This will be a divergence from my normal style of ranting... of spewing for a bunch of reasons why I hate things. Today will be more of an opinion piece about where video gaming is going and what I see in the future.
Take a walk down the street nowadays, chances are most people you see will own some sort of video game console. If you ask them their opinion on the status of the industry I can assure you again, most of them will say that it's a fairly healthy industry. However, there's the off-chance you might get one who has actively thought about it, one who has taken a good hard look at the path video gaming is going down. Now, the first person you've found, the one who mentions that it's healthy, they are the sheep. The ones who have been blindfolded and led down a path of ever increasing mediocrity. The second person you've found, they are a true gamer. They understand that quality cannot be eschewed forever. That games cannot simply throw together a 4 hour campaign with six levels that have some minor differences and enemy variation with a story that sounds as though a brain-dead howler monkey thought it up. But where did it all start?
If we look back in the past video games had stayed a fairly underground medium until around the Sixth Generation where it became almost a social abnormality to not play video games. It was in this sixth generation that microsoft took it's first steps into the video game industry with the release of their Xbox a revolutionary console that placed focus on the community through the use of it's integrated XboxLive support. Now, this in and of itself is not anything bad, in fact, being able to connect to others on a community from a console is actually a very good thing. However, with it came games that had easy access to online play for their titles thanks to XboxLive. This is where the problem starts. Games such as Halo pioneered the notion that a single player campaign can be an oversight in lieu of a, supposedly, badass multiplayer experience. This is the problem. This degeneration led to an overarching feeling of a reduced need for single player focus or even effort put into creating it. In reality most of the blame falls to the consumer when it comes to the trend away from single player. But they aren't the only culprit. In an issue this great they couldn't be.
Our next culprit is: Marketing. Market research has shown that regardless of how good your game is, if it's not marketed constantly then it doesn't sell as much as other more marketed games do. This has led many gaming companies to spend their ever increasing budget of tens of millions of dollars on marketing their games over actually play testing and making the games fun and worth their pricetags. It goes back to the greed of the companies attempting to exploit the gaming industry to line their pockets.
Now we come to the final point. What I believe is going to happen to gaming, and, honestly, what I hope. Gaming will continue as is for another two to three years, until it gets to the point that even the common gamers, the sheep, realize what is going on and rebel thus resulting in a second crash. Companies will go bankrupt, massive ones such as Microsoft and Sony will attempt to cut their running bills and end long term services or hike the prices up massively. Then an even darker age of gaming will descend where almost nothing is made and only the hardcore fans of certain games continue. I, myself, will be unaffected by this as the majority of my enjoyment doesn't come from new games anymore, as is the case for some others. However, many young people or "cutting edge" adrenaline junkies who focus on the yearly release of Call of Duty will be driven away by the high prices. Then, after another year or two of this Dark Age a shining knight will appear, the proverbial NES to our crash, and drag us out with a brave new leap into the video gaming industry and it will be reborn with a renewed emphasis on the gamer and quality.
Hopefully this is the future, hopefully in 5 years the gaming industry can have quality as it did back in the early 90s.
Cheers,
HappyPariah
PS. As far as MMOs are concerned I feel they are truly the perfect specimen to view when it comes to how to deal with games that want to focus on multiplayer, as I've no inherent problem with games that focus on the community. Build a game that is fun to play first and foremost, one that can stand on it's single player game, THEN incorporate the multiplayer aspects.
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