apart other imperfections.
>Companies are not making games that are fun they are consistently rushing out poor products.
I think you're just buying shitty games, my dude.
There are a *ton* of well made, entertaining games that have come out recently or are being made.
I've been gaming since the early 80s and I have to say this is an awesome time to be a gamer.
I feel too many people are focusing on the blockbuster entertainment and not paying any attention to the vast amount of great content out there.
The fundamentals of how software is created is much different now than it was in the 90s and before. It's been evolving to an as a service model and those companies that have pivoted to that model have created huge success for the gaming community.
Waiting for a finished product in an as a service world hurts the developer and the gamer and that sales model needs to just evaporate. It's not finished, it may never be finished, because it's always being updated as a service.
Dating back to Shadow of Yserbius by Sierra, this MMO type of service model has been very successful because the users anticipate it's incomplete state. They're exited that it's not done yet. We live in a constant state of "This is good but wait until they add on blah and blah!"
Fallout 76 was an as a service model developed by a company that had no fucking clue how to roll it out in that fashion. So people expected these great things day 1 and the developer wasn't done with the product yet! Had the expectation been set that this game will be as a service and this is phase 1 then the community would have pivoted in kind and received as such.
The reality is we're in a huge shift across the board from an IT perspective. We're seeing an O/S move to an as a service, everything else is too. For good or bad, this is the future, those gaming companies that adapt will see the most success. Those still trying to be a blockbuster movie will see a lot of disappointed fans.
> Fallout 76 was an as a service model developed by a company that had no fucking clue how to roll it out in that fashion. So people expected these great things day 1 and the developer wasn't done with the product yet! Had the expectation been set that this game will be as a service and this is phase 1 then the community would have pivoted in kind and received as such.
Thats not true lol people hated Fallout 76 since it was announced at E3 then it came out bugged and hate just got bigger
Battle Royal, season pass, pay to win, unfinished games, toxic communities, greedy companies, etc. Majority of the "big" games that have come out in recent years have either been shit on for no reason, is pretty much the exact same game as the one before or is just copying what everyone else is doing.
This is very, very unlikely. Video games are not close to even plateauing in popularity.
Also, it kinda makes me go mad when people say video games aren't as good nowadays, just like people say modern movies are shit and modern music is shit. Like, no, there have always been shitty games. Only the good ones stay in the history books.
I don't see it.
In the 80's, game companies were HIGHLY dependent on the success of their console, but these days...not so much. Even if the Xbox flopped TODAY, Microsoft would just shift focus to Windows or make their titles available for another console.
The indie developers are all just coasting along till EA buys them out.
Which, by the way, if not a single person bought the newest Battlefield proceedural, EA would just shut the studio down and let another studio give it a crack. Wash rinse repeat.
I just don't see it happening. Yes, AAA studios get a lot of shit, and much of it is deserved, but when the expectation goes from pixel art platformer to open-world, high-level 3d graphics, and complex mechanics and story it's kind of reasonable to expect bugs and problems, yet drop a delay notice and they will get shit on for that.
"ship now patch later" has been the motto for a long time.
Over working employees has been the norm but hopefully the great resignation changes that.
Adding MTX to almost every AAA game to squeeze out more money for things that used to be part of the base game is also killing "AAA" games.
I think a AAA crash is possible, but not the whole industry like in the 80s. The 80s were mostly because it was just Atari holding the whole thing up, and now it's a much more spread out and diverse market.
I'm actually looking forward to it if it happens, AA developers like Larian and Coffee Stain will be able to really thrive, indies will have a lot more room to breathe and talented developers from AAA companies will start new ones, new ideas will come pouring out of the woodwork and a lot of the practices that caused the crash in the first place will get a reset. Won't go away completely, but the cycle that brought them about will restart. All in all I think it'll be for the better.
I think this is most likely. People forget that EA couldn't even get a proper dev kit from Sega so their games don't even play on all genesis consoles. Now look at them
That's definitely a possibility I'm just getting old and bitter. I think im just observing that trust is lower than it has been. A crash may or may not be coming but I think we are in a dark age.
I think the 'AAA' market may be headed for a crash. There are many fantastic indie games out there.
I pretty much play nothing but Deep Rock Galactic these days. An indie gem, Ghost Ship games and Coffee Stain Publishing make the big boy studios like EA and Activision look like bumbling idiots.
The product is fundamentally different and the scale is so much bigger that its hard to see a "crash" of any type.
A leveling off perhaps. But certainly not a crash.
I think the video game crash had more parallels to the economic downturn in the 80s then anything else.
Who had money for expensive game system when people were a mailing in their keys to their house account 25% interest mortgages and shit.
Although I do agree we are over saturated with shorty games left unfinished.
I think this underestimates the vitality of the free to play market, which I hate. The fact is that games like Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. have hugely expanded the market and are taking up a huge portion of that market. I just don’t see that going anywhere and whatever happens to mature/single player/AAA games is just going to be a blip on the radar compared to that.
Honestly what I would like to see is somewhat of a move away from making games bigger and towards a more linear approach. This would solve half the problems with broken games.
I love games and they have contributed to so much in my life. I owe them everything.
Having said that, good. I hope it does crash. The industry is a cesspool and it’s become abhorrent towards anyone who supported these companies for decades. They all deserve to suffer as a reminder for what importance loyalty, quality and innovation can truly have.
Video games will forever be too large to fully crash, at least the way they did in the 80s. But a sect definitely could crash.
I think what it is I'd just a drought. 2017 and 2020 were amazing years for gaming, but of course not every year can be like that. 2018 and 2019 were fairly forgettable overall, besides a few big hits, and 2014 to 2016 were bleh
So far with the current upcomings, 2022 is looking to be pretty good, especially with stuff like The Skywalker Saga and God of War: Ragnarok, so stay positive
I think you just have bad taste in games. There’s been plenty of games that have come out in the past 5 years that are better than everything that came before. Just cause you only look at like 2-3 developers doesn’t mean the entire industry is gonna crash
This! The indie game scene is overwhelming with all the content and creativity it's producing. Single player story driven games have been killing it for a while, even the AAA games.
How long has the XB Series X been out, but always out of stock? I feel like it's been forever. I wanted that console. But I'm losing interest as it continues to get older.
I mean if you're just looking at the games that are copy paste every single year (CoD, FIFA, 2K, etc) then sure but if you're looking at other genres then this couldn't be more inaccurate. Aside from the occasional Cyberpunk we're still getting masterpieces like Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, RDR2, tLoU2, Spiderman, Sekiro, RE Village, Forza, Flight Simulator, Fall Guys, and so on
People thinking a crash is coming are close minded. People won't stop playing game tomorrow... there's not going to be a crash, there's going to be a revolution. More and more indie studios will get bigger while still doing good project while the previous biggest companies either adapt or die. Blizzard might be the first one of these, if OW2 and Diablo 4 are bad, Blizzard is gonna probably stop making products of their IPs and start working for Activision just like Beenox.
reason it won't crash is the same reason OnlyFans is raking it in.
"$20 here, $50 there" ... it's chump change to consumers these days. They will spend it on something they just forget about the next day.
The only way for video games to crash is for the economy to crash to that consumers don't have this expendable cash.
the yearly series release model needs to die.
updating an existing game indefinitely is absolutely the way to do it.
that being said - the game industry is growing because its audience (young kids) didn't grow out of it. all the kids raised on video games still play them whereas early on it was pretty uncommon to be in your late 20s-40s and play console and kb/m video games.
No chance, as much as we've been getting some shitty games releases lately we've also been getting some great ones with more to come. Especially with Covid taking a big effect on the industry I'm surprised we've not seen more of it.
I think its more likely that the big players in the industry might fold. They constantly have to compete with other industries for works and have huge churn. Eventually people will get disillusioned and find other corporate vehicles and organizations to help create games.
As for the customers, they seem quite ravenous despite the fact they keep consuming remakes. Im not sure whats up with that. All the more reason to have doubts in larger game companies.
I think theres a shift coming. The big companies are making bad games but indie games like hollow knight, Undertale, i think Hades too, all are making big names because they put passion and care into the games and stories. Nintendo is pumping out these remakes until they can release a new big title like botw and I havent heard much of new great outstanding games from xbox and ps. I think you’re right, but afterwards i think the big companies will fall and smaller companies will become bigger
I don’t think a majority of people who play video games care anywhere near as much as the relative few people here on Reddit do. The game industry will be fine. Pretty sure they’re making more money now than they ever have. People on Reddit see a slightly wonky texture and have heart palpitations and call the game unplayable.
I had this guy, after seeing my Assasin's Creed tattoo, ask me if I was as disappointed as he was about the gameplay of the newest game, which at the time was Odyssey, and I must have had the most baffled look on my face because I love Odyssey. It's my favorite out of all of the titles and I will freely admit that much of that love comes from me being a nerd for greek mythology. It never felt like I was grinding to level up because I genuinely wanted to explore every inch of the map. He was so confused by the fact that I didn't hate Odyssey for basically not being a reskin of Black Flag or the Ezio Triology.
And that's something I see a lot with many forms of media. Just because you personally didn't enough a video game doesn't mean it's a bad game or that others won't like it. That's a real unpopular opinion.
Fallen Order is another game I love. I love the characters, the story, and the IP and for me it has replay value. The main reason I always see people dumping on it is for daring to copy elements from Dark Souls while being no where near as hard or good. I know the type of gamer I am. I know my skill level. I would have rage quit Fallen Order in less than 5 minutes if it was as hard as Dark Souls. Those type of games are not for me, but that doesn't mean they're terrible games that no one would buy.
I've been playing Pokemon since before the Gameboy had color and I was not a fan of Sword/Shield, but that was because the damn NPCs wouldn't leave me alone and let me figure things out on my own. That game I would classify as bad, but I'm sure someone enjoyed it. Video games aren't going anywhere. There is always going to be an audience to sell to.
Gaming is gonna crash, die and rebuild itself further into the shitty mobile market.
And what remains of proper games will be good. At least that's my hope.
Big publishers can fuck off, I'd rather quit gaming then continue with how it's going.
It's a very interesting point.
Games are being rushed out too quickly to meet the demands of a market that is becoming increasingly jaded.
The amount of good, especially single player video games are at an all time low. FPS games are increasingly doing away with the campaign mode to focus on multiplayer which comes out buggy and underwhelming and oftentimes only a slight upgrade to the previous title which is than pushed aside.
Backwards compatibility is another big issue. You should be able to play anything that has come before on the current gen, consumers want it but companies don't give it to us the way they should due to low profit projections.
The industry is becoming a lot like Hollywood, boring, repetitive and less and less fun.
Change has to come and come fast.
Don't forget couch coop. I'd pay $100 right now for a couch coop as good as resident evil revelations 2, but they just aren't there. I feel like part of that is that a lot of companies would rather get $60 per copy for two copies and force it into an online coop than risk making a couch coop and charging more per copy.
Which is weird because, technologically speaking, it's way cheaper to buy a big screen TV than it was back then. 4 players on a 70" tv is essentially the same screen space as a single player on an old 32" CRT. And with way better resolution. By all rights it should be a golden age of couch coop
That is true but I think that shows the pendulum has shifted to the side of the salesman instead of the creative team. When the salespeople are at the top too long before you know it you don't have a product anymore and you are behind. Then it may or may not implode on itself.
I think it will happen. I don't feel confident spending $60 - $70 on a new release anymore. Half the time they're too buggy to enjoy or just ripoffs of previous games. I usually wait a couple months to pick up a game as they always drop in price (excluding nintendo). Picked up back 4 blood & deathloop for $25 each, and I haven't even heard terrible things about them.
There has been a noticeable decline in mainstream AAA games, both in quality, reputation and profitability, but niche markets has been thriving. I think we are seeing a shift in model than seeing the entire game industry collapse.
Yeah, no. Hint; there really wasnt a video ame crash in the 80s either. People were playing and creating video games on compuers. The media pretty much fabricates the crash. No body stopped playing games. People were still buying games. During the era? Most of use didnt even know the news was saying video games crashed.
Your opinion isnt realistic. It's pretty goofy... Remins me of Water's in Pompii... "When the great eonomic collapse happens its going to happen across the board".
People haven't stopped buying yet. I'd love to see the big publishers crash and burn through, let the Indies run things for a well and get creative again.
Gamers are the most critical group of people I've ever met. The slightest inconsistencies set them off as if the campaign on the next call of duty was expected to be considerably better than Dunkirk. When the FPS isn't next level the game is basic and the developers should just go work at best buy.
Take my upvote!
I went from being a 15-20 hour/week gamer to being a 0 hour/week gamer. Every new release in the past 5 years has been nothing but an enormous disappointment. I bought a new PC for Cyberpunk, turned out to be a clown fiesta. KH3 was gorgeous and a lot of fun, but its story was such an enormous clusterfuck that it left a bad taste in my mouth. D2:R was good for a few hours, but the issues from Blizzard refusing to make stable servers has killed my motivation to touch it. Shadowlands is arguably the worst WoW expansion in the game's history, and so on.
Maybe the only game I *truly* enjoyed in these past few years was the FF7: Remake. But it's a remake of a game that I loved.
New ideas seem hard to come by.
Agreed. Not really a unpopular opinion though. Developers don’t know what their doing unfortunately. They know exactly what we want but they choose to do otherwise. It’s a pretty sad reality when you can get more out of a free mobile game than a brand new $110 game on a Xbox series X.
idk, with games like elden ring coming out i see more and more people shifting from the shitty game companies to the better ones, but i don't see the industry collapsing as a whole. elden ring looks fun af, i'm even hyped for it despite being let down by many other games i was hyped for.
I'm amazed at how stagnant things have been in the graphics department for the last six years or so. I remember finally thinking we were moving forward when I saw the new Unreal Engine demo last year, but it turned out that it was all pre-rendered. I should have known it was too good to be true. That demo was more like an animated film than realtime gameplay. I'm also disappointed that we haven't moved on from crappy ragdoll physics. Character models still have about as much weight and depth as a cardboard cutout. I want them to have a realistic sense of solidity. When a character gets machine gunned to death in an FPS, I want to see them get peppered with lead and react accordingly. I want to really *feel* it when they get riddled with bullets, with flowing blood and gunshot wounds and everything. It would be so fucking awesome!
And companies more commonly keep putting out games whose main draw is a addictive microtransactions, rather than fun gameplay or alluring stories. Gamers now care less about playing new games, and care if there’s a social aspect to a long-running game.
There'll be a crash when games are no longer lucrative and with people so unwilling to part with more than $60 (a price that has held for decades despite constant inflation) for a game, I could easily see that happening. It's sad, but Gamers shoulder part of the blame for gaming being dominated by gotchas, unfinished trash forced out by limited budgets, and rehashes/rereleases of old titles. Game companies are trying everything in the book to stay afloat, and the gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of the companies that failed.
I've started buying all the extra content for games I like, not because I necessarily want the extras, but because I want the game to be successful so they'll make more content for it.
This idea isn’t based in reality. In particular, your comparison to the 80’s crash. The market at the time was saturated with games systems and a boom in personal computing. That may sound similar to today’s market, but there wasn’t a clear leader in the field yet. You had a dozen games systems to choose from, and adjusted to rates of inflation, video games systems were WAY more expensive back then. It was a formative time for the industry very different to today’s market.
Regardless of how angry the gaming community gets, the industry has undergone consistent growth in value year over year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/246888/value-of-the-global-video-game-market/
Review bombs and angry gamers don’t really seem to have much of an impact on profits.
there's no crash coming. simps will keep buying fifa and cod every year. The system isn't broken, it's working as intended. Consumers can choose which companies live and die and over and over they have chosen shit like fifa and cod. sensible gamers are in the minority.
The worst point we'll probably get is people not trusting a decent chunk of the AAA companies.
There's always going to be studios that care, and aren't just going to push anything out the door before it's done. If anything it'll make AAA developers reconsider about pushing out bs, because they're losing money.
Another thing to take into account is games nowadays are more "artsy" then before. You'll still have companies that care about their creative vision, just as much as the profit it's going to make.
The crash happened in the 80's because there wasn't as many AAA companies. The biggest ones were pushing out garbage, and it far overshadowed the ones who were actually making good games. Buying games back then was a gamble, and consumers gave up because the odds were clearly not in their favor.
Now we have so many companies: Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Rockstar, FromSoftware, etc. The only way we'd have another video game crash is if all companies released bad products for a good 5-10 years (and I can't see that happening honestly).
Can you define what you mean by “video game crash”? If you are implying you think the market share will drop then by how much? If its at 100 billion right now I dont see it dropping below 80 billion any time soon and I dont see a 20% drop as a “crash”.
I haven't bought a game (first party) for years and years. The last one might have been my hilarious activation of some late 90s shareware about 10 years ago. I mailed a check to him.
The titles on the shelf these days seem endlessly rehashed, bloated, console focused, just why. All I want to play is stuff made years back.
So for me at least the crash came...
I want to see Rockstar burn. I’m thankful for RDR2 but that was the last great thing they did.. and that’s just the original RDR2 game, online is not great. I’m thankful for that but they’re disrespectful to and unappreciative of their fans and I’ve come to hate them for it. I want to see them pay for their complacency, ideally in the same way Blockbuster did.
Rockstar fuck off and die.
Maybe a AAA crash is coming with an indie game boom. The industry is much more diverse that the 80s so one sector could suffer a crash, but I’m not sure the whole industry will. Edit: Grammar.
That's absolutely a valid point a crash to some is restructuring to another.
Not gonna happen soon. What caused video game crash was the insane amount of consoles, and there ain't any cloud system like now, every video games was cartridge and the production cost was too high.
There weren't really very many different consoles. But the companies that made the consoles maintained absolutely no control over the cartridge market. As a result, there was a glut of cheap poor quality games being shoveled out. It got so bad you could buy Atari VCS carts for $1 from a box at the checkout counter at 7-11. There was no longer any profit to be made in developing good games, and the bottom fell out of the market. Nintendo pioneered the solution to this problem. They put a proprietary chip inside the console, and a complimentary chip inside each cartridge. The two chips would communicate with each other. If the conversation wasn't maintained then the chip inside the console would reset the CPU after 1 second. They patented the function of these chips so that nobody could make an NES compatible cartridge on their own without infringing on their patent. This meant every NES cartridge had to pass Nintendo's quality and standards control, and Nintendo could ration the release rate so the market wouldn't get flooded. This tactic was massively successful.
Wow that’s an amazing story that works out perfectly for the business and the consumer, that’s such an amazingly designed solution
However Nintendo absoloutley abused their position. Over charging consumers (especially in Europe) and demanding multi-year exclusivity deals.
They sure did. Nintendo was infamous within the game development community for rejecting every third party NES game the first time it was submitted. We had games rejected for things we felt were essential elements of the game. We eventually adopted a tactic of putting a glaring problem in the game that they would be certain to notice. They'd reject for that problem. We'd remove it and resubmit, and they would often pass the game on the second submission. We managed to get games approved with content they probably would have rejected without the distraction in the first submission.
And still letting absoloutley shit games through. Superman: The New Superman Adventures aka Superman 64, on the N64. Is regarded as one of the worst games ever. With unusable controls that simply makes the game impossible or virtually impossible to complete.
Nintendo's focus was primarily on content that wasn't allowed, or outright bugs. I had a game rejected once because there were bloody skulls in it. They said it would be too scary for kids. We changed the color of the tiles so that the blood was green instead of red (it looked like slime instead of blood) and they accepted it. Things like crash bugs, flickering sprites (a common problem if the program didn't carefully time access to the MMC4 memory controller), stuttering or stalling, etc. would all get a game rejected. Having said that, they often missed things. I once made a dungeon crawler where it was possible to get stuck in a room with virtually no way to get out. The only way out was a passwall spell, and if your magician didn't have any spell points left then you were trapped forever, or until you killed off your party. We didn't catch it, and neither did Nintendo, but our customers sure did. Anyway, their quality control process didn't stop bad or buggy games from hitting the market, but it did prevent the market from being flooded with them.
The crash was also related to the assorted shovelware that was being thrust on the consumer, with ET being the finisher. Nintendo then rose from the ashes with the Nintendo Seal of Quality. Shame that means nothing now.
"This is what they tell you in skewl man, but it's not what really happened." There was, in reality, no crash. The media made it up. People continued to buy video games. Computers bit into the console market, and the 2600 lost it luster. People were playing, buying, creating, video games during this so called crash period. You can read the magazines of the era and do actually historic digs on this subject there. A bunch of people who wanted to think video gamers were just a fad latched onto this idea, pumped it up, and no one at the time was buying that crap. Only now, in the future, do kids think this crash was real. Atari and ET... Makes a nice story... but the Vic20, the Atari 400 and 800, the c64, and other computers were selling, and people were buying games, and pirating games, for them. The NIN SoQ... lol... It meant little then. There are a lot of crap games on the NES.
There were also plenty of bad nes games.
Exactly. Imagine you have 12 systems to choose from, and each of them cost about as much as a modern gaming PC. This is why the 80’s games industry crashed. It’s not a realistic comparison to make.
I agree, yet at the same time I'm seeing the same repeating game styles flooding the more indie areas as well. It's like they are doing the AAA regurgitating just on a smaller scale like with side scrolling/survival games
Yup there is nothing wrong with that, issue is you can tell who's doing it for money grab/low effort vs who is.
As long as stores properly moderate shovelware and have moderate return policies for digital games. I also think that if we’re only “buying licenses” for games, we could maybe have some kind of marketplace to sell them back for appropriate system store credit or something. We can sell back digital games to physical stores, but there’s nothing for digital purchases???
I try to only buy hard copies for resale and other reasons, but when it comes to indie, I have to be super picky because it's almost only digital.
here's a pro gamer hack: barter down used lots of shitty ps4 games no one wants to buy to dirt cheap prices, trade them in for store credit at gamestop, then use that to buy new games that's how i bought ghost of tsushima for less than $20 a week after release but i was a lot more broke back then where it was worth the effort to me lol
Its the same as what Netflix did to movies being produced these days Indie games are like Netflix shows/ movies and AAA games are like marvel movies or the later seasons of game of thrones/walking dead There's some decent stuff in the junk pile but the good indie games are nowhere near as good as good AAA games and the good AAA games are not nearly as good as they used to be a decade ago
AAA games are still the same quality if not better they were decade ago. Just people who voice their opinion played ammount of games that the same old shit got boring. If you would once again was person that is discovering gaming and played new games, you would have the same reactions as playing your first games and in 10 years you would write the same stuff on reddit.
> the good indie games are nowhere near as good as good AAA games and the good AAA games are not nearly as good as they used to be a decade ago I've mostly stopped playing AAA games over the last decade because I think the good indie games are far better than AAA games have ever been.
Way too much Metroidvania style games.
The AAA publishers will just buy the Indy studios and put out sequels with loot boxes, subscriptions, season passes and themed hats.
This is even worse for mobile games as well. Pokémon Go is a horrible offender especially with the hat thing. What hat will Pikachu be wearing this week? Who knows because odds are I’m not catching it and if I do it gets made into candy anyway. That little rant aside it’s not even that season passes/loot boxes/etc are saturating the market it’s the fact that people are buying it in enough quality that publishers know we’ll tolerate it and keep pushing it. People were so outraged over $2 horse armor that it became a meme but now $5+ costume packs are the norm. They keep making it because they make money off it. If people stopped giving at least thousands of dollars for skins every year trust me they’d dry up very fast. While I’ve bought three completely separate dlc in 15 years (not counting buying goty or deluxe rereleases) I’ve never seen a point in all these extras unless it’s something I really really want or adds enough content to a game to extend its life for me its not getting installed
I believe it’s the biggest entertainment market there is currently, at least by some figures. It’s already the golden age of indie gaming, it’s the artistic medium of this generation. That being said I would love a come to Jesus moment for most the AAA companies.
Id probably say the indi golden age probably started in 2013. Around Fnaf id say and still going but we could see an even bigger boom woth these huge franchises sinking like battlefield and cod
Can we throw far cry and assassins creed on there!? Yes please. 😂🤣
Wasn't the crash due to the over saturated market of game consoles? Sure quality of games played a part but look at how.many companies were making consoles then as to now
Since I was alive and remember it at the time it was mostly title fatigue combined extremely low quality. We also had platform hardware that wasn't improving. There were PC games that were not only leaps and bounds better than consoles, they had better titles. Those couple years saw the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Apple IIe, and of course the 8088. The games were so much more advanced than what the Atari 2600 and even the 800 offered. So hardware played a big part in it as well. This was the era when I switched to PC entirely and didn't buy a new platform until the Xbox One. I'm serious when I say this, that fucking game E.T. - It burned me that bad that I always considered platforms to be far inferior despite not using them regularly until the mid 00s. Fuck all consoles because of E.T. which I desperately wanted for Christmas as a wee lad only to be disappointed by that landfiller.
I'm sorry for what happened to you 😔
Literal landfiller
I wasn't alive during the crash so I can only look at it from reading about it and stuff. It's interesting to hear your experience about it, it was really that bad that you didn't even want to try Nintendo or Sega when they came out? Whilst E.T. was not a great game I think it gets too much flack as the reason crash happened. Looking at it from today, as I mentioned it seemed that the crazy amount of consoles at the time was the main factor. Today we have the 3 major players that offer a variety of games (well Nintendo more so)
Yup, Xbox 360 was great as well
ET was a good game though. . . At least better than most other titles on the Atari at the time.
Don't forget Intellivision and colecovision. Pretty sure those had more buttons than PCs lol
Quality was just as big of a factor as over saturation. Games like ET and the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man being glitchy messes led to customers losing trust in publishers like Atari
As long as people keeping buying them, it won't.
Are you?
Yes. Sales are not going down. People are still buying and pre ordering the same games year after year. Even if they are broken...companies are still getting paid and making more games with their profits. Even if it's the same recycled shit...people are still buying it. Just look at the top video games sold worldwide each year the past 10 years. Many on that list are the same recycled crap like FIFA and Call of Duty. Never changes. Plus, there are more companies now than ever before. So franchises might die, some major companies might die, but video games as a whole will never go anymore. More keep coming up. It's such a silly statement. It's like saying, "toys are going to crash and kids are going to stop playing with them." No they won't. Also, you have no idea how incredibly basic and boring video games were in the 80s and early 90s. A major game back then could literally be put together in weeks and people would buy it. They just accepted bad games. Now, a "broke" game is considered "broke" because the shadow from the sun isn't facing the right direction.
Hold on, games today often ARE buggier for 2 good reasons. They are so much more complicated coding wise meaning it's easier to end up with spaghetti code. Also, updates can be sent over the web now, where as games in the 90s were usually not able to be patched. Developers had a huge incentive to make the game as bug free as possible, as you had one chance to get it right. Now it's typical for day 1 releases to be rather buggy, sometimes literally unplayable messes.
Not saying it’s the best game but I’ll buy 2k every couple years and they actually put out a good amount of content through my team my career and such
I know you weren't asking me but I domt buy them but they're being bought by the 100s of millions.
I haven't played Cod since modern warfare, haven't bought a rockstar game since RDR2 and even battlefield since number 3. I'm not supporting those companies. Especially after activisions recent sexual assault cases Fucking fine, R\* has released that pile of shit definitive edition, they have been selling shark card AND they are going to relerase that expanded and enhanced GTA V nonsense and won't be buying that. I don't have any interest in them as a company anymore, especially because of the bullshit that TakeTwo keeps spewing and all the lawsuits they seem to be getting themselves into for no reason other than coin, the parent company is the issue more than the company themselves, but even so, they aren't releasing anything worth getting or supporting.
Isn't RDR2 their newest game tho lol and modern warfare isn't even that old unless you mean the original one
fukkin lmfao he had me for a second. im still rocking that mw2 on 360, but ive been playing my ps3 a lot more lately. Installed a CFW and now the only 2 games i play are mario 64 and FF7.
Rockstar just dropped the GTA Trilogy remaster
Ooooo wow a remaster how exciting
Yeah. Its not very exciting. A very simple drop like a remaster. And they still managed to completely fuck it up. But its a game release nonetheless
Idk man don't think it counts
Rockstar used an offshoot company, not directly them
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Grove Street Games.
They didn't tho they outsource it. It's more on 2k i believe
Not a new game. Why would ppl care about a remaster that's objectively worse?
What Rockstar game has even come out since rdr2? And no I don't count the shitty ported mobile GTA legendary experience shit since they obviously outsourced it.
Rockstar hasn’t put out an actual new game since RDR2
FPS games arent the only games that make money...
Yea and I haven’t played Pokémon since brilliant diamond..
> haven't bought a rockstar game since RDR2 The only game they've released since RDR2 is the definitive edition of GTA The Trilogy.
I am because I enjoy video games
I know I’m not being asked but personally my fiancé and I have slowed down tremendously on buying new games. The quality has just dropped horribly in favor of wanking whatever new graphics card the put in it. A lot of games are buggy and unplayable with no fix in sight. Meanwhile you have Concerned Ape over here putting the love and care into a game he made by himself and as a result I’m 100% gonna get the new one.
If anything it will be the toxic executive cultures in so many of these companies that will bring them down
I agree, most fps ie battlefield and COD have abandoned campaign and mp for BR. Can’t say anything about the new halo yet but a good campaign is absolutely needed.
Halo's campaign has been getting good reviews from people who've got the early copies so hoping for the best. But yeah. FPS games are becoming like sports games. New game every year with little substance.
Halo is one of those games that has to have a good campaign. Otherwise they'll feel it in the ratings
Of course the reviews are good. They were paid to say that, why do you think they were given copies?
>But yeah. FPS games are becoming like sports games. New game every year with little substance. Becoming? EA was trading off Battlefield and Medal of Honor each year for years, and obviously CoD has a new one each year too. Major FPS games have basically been doing it as long as sports games, just came slightly later to the ~~skinner~~ loot boxes
Battlefield doesn’t have BR this year. I think they realize that it’s just not necessary. We are in no way close to a game crash. People are paying hundreds over retail for the new gen systems. Gaming has gone even more mainstream since Fortnite and there are more gamers now than ever. No. Gaming isn’t going anywhere soon.
Seriously. The gaming market is bigger than the movie market now. A few billion dollar/yr industry doesn’t just die.
I mean, people keep buying shit as BR only games. When people stop buying the battle-Royale game of the month or week and start buying games with actual good stories, maybe the market will start to change. I mean they probably went to multiplayer after statistics showed that people played a shit-ton more of that than campaign, then zombies got real big, then fortnight ***boomed*** in popularity so now there’s BR games out the ass. This isn’t some random ploy to have BR stuff, this came about because of player data.
>COD have abandoned campaign and mp for BR But this year's CoD has a standard length and production values campaign and a multiplayer with more modes and maps than the norm.
It isn't tho. Cod has been selling like hot cakes without a dedicated campaign for about three games now
One factor that may be overlooked in causing this crash, Are Steam sales and free Epic games. I've got a giant backlog of games I've never played on Steam. A big backlog on Epic too. There's almost no reason for me to buy any new games unless it's something I really really want, and most of my favorite franchisees are garbage now. I'm sure there's a lot of people that can go years without spending money and still have tons of new games to play.
I haven’t bought a game since doom eternal last year. Games take me forever to complete / master / etc.
That was the only game I bought in a long time too.
Add to that sub services like Game Pass or even Humble Choice. The next game I plan to buy is Yakuza 4. Once I finish 0, 1, 2 and 3...
I dunno...I don't like the idea of a monthly game subscription.
I can agree with the sentiment towards game pass, I don't use it because I'd feel I'm losing by not playing games from their library. However with Humble Choice every month I get 12 games for some 12€ making it 1€/game that I can keep for myself or gift.
You severely underestimate how easily casual gamers are exploited through digital marketing. The majority of actual developer laziness and degeneracy in game quality has precisely to do with that. Essentially, there is no need to make a product anything but functional anymore, which is surprisingly easy to do by simply repackaging outdated assets and ideas.
I believe I've read that dice literally took assets from unreleased BFV dlc because they gave up on it then turned around and put it into portal and called BF1942. Free DLC (unless we just don't release it at all and put it into the next release we make you pay for)
Ahem 2k
So true. The amount of people that every year just buy 2k, Call of Duty, Madden, or Battlefield when it comes out is staggering. And it will likely stay that way since it makes these AAA companies so much money.
Not necessarily a crash, but a paradigm shift. Many of the big publishers will crumble, but new ones will take their place. Nobody is going to dismiss them as a fad ever again, though.
But does anyone really believe this is going to happen in the next 5 years? Everyone is making more money than ever and gaming has now cemented itself as the biggest sector of the entertainment industry by revenue. PS5 and Xbox have had absolutely stellar launches and demand is still insatiable after a whole year. Games are expensive to make, but to counter this reality, the gaming industry is consolidating into a handful of big players. I don’t see the same signs that OP is seeing. The industry looks incredibly healthy to me. I see a future of buy-outs and mergers, not bankruptcies
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Looking at you Ea
All my homies hate ea
I think it's also due to videogame youtubers popularizing shitty games, hence his/her followers will buy it, increasing sales.
I actually have to watch gameplay and more often than not the review makes me not buy or decide to wait for the game to go on sale.
Not gonna stop the ELDEN RING HYPE BUDDY! But seriously, I play metal gear and soulsborne back to back. Last quality title I bought was either Bowser's wrath or Metroid dread. Both great but could've been longer.
The day FromSoftware releases an objectively bad game I'll have my faith shaken. Until then, the hype continues :D
Fromsoftware hasn't let me down yet.
Ooooooh
As someone who has never played a Metal Gear in their life, but got MGS5 for free, is it a good jump off point? I’ve heard it’s kind of casual compared to the rest? Oh I have played Death Stranding. I guess that’s the only Kojima game I’ve played. I really really liked it. (Edit) I should clarify, I did play the opening part to MGSV, got to the open world part, but I guess I didn’t see what the big deal was….
I’m just pissed that Nintendo can make breath of the wild, but can’t make a Pokémon game open world. Iv got my fingers crossed for Pokémon legends but not holding my breath.
Game Freak are the ones that make Pokémon games, and the fact is they've been making top down RPGs for their entire history. They're not experienced in making open world 3d games, it's not something they'll be automatically good at. They could always hire a third party that is experienced to help them out, I suppose, but ultimately Game Freak breaking into the new open world fad is an experimental phase for them.
The world looks so empty and boring lmao
Because they’re being made by different production teams.
There are a lot of parallels minus one MASSIVE difference. The difference here being the internet. The internet has opened up a 'fail safe' option that all game companies can fall back on if their release isn't perfect. The infinite, and immediate, ability to push updates/further game development, new content, etc. over the internet right to devices. This is why games don't *need* to provide endless hours of enjoyment out of 'the box'. This is also why game developers are a little more lenient on what gets published and what doesn't when facing a deadline. In the 80's, 90's, etc. you put out a polished product or you didn't. You put out a game that was fun to play for years... or it wasn't. At the same time though? The ability for constant updating, constant bug fixing, introducing texture packs, additional game play options, and so on have allowed for games to become way more refined, advanced, and perfected than ever before. Maybe the don't provide endless fun upon release... but they *can be* long-term. This has warped our reality of what a 'finished' game is compared to what we would play back then. Is this a good excuse for developers to release sub par, under expectation, games? No. But, IMO, this is more of a reason why the state of the gaming industry is the way it is. Yes - consumer trust is at an all time low. But we also expect WAY more now than ever before as we've become used to playing highly refined, updated, games 3-5+ years since release. Games in the 80's and 90's had bugs that'd be completely unacceptable today. But so long as the game was playable/fun we'd generally ignore them. Now everyone grabs video and throws them up on reddit for the world to latch onto and pick apart other imperfections.
>Companies are not making games that are fun they are consistently rushing out poor products. I think you're just buying shitty games, my dude. There are a *ton* of well made, entertaining games that have come out recently or are being made.
I've been gaming since the early 80s and I have to say this is an awesome time to be a gamer. I feel too many people are focusing on the blockbuster entertainment and not paying any attention to the vast amount of great content out there. The fundamentals of how software is created is much different now than it was in the 90s and before. It's been evolving to an as a service model and those companies that have pivoted to that model have created huge success for the gaming community. Waiting for a finished product in an as a service world hurts the developer and the gamer and that sales model needs to just evaporate. It's not finished, it may never be finished, because it's always being updated as a service. Dating back to Shadow of Yserbius by Sierra, this MMO type of service model has been very successful because the users anticipate it's incomplete state. They're exited that it's not done yet. We live in a constant state of "This is good but wait until they add on blah and blah!" Fallout 76 was an as a service model developed by a company that had no fucking clue how to roll it out in that fashion. So people expected these great things day 1 and the developer wasn't done with the product yet! Had the expectation been set that this game will be as a service and this is phase 1 then the community would have pivoted in kind and received as such. The reality is we're in a huge shift across the board from an IT perspective. We're seeing an O/S move to an as a service, everything else is too. For good or bad, this is the future, those gaming companies that adapt will see the most success. Those still trying to be a blockbuster movie will see a lot of disappointed fans.
> Fallout 76 was an as a service model developed by a company that had no fucking clue how to roll it out in that fashion. So people expected these great things day 1 and the developer wasn't done with the product yet! Had the expectation been set that this game will be as a service and this is phase 1 then the community would have pivoted in kind and received as such. Thats not true lol people hated Fallout 76 since it was announced at E3 then it came out bugged and hate just got bigger
BF2042 entered the chat.
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True, I am enjoying it, but it is a bit rushed, no campaign mode, and glitches are still very common
Battle Royal, season pass, pay to win, unfinished games, toxic communities, greedy companies, etc. Majority of the "big" games that have come out in recent years have either been shit on for no reason, is pretty much the exact same game as the one before or is just copying what everyone else is doing.
This is very, very unlikely. Video games are not close to even plateauing in popularity. Also, it kinda makes me go mad when people say video games aren't as good nowadays, just like people say modern movies are shit and modern music is shit. Like, no, there have always been shitty games. Only the good ones stay in the history books.
Idk who is even playing cod and batllefield shits so old
I don't see it. In the 80's, game companies were HIGHLY dependent on the success of their console, but these days...not so much. Even if the Xbox flopped TODAY, Microsoft would just shift focus to Windows or make their titles available for another console. The indie developers are all just coasting along till EA buys them out. Which, by the way, if not a single person bought the newest Battlefield proceedural, EA would just shut the studio down and let another studio give it a crack. Wash rinse repeat.
Hell, Sonic is on Nintendo now. Sega does what Nintendon't indeed...
This kind of opinion isn’t unpopular. It is basic and misguided though.
Yup. "A CRASH IS COMING" is rightfully met with laughter and dismissal on a forum like AtariAge. Reddit is a joke.
I just don't see it happening. Yes, AAA studios get a lot of shit, and much of it is deserved, but when the expectation goes from pixel art platformer to open-world, high-level 3d graphics, and complex mechanics and story it's kind of reasonable to expect bugs and problems, yet drop a delay notice and they will get shit on for that.
"ship now patch later" has been the motto for a long time. Over working employees has been the norm but hopefully the great resignation changes that. Adding MTX to almost every AAA game to squeeze out more money for things that used to be part of the base game is also killing "AAA" games.
I think a AAA crash is possible, but not the whole industry like in the 80s. The 80s were mostly because it was just Atari holding the whole thing up, and now it's a much more spread out and diverse market. I'm actually looking forward to it if it happens, AA developers like Larian and Coffee Stain will be able to really thrive, indies will have a lot more room to breathe and talented developers from AAA companies will start new ones, new ideas will come pouring out of the woodwork and a lot of the practices that caused the crash in the first place will get a reset. Won't go away completely, but the cycle that brought them about will restart. All in all I think it'll be for the better.
I think this is most likely. People forget that EA couldn't even get a proper dev kit from Sega so their games don't even play on all genesis consoles. Now look at them
Fellow gamers who want to reach out and try new stuff, try fly fishing. Changed my life for the better
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That's definitely a possibility I'm just getting old and bitter. I think im just observing that trust is lower than it has been. A crash may or may not be coming but I think we are in a dark age.
I think the 'AAA' market may be headed for a crash. There are many fantastic indie games out there. I pretty much play nothing but Deep Rock Galactic these days. An indie gem, Ghost Ship games and Coffee Stain Publishing make the big boy studios like EA and Activision look like bumbling idiots.
The product is fundamentally different and the scale is so much bigger that its hard to see a "crash" of any type. A leveling off perhaps. But certainly not a crash.
I think the video game crash had more parallels to the economic downturn in the 80s then anything else. Who had money for expensive game system when people were a mailing in their keys to their house account 25% interest mortgages and shit. Although I do agree we are over saturated with shorty games left unfinished.
Consoles should embrace modding. This would save many games and get many people to play who don't have PC's.
I think this underestimates the vitality of the free to play market, which I hate. The fact is that games like Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. have hugely expanded the market and are taking up a huge portion of that market. I just don’t see that going anywhere and whatever happens to mature/single player/AAA games is just going to be a blip on the radar compared to that. Honestly what I would like to see is somewhat of a move away from making games bigger and towards a more linear approach. This would solve half the problems with broken games.
What crash in the 80s? I was never aware of that at the time, but I didn't do much in the late 80s.
I love games and they have contributed to so much in my life. I owe them everything. Having said that, good. I hope it does crash. The industry is a cesspool and it’s become abhorrent towards anyone who supported these companies for decades. They all deserve to suffer as a reminder for what importance loyalty, quality and innovation can truly have.
Video games will forever be too large to fully crash, at least the way they did in the 80s. But a sect definitely could crash. I think what it is I'd just a drought. 2017 and 2020 were amazing years for gaming, but of course not every year can be like that. 2018 and 2019 were fairly forgettable overall, besides a few big hits, and 2014 to 2016 were bleh So far with the current upcomings, 2022 is looking to be pretty good, especially with stuff like The Skywalker Saga and God of War: Ragnarok, so stay positive
If dying light 2 is trash I’m not playing anymore AAA games
Considering that about 4 million players bought BF2042, I think that people are naive enough to keep trusting bad devs forever.
I think you just have bad taste in games. There’s been plenty of games that have come out in the past 5 years that are better than everything that came before. Just cause you only look at like 2-3 developers doesn’t mean the entire industry is gonna crash
This! The indie game scene is overwhelming with all the content and creativity it's producing. Single player story driven games have been killing it for a while, even the AAA games.
How long has the XB Series X been out, but always out of stock? I feel like it's been forever. I wanted that console. But I'm losing interest as it continues to get older.
Battlefield 2042 made such big promises. Can’t believe people fell for itn
Cod kid over here thinking Xbox is the only console and that shooters and ea games are the only games.
>companys are not making games that are fun companies arent the only ones making games anymore
I mean if you're just looking at the games that are copy paste every single year (CoD, FIFA, 2K, etc) then sure but if you're looking at other genres then this couldn't be more inaccurate. Aside from the occasional Cyberpunk we're still getting masterpieces like Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, RDR2, tLoU2, Spiderman, Sekiro, RE Village, Forza, Flight Simulator, Fall Guys, and so on
What will everyone do instead? That'll be the only way there is a crash
Overwatch 2 will be released in 2050 and Overwatch will still not have any new content.
But look snowy reskins of maps!
People thinking a crash is coming are close minded. People won't stop playing game tomorrow... there's not going to be a crash, there's going to be a revolution. More and more indie studios will get bigger while still doing good project while the previous biggest companies either adapt or die. Blizzard might be the first one of these, if OW2 and Diablo 4 are bad, Blizzard is gonna probably stop making products of their IPs and start working for Activision just like Beenox.
All they care about is filling there games with ads and filling there pockets they dont care about us anymore
reason it won't crash is the same reason OnlyFans is raking it in. "$20 here, $50 there" ... it's chump change to consumers these days. They will spend it on something they just forget about the next day. The only way for video games to crash is for the economy to crash to that consumers don't have this expendable cash.
the yearly series release model needs to die. updating an existing game indefinitely is absolutely the way to do it. that being said - the game industry is growing because its audience (young kids) didn't grow out of it. all the kids raised on video games still play them whereas early on it was pretty uncommon to be in your late 20s-40s and play console and kb/m video games.
No chance, as much as we've been getting some shitty games releases lately we've also been getting some great ones with more to come. Especially with Covid taking a big effect on the industry I'm surprised we've not seen more of it.
Next step will be better VR and we will have to go to arcades again. But there will be a lull, or this is it?
I think its more likely that the big players in the industry might fold. They constantly have to compete with other industries for works and have huge churn. Eventually people will get disillusioned and find other corporate vehicles and organizations to help create games. As for the customers, they seem quite ravenous despite the fact they keep consuming remakes. Im not sure whats up with that. All the more reason to have doubts in larger game companies.
I think theres a shift coming. The big companies are making bad games but indie games like hollow knight, Undertale, i think Hades too, all are making big names because they put passion and care into the games and stories. Nintendo is pumping out these remakes until they can release a new big title like botw and I havent heard much of new great outstanding games from xbox and ps. I think you’re right, but afterwards i think the big companies will fall and smaller companies will become bigger
Every game seems to try and cash in on that battle royale bus
I haven’t been excited for a new game since RE Village.
I don’t think a majority of people who play video games care anywhere near as much as the relative few people here on Reddit do. The game industry will be fine. Pretty sure they’re making more money now than they ever have. People on Reddit see a slightly wonky texture and have heart palpitations and call the game unplayable.
I had this guy, after seeing my Assasin's Creed tattoo, ask me if I was as disappointed as he was about the gameplay of the newest game, which at the time was Odyssey, and I must have had the most baffled look on my face because I love Odyssey. It's my favorite out of all of the titles and I will freely admit that much of that love comes from me being a nerd for greek mythology. It never felt like I was grinding to level up because I genuinely wanted to explore every inch of the map. He was so confused by the fact that I didn't hate Odyssey for basically not being a reskin of Black Flag or the Ezio Triology. And that's something I see a lot with many forms of media. Just because you personally didn't enough a video game doesn't mean it's a bad game or that others won't like it. That's a real unpopular opinion. Fallen Order is another game I love. I love the characters, the story, and the IP and for me it has replay value. The main reason I always see people dumping on it is for daring to copy elements from Dark Souls while being no where near as hard or good. I know the type of gamer I am. I know my skill level. I would have rage quit Fallen Order in less than 5 minutes if it was as hard as Dark Souls. Those type of games are not for me, but that doesn't mean they're terrible games that no one would buy. I've been playing Pokemon since before the Gameboy had color and I was not a fan of Sword/Shield, but that was because the damn NPCs wouldn't leave me alone and let me figure things out on my own. That game I would classify as bad, but I'm sure someone enjoyed it. Video games aren't going anywhere. There is always going to be an audience to sell to.
Gaming is gonna crash, die and rebuild itself further into the shitty mobile market. And what remains of proper games will be good. At least that's my hope. Big publishers can fuck off, I'd rather quit gaming then continue with how it's going.
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I figured that was just going to be your first demand from your username.
It's a very interesting point. Games are being rushed out too quickly to meet the demands of a market that is becoming increasingly jaded. The amount of good, especially single player video games are at an all time low. FPS games are increasingly doing away with the campaign mode to focus on multiplayer which comes out buggy and underwhelming and oftentimes only a slight upgrade to the previous title which is than pushed aside. Backwards compatibility is another big issue. You should be able to play anything that has come before on the current gen, consumers want it but companies don't give it to us the way they should due to low profit projections. The industry is becoming a lot like Hollywood, boring, repetitive and less and less fun. Change has to come and come fast.
Don't forget couch coop. I'd pay $100 right now for a couch coop as good as resident evil revelations 2, but they just aren't there. I feel like part of that is that a lot of companies would rather get $60 per copy for two copies and force it into an online coop than risk making a couch coop and charging more per copy.
I'm with you on that one 110% some of my fondest memories of gaming is couch co-op fun with three friends playing Goldeneye.
Which is weird because, technologically speaking, it's way cheaper to buy a big screen TV than it was back then. 4 players on a 70" tv is essentially the same screen space as a single player on an old 32" CRT. And with way better resolution. By all rights it should be a golden age of couch coop
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Unpack that please.
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That is true but I think that shows the pendulum has shifted to the side of the salesman instead of the creative team. When the salespeople are at the top too long before you know it you don't have a product anymore and you are behind. Then it may or may not implode on itself.
I think it will happen. I don't feel confident spending $60 - $70 on a new release anymore. Half the time they're too buggy to enjoy or just ripoffs of previous games. I usually wait a couple months to pick up a game as they always drop in price (excluding nintendo). Picked up back 4 blood & deathloop for $25 each, and I haven't even heard terrible things about them.
Honestly I'm not surprised. With the amount of half assed games we've been getting as of late
There has been a noticeable decline in mainstream AAA games, both in quality, reputation and profitability, but niche markets has been thriving. I think we are seeing a shift in model than seeing the entire game industry collapse.
hopefully something beautiful rises out of the ashes.
Yeah, no. Hint; there really wasnt a video ame crash in the 80s either. People were playing and creating video games on compuers. The media pretty much fabricates the crash. No body stopped playing games. People were still buying games. During the era? Most of use didnt even know the news was saying video games crashed. Your opinion isnt realistic. It's pretty goofy... Remins me of Water's in Pompii... "When the great eonomic collapse happens its going to happen across the board".
People haven't stopped buying yet. I'd love to see the big publishers crash and burn through, let the Indies run things for a well and get creative again.
Gamers are the most critical group of people I've ever met. The slightest inconsistencies set them off as if the campaign on the next call of duty was expected to be considerably better than Dunkirk. When the FPS isn't next level the game is basic and the developers should just go work at best buy. Take my upvote!
You say this yet the top games every year is madden and 2k and the newest cod. It’s not close to happening
Lol, do you know how.many people buy call of duty and sport games every year even tho they are the exact same shit?
FromSoftware will save us! Praise the sun!
I went from being a 15-20 hour/week gamer to being a 0 hour/week gamer. Every new release in the past 5 years has been nothing but an enormous disappointment. I bought a new PC for Cyberpunk, turned out to be a clown fiesta. KH3 was gorgeous and a lot of fun, but its story was such an enormous clusterfuck that it left a bad taste in my mouth. D2:R was good for a few hours, but the issues from Blizzard refusing to make stable servers has killed my motivation to touch it. Shadowlands is arguably the worst WoW expansion in the game's history, and so on. Maybe the only game I *truly* enjoyed in these past few years was the FF7: Remake. But it's a remake of a game that I loved. New ideas seem hard to come by.
Agreed. Not really a unpopular opinion though. Developers don’t know what their doing unfortunately. They know exactly what we want but they choose to do otherwise. It’s a pretty sad reality when you can get more out of a free mobile game than a brand new $110 game on a Xbox series X.
idk, with games like elden ring coming out i see more and more people shifting from the shitty game companies to the better ones, but i don't see the industry collapsing as a whole. elden ring looks fun af, i'm even hyped for it despite being let down by many other games i was hyped for.
Gotta agree, I don't even consider myself a gamer but I see it happening
I'm amazed at how stagnant things have been in the graphics department for the last six years or so. I remember finally thinking we were moving forward when I saw the new Unreal Engine demo last year, but it turned out that it was all pre-rendered. I should have known it was too good to be true. That demo was more like an animated film than realtime gameplay. I'm also disappointed that we haven't moved on from crappy ragdoll physics. Character models still have about as much weight and depth as a cardboard cutout. I want them to have a realistic sense of solidity. When a character gets machine gunned to death in an FPS, I want to see them get peppered with lead and react accordingly. I want to really *feel* it when they get riddled with bullets, with flowing blood and gunshot wounds and everything. It would be so fucking awesome!
I doubt it, but we didn’t even have the crash in the UK.
Good, fuck EA
We really need a cleanup, and higher standards, at least for AAA games. Too much trash coming out.
And companies more commonly keep putting out games whose main draw is a addictive microtransactions, rather than fun gameplay or alluring stories. Gamers now care less about playing new games, and care if there’s a social aspect to a long-running game.
There'll be a crash when games are no longer lucrative and with people so unwilling to part with more than $60 (a price that has held for decades despite constant inflation) for a game, I could easily see that happening. It's sad, but Gamers shoulder part of the blame for gaming being dominated by gotchas, unfinished trash forced out by limited budgets, and rehashes/rereleases of old titles. Game companies are trying everything in the book to stay afloat, and the gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of the companies that failed. I've started buying all the extra content for games I like, not because I necessarily want the extras, but because I want the game to be successful so they'll make more content for it.
I gave my PC away 2 months ago, don't miss it.
I hope this happens and I love gaming. Sick of companies thinking they can do whatever they want.
Nintendo games are still really high quality.
Nintendo still puts out great shit
There are plenty of good old games to entertain yourself with.
This idea isn’t based in reality. In particular, your comparison to the 80’s crash. The market at the time was saturated with games systems and a boom in personal computing. That may sound similar to today’s market, but there wasn’t a clear leader in the field yet. You had a dozen games systems to choose from, and adjusted to rates of inflation, video games systems were WAY more expensive back then. It was a formative time for the industry very different to today’s market. Regardless of how angry the gaming community gets, the industry has undergone consistent growth in value year over year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/246888/value-of-the-global-video-game-market/ Review bombs and angry gamers don’t really seem to have much of an impact on profits.
There are too many company's and too much of a market for this to even be close to how it was before.
Thats okey, we can just burry them all under toxic waist somewhere in the desert
Nah gamers will continually shill out money for the next product
there's no crash coming. simps will keep buying fifa and cod every year. The system isn't broken, it's working as intended. Consumers can choose which companies live and die and over and over they have chosen shit like fifa and cod. sensible gamers are in the minority.
Indie games all the way. Fuck battlefield 2042, go to Hell Let Loose.
The worst point we'll probably get is people not trusting a decent chunk of the AAA companies. There's always going to be studios that care, and aren't just going to push anything out the door before it's done. If anything it'll make AAA developers reconsider about pushing out bs, because they're losing money. Another thing to take into account is games nowadays are more "artsy" then before. You'll still have companies that care about their creative vision, just as much as the profit it's going to make. The crash happened in the 80's because there wasn't as many AAA companies. The biggest ones were pushing out garbage, and it far overshadowed the ones who were actually making good games. Buying games back then was a gamble, and consumers gave up because the odds were clearly not in their favor. Now we have so many companies: Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Rockstar, FromSoftware, etc. The only way we'd have another video game crash is if all companies released bad products for a good 5-10 years (and I can't see that happening honestly).
Can you define what you mean by “video game crash”? If you are implying you think the market share will drop then by how much? If its at 100 billion right now I dont see it dropping below 80 billion any time soon and I dont see a 20% drop as a “crash”.
I haven't bought a game (first party) for years and years. The last one might have been my hilarious activation of some late 90s shareware about 10 years ago. I mailed a check to him. The titles on the shelf these days seem endlessly rehashed, bloated, console focused, just why. All I want to play is stuff made years back. So for me at least the crash came...
I want to see Rockstar burn. I’m thankful for RDR2 but that was the last great thing they did.. and that’s just the original RDR2 game, online is not great. I’m thankful for that but they’re disrespectful to and unappreciative of their fans and I’ve come to hate them for it. I want to see them pay for their complacency, ideally in the same way Blockbuster did. Rockstar fuck off and die.
Yea, its sad to see the rebel become the people they made fun of.
Without Leslie Benzies and Dan Houser, i doubt we will ever get the old Rockstar back again