To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
I think what really started the current levels of rot was online passes for used games. They saw that people were playing without paying them directly, and wanted to stop it.
It was unpopular, as were map packs (which split the player base in online games), and here we are now with endless lootboxes and gacha elements. Sure, you can play without paying, but you’ll always feel like a second class citizen if you do. Everything you want will be held deliberately out of reach, and the aspect of “fun” has been reduced to collections and bars filling up.
It’s bred this generation of zombie gamers. I went to see my sister at Christmas, and her husband was playing Fallout 76 “doing his dailies”. I did ask what it was for and he said he didn’t really play it or want anything from the points it gives, and admitted what he was doing was kind of pointless. And then fired up the next game and did the same thing.
I tend to just stay away from multiplayer games these days. They’re pretty much all like that. The idea of playing because it’s fun is dead.
No matter how much hobbyists liked selling their games back to GameStop so the store can mark them up 500%, I have always hated that the industry of used games punished releasing fantastic short singleplayer games much much more than perpetual 2000-hour microtransaction live service games.
That crowd of gamers absolutely contributed to the fall. The general distrust of digital is acknowledged, but if people were just paying low/moderate sale prices for each SP game and keeping them, instead of paying used prices, we’d probably have fewer publishers moving this way.