Bad Business (Or, “Why I Don’t Get Excited About Video Games Anymore”)
I’ve bought one brand new video game in the past 3 years. Certainly not for lack of wanting to. I love games. I want to make time for them. I’ve never pirated one (the people who make the game need encouragement to make another one, right? Best way to do that is with money). I literally grew up on my Dad’s lap when he was playing the original Legend of Zelda for the NES. I was raised on Nintendo the rest of my childhood, always having the latest and greatest from them. I got into PC Gaming later, starting with classics like Unreal, Warcraft, Starcraft, and Half-life, progressing to the newest Half-Life games and other FPS’s. I really should be the poster child for modern gaming.
And yet I haven’t had much interest in anything recently made.
And really, I probably won’t every get anything new in this industry ever again (for myself, at least).
Why, you might ask?
The “Death of PC Gaming” is the short answer. You’ll notice that the PC became my “main” source of gaming later on in life. The reason being is that my family didn’t really get into anything gaming-console wise past the Gamecube (Nintendo’s first use of discs instead of cartridges). Since my Dad kind of made computers for a living, we always had the latest and greatest as far as graphics cards and such went, so we were always equipped to play computer games, which we went with instead of paying the up-front money for a console and then for games.
The PC had some good titles, but eventually this trend started occurring: instead of having exclusive titles, the PC was now seeing console games made as PC games, and vice versa. This wasn’t really a big deal at first, but nowadays this is becoming a big problem: Developers are making superior versions of the same game for consoles. It’s not just the same game, different platform, but developers are making games that are literally better in definable ways for the console versions.
And then there’s the DRM (Digital Rights Management), the concept of using certain methods of preventing people from pirating the game. This is the worst. Since consoles are all solely designed for playing games, they can have certain restrictions that don’t allow them to play copied games. Those same measures can’t be taken on PC’s since the PC is used for lots of other things. And yet, developers are trying anyway. PC Games are now forcing you to stay online while you play your game, even if the game isn’t a multiplayer game. If your Internet connection falters or lags, your single-player game will cut out, forcing you to start it up again once the connection’s secure. If the servers for the game are down (through no fault of your own, I imagine), then you can’t play your game. I mentioned Steam a few posts back; Steam allows you to play in “offline mode” (if your connection is down) and offers several social perks along with the evil of forcing you to connect to the internet or else. This system is nothing like that: it’s net connection or nothing. Then there’s the terrible anti-piracy DRM that will actually open up security holes in your computer and bog it down like nobody’s business. Oh, and by the way: you can’t uninstall it. Not without going deep into your computer and removing the files the hard way.
That’s just on the technical side. That’s really enough for me to never buy another PC game, but then there’s the terrible selection of games.
Much like how Hollywood is slowly becoming creatively bankrupt, the video game industry is becoming likewise. Games nowadays are pretty much solely based off of existing IP (Sequels and such), or are very, very heavily based on those IP’s. The top 10 games of each year are either sequels or first-person shooters based off of Call of Duty. Every first person shooter nowadays is based off of the Call of Duty (they did the highly-successful Modern Warfare series). Every “RPG” is slowly being replaced with shooter elements (Mass Effect or Fallout, for example). I like first-person shooters, but not that much. (as an aside, Portal is pretty much the only game with any relative creativity as far as gameplay and writing is concerned. I dare you to think of another one).
There are no great stories coming from anyone. There’s no innovative gameplay being introduced. Everything’s some hyped-up shooter with 5 hours of gameplay (but it’s got multiplayer!).
And now consoles are costing upwards of $300, along with crappy games that are $60 a pop. All requiring an internet connection and a monthly subscription to their multiplayer network. Even the reasonably-priced Wii is only fun for a few types of games. It’s most recent successes (Donkey Kong Country and Mario Wii, both based on existing IP’s, by the way) have made very little use of the motion sensor tech.
Yeah. I’ll probably never buy a game again. Portal 2 was fun, but I don’t think another one has the kind of potential that it did, and I don’t want to start paying $60 to be a beta tester and taken advantage of.
Attention, “The Video Game Industry”, you lost a customer. No, I’m not switching to another console or another game or whatever. You ALL lost in your attempts to get my business.
