Gaming's Shaky Future

The gaming landscape is unfortunately in a bit of a pickle at the moment. The industry's major players and publishers appear to be putting all their eggs into the basket of 'live-service' games, aiming to ape the trends of mobile games: to charge players through the nose for the most trivial things. Anyone who's even remotely familiar with games like Candy Crush or Clash of Clans probably knows what I'm talking about: the barrier for entry for these games is low but the game tries to nickel-and-dime at you at every corner. You don't have enough energy to play anymore! they taunt. Do you want to spend 10 dollars right now to continue?

Most of us like would think we're savvy enough to not fall into that pitfall. Unfortunately, that isn't the case for the majority.

The numbers speak for themselves. And now, the major publishers behind the more 'traditional' games--the console and PC sector--are trying to get in on that sweet, sweet mobile game-tier money. We can see traces of that in the Warner Bros. game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a game centered on the titular team of anti-heroes as they are pitted against brainwashed versions of iconic DC Comics superheroes. A game with a premise like that should sell like hotcakes but the people have spoken loud and clear.

This game is emblematic of a growing problem within the industry, a problem that trickles down from the very top. Game executives have become obsessed with monetizing games to the detriment of everything else, sacrificing key elements of the game or artificially increasing the difficulty of a game to incentivize people to pay to skip the tedious bits. The latter was seen with another WB game, Middle-earth: Shadow of War. The game's ending was locked behind an abominable amount of busywork that indirectly encouraged people to pay to skip significant portions. They later removed this due to backlash but the damage was already done.

This worrying trend is but one of many. A cursory Google search will show you that many game studios are laying-off a significant amount of staff, from Bungie, the developers of the Destiny games and the former developers of the Halo games, to the Embracer Group's catastrophic dealings that started last year and are still raging today. This, coupled with a flagging standard for quality among the big game companies has left many wondering if the industry is heading for another crash similar to the one it suffered in 1983. Things have gotten so bad that at the latest Game Developers Conference, a bunch of developers organized an informal session simply to scream and vent their frustrations at what is essentially a collapsing industry. All of this is exacerbated even further with controversy generated by alt-right activists using the medium as a smokescreen for their own ends.

Thankfully, it's not all doom-and-gloom. Mostly.

Many have espoused that the indie scene seems to be the last bastion of sanity in an industry headed towards the brink. To that end, smaller publishers and studios decided to host a little shindig of their own, seemingly in an effort to combat the rising tide of negativity in the domain. The Triple-I Initiative was an attempt by several notable indie publishers to bring the spotlight on lesser-known titles. The triple-I name appears to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the triple-A (or AAA) stamp given to big games that is seemingly meant to be a signal of quality but in recent years has slipped into something of a mark of shame; Ubisoft's attempts to gas up their shoddy pirate game Skull and Bones comes to mind.

The future of the industry seems bleak but it is heartening to know that there is pushback happening somewhere, no matter how small it may be. This medium means a lot to me--I mean this entire newsletter is based around it!--so ultimately, I feel like it falls on the players and the consumers to really push back against this. Games need to be treated like the pieces of art they are and not as a cheap cashgrab; stunts like that only serve to delegitimize the industry as a whole. But by appreciating and analyzing games for what they are and putting them on a spotlight, we might be able to correct the course before we sail straight into iceberg.