Meeting Gamers' Standards

I’ve always upheld that games are the peak of media entertainment and the boon of modern intellectualism. They are able to have all of the visual and musical aspects of a film, with the length and depth of a novel with something that neither can do, allow the participant to interact.

Following my previous post on changes within the game industry lately and how some of these will herald the good to come, some of the changes have been a lot more problematic and before we can start issuing celebrations, there are going to be some serious reformations made.

The games industry for a long time has represented only some of the interests of the small group of people that enjoyed games. Science fiction and fantasy were common genres in videogames as the respective gamers were interested in these things.

As the people began to flock to videogames during with Playstation 2′s domination, more genres were introduced to a greater extent and in wider circulation, and not just literary genres, but game genres too.

Game genres of all types were selling; horror, sports, shooters, RPGs, adventures, sims etc.

But games were rigidly confined within their own gameplay styles.

There were exceptions, but most games stuck to their predefined genres. Shooters had no RPG elements, RPGs weren’t very action-oriented and Real-time strategies did not turn shooter.

But as the hardware jumped dramatically in power and capability, so did the software and development costs.

Each game costing now millions more than the generation previous, publishers were forced to think very carefully about how they marketed their games and what games they wanted to back financially.

The increase in videogame consumers, most of them irregular gamers, meant that the companies had a greater variety of people to please and so, tried to please all of them.

Games were hybridised to include aspects of all genres.

Watch Dogs is an open-world, third person shooter, with hacking and action based gameplay. As one of 2013′s most anticipated games, will it live up to the hype?

There are many upsides to this; games that had no other way of existing were made, like Valkyria Chronicles, gamers that were very limited in the type of games they played were introduced to new types of game and gameplay elements and good implementation of different ideas leads to genre-wide innovation.

Unfortunately there are also many down sides, games are ostracising the gamers that made them what they are by not appealing to the former fans of that genre, introducing lots of gameplay elements can stifle the overall experience and the numerous “hybrid” games can oversaturate the market.

These kinds of games have still managed to sell because the majority of people who buy games now, are just not fussy enough to care, nor play enough games to get sick of them.

But for the regular gamers this can be incredibly frustrating. I for one have become increasingly disheartened with every update on “Thief” since its announcement.

Developers are ignoring the most simple and key business trick of all: Supply and demand.

There is room in the industry for hybrid games, but not at the expense of ALL of the other genres, which offer rich and varied experiences in their own right. Nobody wants the market to be full of indistinguishable games pushing us ever closer to the looming threat of another industry collapse.

I want Videogame genre reform and whilst we’re at it, more respect for loyal gamers in general.

I am tired of all of the poor treatment to the most loyal fans of games, IP’s, consoles and yes, even companies.

It’s not the irregular gamers that lose out whenever a company wants to cut expense, it’s always the regular gamers, who love this industry that lose out.

It’s your loyal fans that; buy your DLC and season passes, preorder your games or buy them at launch, buy all of the games in the series and spread their love for your product to everyone they know as soon as they complete your latest game.

The irregular gamers don’t.

The enduring loyalty of fans has long been underestimated by many of the industry’s biggest companies and is rarely rewarded with anything worthwhile. Playstation Plus is a good idea. Nintendo’s loyalty star program is another. But both of these schemes are exactly that, schemes. Further financial exploits for the gamer, not a pure gift in recognition.

Gearbox were commissioned to develop Aliens Colonial Marines, but when the game was released there was a huge outcry among fans that the game’s advertisements held incorrect and unrepresentative footage, amidst the controversy there are also rumours that Gearbox used the time and resources meant for the Aliens game on their own Borderlands 2 to increase its quality.

But it’s not the console developers that are our biggest worry, it’s the software developers, who manipulate the expectations of gamers to their own benefits, providing false information and gameplay videos, who make shop exclusive preorder bonuses so divisive that I know longer wish to purchase new games, for fear of buying the “wrong” version, knowing it already has a 31 meg patch and on-disc DLC I am meant to purchase to unlock and goodness what extra down the line.

I remember hearing someone liken it to buying a house and being told you’d need to pay extra to be given the key to basement. But this could be applied to most of the standards in the industry we’ve come to accept.

If any other industry had pulled a Colonial Marines, there would have been a bigger lawsuit a lot faster than the one we’ve got now, Gearbox would be dismantled and sold off for spare parts to EA, Randy Pitchford would be queuing at a soup kitchen and we’d all be laughing at how we all fell for “Marine-gate” whilst playing another, better Aliens game.

But instead we’ve got a Metacritic with some low numbers and a few too many tweets about how great the game is from Pitchford’s Twitter feed.

It’s such a shame we’re not even treated to the sweet irony of his name being “Pitchfork”.

The industry has been shifting a lot recently and has now entered a state of flux, with Nintendo opting to block fan’s monetization of Let’s Plays on Youtube and rumours of Microsoft using “Always online”, it won’t take long before the dissent of gamers begins to reach the ears of prominent publishers and companies, it’s just a shame that it has to hit their pockets first.

Meeting Gamers' Standards