Things that are RUINING Video Games!!!- Article 2

  Video games are amazing. We have tons of fun with them all the time, but there's also stuff that just really sucks that's kind of invading video games. If it was good, we wouldn't really be calling it an invasion either. I'm using that word because they're messing stuff up. Hi folks, today on GrimByte, 10 things that are ruining video games.

 Number 10

                Publishers and developers chasing the live service dragon. You know how much revenue Fortnite has generated? More than $20 billion since it launched. Well technically, relaunched back in 2017. That's 20 billion with a beat. Of course, everybody wants a piece of that pie and they'll do pretty much anything to get it.Here's the thing, the live service model isn't a total scourge of the games industry. There are a few good live service games out there and more coming out. Look at Helldivers 2, it's about as live service as you can get and it's great. The thing that's really hurting video games is these publishers who want live service games above all other things.Instead of naturally developing games with studios who want to make them, so many recent live service flops come from studios who are famous for single player games. They know how to make a certain kind of game, but the executives want to insert a square peg into a round hole. The studios' fans don't want these kinds of games and the developers don't want to make them.It shows in the final product. I'm talking about games like Anthem, Red Fall, Avengers, Suicide Squad. These are all flops made by single player studios working outside their comfort zone. The Suicide Squad game is especially noticeable here 'cause it illustrates how clueless some of these publishers are.After Suicide Squad flopped, Warner Brothers just flat out announced they were getting out of the volatile AAA games market, focusing on, you guessed it, live service games, even though their new live service game just flopped horribly. Oh yeah, and just to make the announcement look more absurd, guess what their most successful game of 2023 was? Uh, Hogwarts Legacy, which is by the way, a single player game.The game wasn't just a regular success either, it was a massive success. It actually managed to beat Call of Duty in terms of numbers sold. And that just, that doesn't happen. The whole live service push it. It reflects who they're going after, the gambling addict throwing good money after bad, hell worse.Like throwing their life savings into a wishing well and hoping it'll grant their wish. But it's just a well, dude. I'd argue, they're trying to form a market very much like the mobile games market where one to 2% of the consumers account for about 50 to 70% of the revenue. A whale market. If we look at it this way, it might be a little bit harder to tell what exactly is a failure and what isn't.But I think it's completely fair to say these are boneheaded decisions that aren't guaranteed to bring anything good their way. Let's say it does work and they do make whale markets and they end up making tons of money off of low effort crap that they just churn out into a live service game. Let's say they do that.Let's say that just completely flat out works. The reason why people get into stuff is because people love it. And the more people love it, the more it looks like something that's smart to love. All of this crap is making people love games less. And while they might be able to find whales and make a bunch of money in the short term, if they end up killing their market by destroying the consumer base, it's not gonna matter.On top of that, your developers, the people that make these games, the people that put tons of effort into it just don't even like making these things though. You could tell. Every time you play it, it just feels like garbage. Because they are having to clock in, work all day on something they hate and clock out.Like imagine a world where Rocksteady, instead of being pushed into making a crappy live service game got to make a follow up to Arc of Night. That would've gone gangbusters. Now we don't even know where Rocksteady's gonna be in six months, if they're going to still be around. Like that's something that would've shocked me to say five years ago.

Number 9

                       Delisting games not content with just like vaulting, unreleased movies. Warner Brothers is adding video games to the chopping block with a lot of indie games published under the Adult Swim banner. They're getting delisted on digital platforms. In this case, at least, a lot of the developers actually own the IP so they can republish the games after they go down.But most of the time, once a game has been delisted, it's gone for good. If you want to own the game in your digital library, you're out of luck. Like maybe you might find a secondhand key seller who might sell you spare key who already own the game. 'Cause if you wanna play it, you're screwed.There's a lot of reasons why a game gets delisted. Sometimes the company loses the rights to an IP or the licensing agreement runs out, which is understandable but that doesn't make it not suck. With situations like the Warner Brothers story going down the way it did, games are getting delisted for no particular reason.It's just corporate belt tightening. They wanna make their bottom line look better so they don't wanna pay the pennies it takes to keep the games available. They're just cutting them, simple as that. I don't think I need to tell you why that sucks. And imagine if every game publisher out there was as mercenary about their games.I just want games to remain available for people who wanna play them. Is that really a big ask? I don't think so. 

Number 8

                         Releasing intentionally unfinished games. It's a problem that's been with the industry for years now and it doesn't seem to be letting up anytime soon. I'm not even talking about early access games, which are their own can of worms, but at least you know what you're getting there.I'm talking about games that claim to be complete but are a broken mess. It's been happening too often, especially with PC ports, they're probably the worst about it. But in general, there's just too many games coming out with major bugs and glaring issues. Of course, there have been and always are games released on launch day that are perfectly stable and mostly bug free.Nothing's perfect, but in terms of what you should expect, yes, there are games that come out like that. But they're the exception at this point. They're not the rule. This lack of quality control, it's really hurting consumer confidence and thus the games industry overall. You hear the story all the time.Somebody bought a game day one turned out to be completely broken, they swear off buying new games. A lot of people talk big but don't follow through, but there's plenty of casual consumers who said something like that and mean it. And making games is very hard work. And I'm not trying to claim that these people aren't working hard.The problem is these massive companies with billions of dollars, it seems like they should be able to support their games better. I think this is not a problem of lazy developers, but instead, scheduling, milestones, and management. Still somehow games get released unfinished and they never get fixed. EA, looking at you here, you're easily the worst about this. Activision, not much better. But even back in the mid '90s, games did come up with major issues like look at Sin or the first Unreal, but those things were actually doing certain things for the first time and got patched. It's weird, but somehow it seems like things are getting worse. 

Number 7

                                           cheating epidemic. And as long as there are winners and losers, there's gonna be cheaters. It's a problem that's always been around and it seems to be getting worse and worse. It doesn't matter how much a company tries to promote their anti-cheat measures or announce how many people they're banning, seems like cheating just doesn't go anywhere. It's impossible to accurately say just how many people cheat these days, but if you look at pretty much any online gaming space, you'll consistently find people complaining about cheaters. It's just unavoidable. It's a fact of life if you wanna play games online at all. There are things a lot of developers do to weed out and stop cheating. But instead of fostering community and giving players the ability to self-select and weed out cheaters, they usually rely on increasingly outlandish gimmicks that are ultimately not that effective at catching cheating. The fact is, confronting cheating is difficult. Tools are getting easier to use. The cheats themselves are getting more sophisticated. It's an endless uphill battle to stop them. Some games have been successful in solving widespread cheating, but some don't even try. There's a lot of great games that have just been hurt by cheating. And players that have gotten burnt often just give up. I wish there was an easy solution here, but cheating is just kind of part of it. You're creating incentives and competition, there's of course gonna be people that want to bypass the difficult aspects of that. It's just part of how things work. If there's a way to cheat, some people are just gonna do it no matter how pointless or unnecessary it is. 

Number 6 

                                           Intrusive and annoying DRM.So just DRM, DRM like, and sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. And nowhere is that more obvious than when you're talking about DRM. Here's the thing, DRM sucks. It tends to make things worse far more than it it tends to make things better. There are too many examples of DRM causing slowdown and performance issues in games to ignore. There's a DRM that forces you to play the game online even when it's single player only. That, it's just crap. And to make matters worse, developers know everyone hates it. So they just keep trying to sneak it in. Like take Capcom who for some reason really has it out for mods in their games, which is a totally different thing, but it's to such an extent that they go back into their back catalog and add DRM into games that didn't even have it originally. Like games like Monster Hunter Rise, where the Enigma DRM was actually so bad it made the game unplayable for some people. That's an extreme example. And it doesn't happen that often. But there have been many, many reported instances of Denuvo or other DRM programs causing noticeable slowdown and stuttering in games. A lot of the time the performance impact is minimal, but still it's an unnecessary burden that makes a game harder to access and play. And these sort of things are just anti-consumer in general, especially in games that are single player only. Like what? Like it destroyed SimCity, like actually just flat out ended SimCity. It's annoying when a game adds DRM, but devs and publishers, I mean, they're starting to get smart, they know people hate it. So instead of removing it from games entirely, they wait till the last minute before the game comes out to add a DRM message. Sometimes they wait till people are actually playing the game in early access before saying something, which is in my opinion just straight up deceptive. I'm not saying DRM has no place in games whatsoever. It's your stuff, it's your right to do what you want with the stuff. The game companies own the stuff, and I'm not for saying that they don't have the right to do what they want with their stuff, but that doesn't mean it's not infuriating. It's just another one of those problems that just does not seem to be getting any better. 

 Number 5 

                                     ballooning budgets and development cycles. It used to be when games took a few years to come out, that was development hell, but now a six to eight year development cycle seems practically normal. With longer dev times comes increasing costs. And the more expensive a game is to make, the more it needs to make back in order to earn a profit. Recent court documents have revealed some absolutely crazy numbers for how much these game companies have spent making games. Like we're talking hundreds of millions just for a single game, not even counting marketing costs. Making games is an expensive business, and so many of these publishers think the only path to making a profit is playing it as safe as possible. There's a reason why so many of the biggest games in the last few years feel so stagnant, and this is that reason. It's why there's so many remakes and sequels these days, why we're not seeing the surplus of innovative and interesting first party games from the big console manufacturers. There's just no room for weird games that may not sell a lot in the billion-dollar games industry. That doesn't mean innovation is dead. The booming indie and renewed AA games market shows us that. But it's disappointing. we're not seeing weird and experimental games from AAA developers. There used to be room for experimentation at Microsoft and Sony, but now you have to stick to what worked in the past or make a live service game. Those seem to be your only options and that sucks. 

Number 4

                                                Getting comfortable with not owning games. Recently in an interview with GI.biz, Ubisoft's director of subscription said in so many words, they want customers to feel comfortable about not owning games. They were talking about the newly relaunched Ubisoft subscription service, but this sort of attitude is common among gaming executives that are looking for the next easily exploitable revenue stream.The thing about subscription services like these is that in conjunction with ownership, they're fine. I don't think anybody is saying that these services mere existence is bad. The problem is that so many of these companies want the subscription model to be the only model, at least eventually. Video game ownership's already precarious enough at the moment. But if guys like that had their way, our game collection would be entirely at the mercy of clueless executives who just don't care about games or game preservation, or you know, what will eventually be the history of art in this era. Can you imagine if like the Mona Lisa just had an off switch? And at some point Leonardo da Vinci was just like, uh, you know, let's get rid of that. I don't want people to have that anymore. And it was just gone. Now I'm not telling you that the Adult Swim Games roster is the equivalent of the Mona Lisa, but I'm sure you get where I'm going here. With ownership, whether that be physical or digital, there are some assurances that I can play the games that I buy. Even when things get delisted off Steam, I can still download and play them if I bought them before they were removed. And if I have a disc game at least for older consoles, I can still play them. You know, as long as the disc still works. Arguably I'm being quite generous with that as you don't actually own those things, but rather a license to them, but still. And even further, there's not a lot of purpose in getting into the physical versus digital argument anymore 'cause that ship sailed, digital one. In terms of preservation, probably our best bet for keeping alive is the long term anyway, is digital. But that's only if people actually, you know, own their games. And like I said, it's arguable that they never actually own them even in the physical media era. We did own a piece of media with the game on it though, which is better than owning a license, which is kind of a virtual piece of paper that says, I'm allowed access to data that's kept in a data center somewhere. Like we really don't have a lot in terms of rights there, do we? There's almost zero consumer protections when it comes to game ownership, at least if you live in the US. And unless something drastic happens, they don't see a changing anytime soon. In the eyes of the court, we really don't own the games we buy, even though logic says otherwise. And that means companies can take games away from us whenever they feel like it. It's a bad situation already and things can get worse, and they probably will.

Number 3

                                  Gacha, loot boxes, FOMO, all that stuff. It almost feels quaint complaining about this stuff in 2024. But make no mistake, microtransactions still suck and they're still making games worse by existing . Instead of focusing on making games that are fun and engaging for their own sake. So many games are, they're gambling machines. Scientifically designed to hit the right dopamine receptors to get you to keep playing and spending. That's the most important part, engagement above all else. The funny thing is, out of all the games that came out in the last year, pretty much all the highest rated ones didn't have microtransactions. The worst of them were what? Resident Evil 4 and Street Fighter 6, which both have robust gameplay separate from the stupid microtransactions. Still of the major games released last year, it's undeniable that the fighting games were negatively affected by microtransactions. Street Fighter 6 has overpriced avatar customization items. Tekken 8 has that stupid cash shop, they snuck in more than a week after the game came out. Mortal Kombat 1, practically felt like a free to play game with all the extra lame microtransactions and season pass crap. Like Mortal Kombat 11 was already pretty lousy with it, but 1 is somehow worse about it and it altogether makes for a less fun game.The season pass model is just straight up annoying and tedious compared to the towers of the previous game. There's less stuff to unlock naturally and the stuff you buy, it's gotten more expensive. And the seasonal fatality microtransactions, I don't like that, but it's what everybody wants, so of course they're going to monetize it. The worst part about it is that no matter how much everybody hates microtransactions and complains about them online, all it takes is enough people to buy it to make it profitable and the companies keep doing it. It's why I kind of worry about game companies no longer targeting the gaming public, but rather smaller groups of whales that maybe aren't necessarily educated on how companies exploit consumers or the lack of consumer protections or whatever. Maybe they're just naive people that they're targeting and they want to move into that as a revenue model. That concerns me because it's precisely what this type of stuff leads towards. If 98% of the gaming industry understands the scam, then why not target the 2% of the industry that doesn't. As long as there's enough whales to hook who will spend thousands of dollars on a single game, there's always going to be an incentive for companies to shove in worthless microtransactions into games. 

Number 2

                                Endless studio closures and layoffs. We're only a few months into 2024 and there have been 8,000 game layoffs so far this year. Last year was even worse, at least at the time of this writing though. It's just, it's not getting better. Right now is not a good time to be a developer and all this chaos is only making it worse to be a gamer. It's not something we're feeling now, but it's gonna have a long term effect on the industry for good or for bad, probably for bad. The thing about making video games is it's very hard. It requires highly talented people who understand really specialized information. And whether you're talking about artists, designers, or programmers, people who are very good at these jobs are few and far between. In the worst case scenarios, when people are fired, it can be difficult to replace certain positions. And without proper training, knowledge can just be lost, gone for good. It's something that people who worked on Skull and Bones complained about in that expose from a few years ago, where talent is lost and development slows down to a crawl. Games are made by people and if those people aren't treated well or provided the opportunities necessary to develop skills, skills that might not have been lost if previous people had been retained, the cycle that gets created makes games suffer. The games get worse. A lot of people do bounce back and find new jobs in the industry, but for a large percentage of people, that's it. They'll find jobs in much more stable industries or just retire. The whole situation stinks and it's making the game industry worse all around. And a lot of cases there's really just no reason for it. And the same breath as announcing record-breaking profits, companies will just turn around and announce huge firings, massive chunks of their workforce just gone for what seems like no reason. It's impossible to ignore that contradiction in my opinion. A lot of people have noticed that in contrast to the US games industry, there have been way, way fewer mass layoffs over in Japan. And there's some reasons for that. One is the work culture but another is the fact that there are legal protections for employees over there we don't have here. Companies can't just fire people without a good reason, and record profits are not a good reason. But they don't even have to justify it. They can just do it and it's fine. Obviously it's not all flowers and rainbows in Japan. Crunch culture is still very prevalent there and dev's salaries are fairly low over there compared to here, but at least they're not worried if they're going to have a job after developing the most successful game of the year or something. Anyway, a chaotic industry is not a healthy industry. I can only hope things are gonna slow down a little bit in some of these areas. Like stop firing everybody, Jesus. And finally at 

Number 1

                            Irresponsible consolidation. In the past few years, game companies have been on a consolidation spree. Microsoft acquired Bethesda and Activision. Sony got Bungie. Embracer got pretty much everybody. Consolidation was the hot new buzzword and everybody wanted in on it. Now in 2024 it's hard not to look back and wonder, you know, why the hell did they do that? What a big waste, right? It was just billions of dollars thrown around for nothing. Just down the drain, right? Lot of game cancellations, lot of studio closures. Few games that probably would've come out anyway, but still. It's possible PlayStation and Microsoft's acquisitions will pay off in the long run. But the Embracer situation has been an absolute negative for the whole industry. 'Cause there's so many talented studios that just went down hard thanks to that.You know that deal by now. Embracer bet everything on this $2 billion deal with the Saudis and lost and we're still feeling the consequences of it. So many great game studios got Embraced and are now paying for it. Free Radical, Volition, Eiodos-Montreal. Last year they canceled 29 unannounced games. We could have gotten a new Deus Ex, but instead we're not getting anything.Like there is a bit of a silver lining here. A few of the devs have managed to divest themselves from that sinking ship, like Saber Interactive. Toys for Bob could have been cursed to the Call of Duty mines like so many other ill-fated Activision Studios. But they managed to separate and hopefully will get to keep making games.So it's not all bad, it's just mostly bad, and it's a lot of bad. It sucks. I mean, this stuff is all just objectively ruining games. And I hope at least knowing about it can help us as consumers navigate the situation a little bit better, but I don't know.