The state of the gaming industry

[bumwhistler]

I'm hoping the governments of the world in time will start to reign in gaming industry practices. Until a few years ago loot boxs weren't on the radar and now governments across the globe are treating them as gambling. Its pointless talking on forums if you want change talk your politicians, there the only ones that can enforce change because the gaming industry is fkn terrible at self policing.

 

[ottffss1]

IDK I guess algos learned that in the entertainment biz, weather flicks or games you are really selling the hype and not the product. Cause that's what entertainment is about? Maybe?

 

[feckyer1ife]

For the tweet, he was referencing how long it took for many gamers to discover all the content in the Witcher3. It took a couple years for many in his view to discover pretty much everything.

Yeah, sadly Witcher 3 was a much better game where i wanted to find that stuff.

 

[tonyj13b]

Get a refund, no drama, move on, thousand of games waiting.

I refunded No Man's Sky, 2 days after launch, 2 years later buy it again at a discount, and the game is good now, no fuss, for me No Man's Sky never released in 2016.

That is a terrific idea but unfortunately after 2 hours of "gameplay" which could be time spent tinkering with the settings to make it playable, you can't get a refund on PC. It takes over two hours to be released into the open world where all of the problems, not bugs, become apparent. Then it's too late. Trust me, I would love to have my $60 back.

 

[Salfin]

Sigh

While i get your point you cant compare the game industry to the automobile industry

One is well over a hundred years old and has had all that time for legislation/laws to be put in place, primarily to save lives, another is relatively new in a even newer and evolving world/market that if faulty wont kill you unlike the other.

Governments are notoriously slow at legislating these types of things, especially in a digital world, just look at smoking/drinking/gambling, things that cause way more harm and damage to ppl than gaming ever could an just how long it took them to step in there.

Your seeing action the now, slowly yes, from various places, but it takes time.

Personally, i dont think gaming is in as bad a state as alot of ppl make it out to be, like all entertainment products i can get ones i like and others i dont but there is some scummy practices that do need looked at which is being done albeit slowly

Well there are studios who have bad behavour, and the tendency is to grow worse.

So for example smaller pieces of content, ever increasing price of games and hardware. It has become the standard to released unfinished, poorly working products.

Its not going in the other direction.

 

[tonyj13b]

Well there are studios who have bad behavour, and the tendency is to grow worse.

So for example smaller pieces of content, ever increasing price of games and hardware. It has become the standard to released unfinished, poorly working products.

Its not going in the other direction.

Honestly, I would prefer a refund over a fix at this point. They could fix every bug in the game and it still won't be worth $60. Especially, when we can buy RDR2 on sale for $30 almost every week or GTA V for $15. For that matter I can just boot up Fallout New Vegas for the 100th playthrough. It launched with crazy bugs in 2010 as well. The difference is it was still a good, immersive RPG. This game objectively not good.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

Inspite the growing success, the industry is in a bad shape.

It focuses way too less on a gaming experience while putting too much focus on visuals and competition with the movie industry, as well as rising the "lowest common denominator" too high in the list of priorities. Games have become too big for their own good. Plebs and shills will always buy anything big and shiny, but the niches is where all the innovation and going forward is. And innovation and going forward is precisely what it missing from the industry, aside from technical achievements from doing what was done yesterday with higher polycount and better streaming capabilities.

 

[taiwanluthiers]

It's also the fact that games have become far more complex.

In the old days (1970s and all) of video gaming games were literally a line on a screen and you moved the line to catch a dot on the screen. That program probably took up a few kilobytes (which was a lot back then) and took a small team of programmers maybe a couple of days to write them out. Then you get the days of the original NES, Altari, etc. where video game development was literally someone drawing artwork, programmers turning said artwork into game sprites, and musicians making music and programmers putting that music into digital form. It didn't take many years to do and it didn't require the use of recording studios, etc.

Now you need a guy writing out the stories, programmers to program in all the aspect of the game (I mean gravity, physics, EVERY SINGLE ASPECT OF THE GAME MUST BE PROGRAMMED IN!! From what happens when player runs to an object, what happens when a player looks at something, falls down, what happens when player hits the ground, player reloading weapon, what the weapon do, etc.. In addition to this, you need a script, you need voice actors, you need a sound stage, 3d animators to draw out shapes and figures that artists have drawn. You also need motion capture, hire guys like Keanu Reeves to do face capture and voice acting (which I am sure costs serious money). I actually think film studios have it easy because all they gotta do is build sets and actually these days they don't even have to do that most the time, just green screen and motion capture.

So The Witcher took a while to finish. You have any idea how long Rockstar took to develop GTA V? Or GTA IV? I bet the original Doom and Wolfenstein 3D did not take decades for id Software to make.

Video games have become really complex, especially an open world game that is supposed to deliver as much as CP2077 does. I think what Rockstar does different is they simply do not announce anything until a game is close to finish (and I think by close they mean 2 years to release). They didn't even announce a PC release until it basically came out! RDR2 was actually a great game and there's lots of emotional moments and unexpected stuff (like Arthur/John getting raped by a hillbilly for accepting random invitations).

You know about Moore's law when it comes to computers? Well right now CP2077 is probably 2^32 times more complex than say Wolfenstein 3D (when that game was basically cutting edge for the day, and yes I am old enough to be wowed by it back then). I'm sure there are those here who is old enough to be wowed by Pacman or even Pong. Those games are like maybe a few thousand lines of code.

So cut CDPR some slack.

But true I do think games maybe should focus on content and not graphics and wow factor. The fact that it taxed systems did not help. Final Fantasy XIV for example has a great, engaging story (and no being forced to make choices, just cooperative fun), and that game uses outdated DirectX 11 graphics. Doesn't even take a great system to run them too. I think this would take some pressure off of game devs.

 

[bign]

While I would say to others to not dismiss this issue, as I agree with OP that it's a concern from consumer's point of view (the whole reason why there are regulatory commissions against other industries), but we ourselves cannot resolve this issue ranting on reddit and forums, and at the end of the day it's just a video game industry, not some refinery leaking out chemicals into drinking water.

However, this is how it is intended. It's economy. It's the system. Despite the scandalous debacle the release of this game was, sales were high. But I am quite sure it hurt the investors plenty as CDPR took a nose dive thereafter. It's slowly gaining back but not enough when compared to about a month ago, before release.

When it comes to game industry, investment is half the time a gamble. You either succeed as its investor by lying to consumers or not.

Perhaps other industries might have gotten away with reassurance from official statements, but game industry aren't really flexible and established enough to do that, despite the whole industry is worth a lot more than Hollywood.

But yes I have personally noticed falsified marketing in tons and tons of games lately, and the final product is disappointing. The laws pertaining to software IP are wholly different than the usual conventional products; so much so that they can get away with pretty much anything.

And video games cannot harm consumers despite the defectiveness of the final product, and despite the falsified marketing. Hence, despite it being a large money making industry, in regards to regulations and other government oversights on protecting the consumers, it's off the radar. All they can do, at their best, is try and protect you from possible privacy violations.

What I am personally bothered by is that they have mass-industrialized a form of entertainment, and mass-industrialized its personnel who are of the highly-educated artists with talents, and those certified enough to be engineers even. And the mass employment of these sectors sooner or later leads them to become mere numbers and laborers for a large body, that is the corporate.

Thanks, you saved me a lot of writing, well said.

 

[Gillian_Seed]

How did the gaming industry get to this point?

The gaming industry has been at war with gamers for a while now and there's a giant storm brewing. How did the gaming industry get to this point?

The short answer is money/power/control.

The long answer is once the gaming industry became the number one most profitable form of entertainment, the industry became a lot less about games and more about things such as making money, social engineering etc simply because of the audience size. The sheer numbers that could be reached through such an interactive, literary medium and all the money involved attracts the worst kind of people and as such the industry was invaded by all the types of people and money who previously used movies and TV as their primary form of making boatloads of cash and polluting minds.

This has resulted in a few things that have severely hurt gaming, none more than these two in my opinion.

1.) Due to the demographic size, the market is flooded and oversaturated with people looking to make a quick dollar and this results in leading to a thinning out of talented devs as more and more less talented people who aren't passionate about gaming become devs to make money or other things like change the world through games according to how they think it should be.

2.) Whereas games developers of old used to be able to primarily focus on creating a great game, now their creativity is severely stifled by feeling the need to please everyone for the most amount of sales. Even beyond sales the smallest minority of sub-cultures must be considered or you will be attacked as a collection of horrible people.

So even the game devs that are primarily only concerned about making good games are still affected by the social situation. Boxes to check in the past? Is the game a good game yes or no? Boxes to check now? Will I be crucified for making this game? Will I receive death threats for drawing the character this way? Will my game be boycotted for not having blue unicorn tigers in it? You get the idea.

 

[StrykerxS77x]

I completely agree with the OP. I will not support unfinished games. Ever.