What's the single worst thing to happen to the video game industry the last 20 years? What was the sign that things were irreversibly going downhill? Not just a shitty game, but a downward trend that would deleteriously affect the entire industry.
I personally think it was the Activision Blizzard merger, or FIFA lootboxes, as those would become the blueprint of all other forms of gambling in video games.
reeeeeeeeeeeeee reply Yea Forums
Lootboxes. Pioneered by Valve Corporation, by the way. Then weaponised by Australia's Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA games.
Don't see much impact of the ActiBlizz merger, Blizzard's best years were long behind them by that point.
dlc
Expansion packs have been around for ages
Not the same thing
An Expansion Pack had to be substantial enough to warrant the physical distribution required -- either mailing CDs around or even stocking it on shelves.
DLC doesn't have that barrier to entry and thus can be a lot lazier.
Maybe that was truly the worst thing to hit the games industry -- 24/7 internet access.
Lootboxes are only a small part of a cancerous whole: microtransactions. Literally having to buy anything within your game for real money is so faggot and these days it's the most commonplace shit. I'm willing to bet over 90% of the people browsing Yea Forums right now don't even care, whether because underage, apathy or acceptance of the practice. But vidya has been and never will be the same since.
video games became art rather than just something you play during downtime, now it is taken very seriously both competitively and as a story telling medium (propaganda outlet co-opted by various interest groups)
compare and contrast with movies
SJWs
yeah and i said dlc not expansion packs you dumb faggot
No, I think microtransactions are far worse. With the lootboxes Valve implemented, TF2 slowly turned from a 50s-esque cartoony team-based shooter to purely an economy medium, a method to trade stocks for money and the game itself became an afterthought. This started a continued trend with content being locked behind shitty small fees, enabling developers to make unfinished games since they could just charge for the rest of it.
Artifact is the ultimate expression of this trend, a game so horribly monetized that it is essentially just a shell for a scam act, a blatant "we don't want to make videogames, but we do still want your money, and we think you're dumb enough to do it." Even card balance in that game was initially not going to be a thing due to "devaluing cards", and the game suffered as a result. And nobody liked it. You get to the point where at E3 a dev/publisher announces "No microtransactions!" and people cheer, as if "not putting shit in our videogame" is something to praise nowadays.
So the blame can all be traced back to Valve Software, pioneering the trash we have to put up with now.
the open world meme games like Oblivion and to some extent WoW. These games proved that you can fill the world with grind quests with bare minimum designed encounters and people will spend hundreds of hours in the playground.
This has led to an overreliance on the open world playground element
Smart phones
Lootboxes that got started off by valve became a succesfull business practice because cs go alone is so shit of a game that their playerbase thinks that having some color on your gun is the next biggest thing so they bought into it.
Nowadays majority of gamers prefer having new weapon skins every week rather than having actual good gameplay mechanics
Honestly fuck cosmetics and fuck valve for creating this cancerous monster
I don't think there's a single thing you can pinpoint. Publishers like EA just try more and more to get drain money out of their customers' wallets. Lazy dlcs, day-1-dlcs, unfinished games, preorder bonuses, early access, microtransactions, lootboxes, gacha, whatever the fuck the Elder Scrolls Blades is. All of these are just incredibly predatory, trying to use the human psyche to make customers buy their stuff. Either due to limited supply or through the desire of collecting. I wouldn't view them separately though, they all aim at certain weaknesses.
Video games being acknowledges as art is technically a good thing imo. Bare skin, gruesome scenes or other controversial stuff fall under artistic freedom. You can't and shouldn't limit creativity of artists. It's just that many don't get that.
>Consoles
>Normies
>Women
>Lootboxes
>SJW agenda
>Always online
>twitch
>mobile shit
>nerd culture
You welcome.
When F2P games came on the rise people just quietly accepted cosmetic DLC in full priced games, back when they used to be unlockables. And they got away with it because it's human nature to want to flex on others, only instead of wasting time trumping the other guy through game time and merit they threw it behind an effortless monetary paywall. Imagine in Halo 3 instead of unlocking Hayabusa or Recon armor you just bought it ..... which they ended up doing by putting Recon behind a preorder bonus. Fuck cosmetic dlc and fuck the people who supported it.
online multiplayer
it becoming accessible and targeted towards the mainstream. it opened the door for shit monetisation, low quality games, feminist grifters, trannies, all sorts. everything stems from it shifting from a pathetic nerd activity to something "cool".
this exactly
besides obvious shit like microtransactions, day1 on disc dlc and p2w, """physical""" releases that just contain a redeem code
can someone come up with a better and bigger physical medium soon? not even the fattest blu-rays can hold 100gb+ clusterfuck games
if someone makes a disc that can hold like 512gb or some shit i'll buy you a hamburger
So the problem is that companies just got better at doing what they've been doing all along, in tandem with the evolution of technology and the way people interact with games.
Arcades used to nickel and dime people with games that killed you often, so obviously monetization is an ancient practice.
The majority accepting foids, homomen and darkoids into gaming.
based and redpilled
>nerd culture
If you can even call it that. Today's nerds would be shunned in yesteryear as normalfaggots that needed to gtfo.
Kinda yes, but another reasons arcades were that hard was to make the games feel longer. If they were as easy as modern games, each arcade and early NES game would only be 1-2 hours long.
The Big Bang Theory
2007 was the worst yet for everything "nerdy"
Steam
>Video games being acknowledges as art is technically a good thing imo.
art is often censored and politicised
i just want to play some fucking games man not giving a shit about some moral horseshit
It was XP gaining and multiplayer progressions. Made people concencrate on one upping each other instead to just get together to play for fun.
Open world good, linearity bad
League of legends and the culture behind it coming into existence. It set a lot of terrible terrible trends for esports and streamer pandering and made the word "toxic" commonplace
Horse armor, fucking obviously.
If you have to ask, you are not old enough to post in here.
Becoming too mainstream. Most of the problems with modern gaming can be traced back to the decision to make dudebros and other normies the target audience and take advantage of their stupidity.
yeah it seemed so innocent back then
Microtransaction and preorder bonuses becoming mainstream
>I don't think there's a single thing you can pinpoint. Publishers like EA just try more and more to get drain money out of their customers' wallets. Lazy dlcs, day-1-dlcs, unfinished games, preorder bonuses, early access, microtransactions, lootboxes, gacha, whatever the fuck the Elder Scrolls Blades is. All of these are just incredibly predatory, trying to use the human psyche to make customers buy their stuff. Either due to limited supply or through the desire of collecting. I wouldn't view them separately though, they all aim at certain weaknesses.
You could argue that those are all the result of a single problem: The industry became too corporatized and consolidated. Three or four big publishers control the entire industry now.
The Xbox.
Before, the PC and consoles were distinct platforms, each with its own typical genres with little overlap.
After Xbox, the consoles became weak PCs, and the PC became a console port machine. Games stopped being made for a specific platform and instead were targeted at everyone, making heavy compromises and excelling at nothing.
Making everything open world. It doesn't work with every game and it gives the devs an excuse to fill the world with garbage filler content that prolongs the game.
>omg why isn't the new uncharted more open world
>omg X game is so linear
Look at skyrim. It's filled to the brim with useless quests that only add to the play time without making the game more memorable
Also all ubisoft games have the exact same formula with the same useless side quests, only with different skins
Asian guy must be some sort of beastmaster. Aren't hippos terribly aggressive?
I think it was all those mergers going on in the mid 2000s. It killed so many smaller dev units.
This was going to happen regardless of the XBox, if you think otherwise you are retarded
I thought the guy was gonna get eaten
In the wild they rely on birds to clean them. It's kind of the same thing.
bruh that hippo could kill him in one motion.
or alternatively: Make an open world and fill it with nothing at all
>Myspace reports a significant decrease in traffic
by far the worst thing on that list
Who else was aiming at making a console pretending to be a PC and trying to bring PC genres to it? Sony? Nintendo? Sega?
Atari
can we just say california and call this thread done? everything wrong with it happens to be wrong here in general, and many of the HQs for the companies going full retard reside here
Pretty much yes. It's why western AAA games are becoming such a joke. You can also see it in those game series getting a title of a current popular genre. Hearthstone leading to a TES ccg or PubG/Fortnite having everyone make a battle royal mode or game. It's share holders pitching game ideas and psychologists designing games.
There's been PC games on consoles since the 80s
any answer other than original xbox and the birth of paid online is wrong. it's also the time that a lot of people that didnt play console games bought a console because
>xbox is more like a pc. it's way more powerful than the dreamcast, so i'm gonna wait for the xbox instead
i heard this shit so much back in high school.
microsoft proceeded to then ruin the entire industry and pave the way for everyone else to copy them because it's dumb to leave money on the table when morons will gladly pay you for the privilege of being able to use their own internet (for which they already pay)
Anita Sarkeesian unironically
Sarkeesian was a result of Gamergate, which was a result of terrible video game journalism and buying reviews
So that shitfest traces back to bad vidya journalism, which was only became a problem once it became online-only. Physical gaming magazines had to put in a modicum more effort.
That image looks a bit small, I got you.
The industry hasn't gone downhill, there have always been things to complain about, you've outed yourself as a newfag for not knowing this.
Holy shit the guy who wrote that was a fucking retard. Why would Microsoft have ever used BD for the 360, even if they didn't push it out early? Sony probably wouldn't have even licensed it to them at a price they could justify, it's complete idiocy to think that the 360 should have shipped with a BD drive. The PS3 was originally intended to accelerate blu-ray acceptance anyway, there were almost no BD players out there when then PS3 launched.
Sarkeesian was before gamergate, and she was entirely Yea Forums's fucking fault. You made your own enemy, she would have remained a nobody youtube vlogger if it wasn't for you idiots. But no, you absolutely had to harass her so she could go whine and get tons of sympathy and cash. Fucking idiots.
checked
>Physical gaming magazines
I miss those. EGM was always fun to read.
Yeah i havent read one in 10 years or so. Miss Power Unlimited.
The AAA explosion starting near the end of Gen VI/beginning Gen VII.
what year was that?
Not him, but I'd say around 2007.
the appearance of DLC and the fall into madness of the American left
Things have gone downhill, mostly due to DLC making devs lazy
Can't argue with that.
normalfags sucking out the fun of everything with their constant whingeing about real life things, so generally what destroyed nerd culture
white people unironically
2007 happened
Microtransactions and paid online
>paid online
what
microtransactions were it. horse armor for oblivion was weird and retarded, and games were coming out where you had to pay money to download a 6kb file that would then "unlock" content already on the disc. in the very least, horse armor was a download that actually added content to the game, even if it was just fucking horse armor.
either that or achievements. achievements trivialized and actually redefined the way many people played games. instead of having personal reasons and personal goals for playing, it was turned into some socialmedia epeen jerkoff shitfest of racking up cheevos and only really playing games not for any personal pride or interests, but just to unlock that pre-fabricated carrot on the stick the devs wanted you to have. They broke immersion completely by frequently reminding you that you completed some retarded menial in-game task that some retard thought you should be proud for achieving. However DLC and cheevos were nay a part of nintendo shit, yet nintendo still suffered all the same with beginning to produce shitty games -- so there's an even deeper answer.
>ctrl-f
>games as a service
>0 results found
disappointed.
>They broke immersion completely by frequently reminding you that you completed some retarded menial in-game task that some retard thought you should be proud for achieving.
Which is especially ironic when you consider that they've been trying to make games more and more like movies.
Right now, that's just an idea. It's something the companies clearly want to do, but they're still trying to figure out how to spin it so that their target audience of morons doesn't realize how badly they're getting fucked over.
No, they became something that makes a lot of profit.
just an idea? EQ was 20 years ago and there were probably MUDs doing it before that.
Was 2007 literally the worst year ever in all of human history?
Fucking 5$
And there are people claiming that Bethesda wa alright until Fallout 76.
Lootboxes started with Valve though
Well obviously MMOs do it, but MMOs are their own thing. It has yet to spread to games as a whole.
What else happened?
Probably DLC and all other forms of in-app purchases that evolved from it.
user... you use real money to unlocked lootboxes, that's what Valve do with Mann&Co crates
This. Games are more commercial and less artistic than ever before. Every major game is a carefully focus-grouped product designed solely to maximize profits.
damn, I fully support this
Live content, every big developer now expects of you to only play their unfinished game in hope the next season gets better
THIS. And next becomes DLC. Everything that takes away from the overall quality of a product essentially and replaces it with something lazy.
best post ignored post
>What's the single worst thing to happen to the video game industry the last 20 years?
Too many to list. AAA has run rampant.
kinda this but also have sex
Achievements could actually be good, but the way they're implemented is merely for the sake of data collection. Its meant to be a metric for what the user does within a game. I also suspect its one of the reasons why AAA games have become so unchallenging in terms of gameplay these past few years.
The general idea that you can turn games into a service that expands beyond their usual lifespan. It's just caused this exaggerated pendulum swing between always-online live-service model cash cows and hyper-reactionary """"art"""" games that focus so much on trying to be the opposite of a product they forget the selling point (ie, gameplay).
That's why AAA games suck now
That's why indie games suck now
A more conspiracy related idea is that the world is just genuinely getting dumber and the kind of entertainment we get now panders to people incapable or unwilling to expand their own artistic horizons. Look at the most popular and well regarded novels, films and general art pieces today compared to a couple of decades ago.
Xbox 360
Gaming becoming mainstream
Even if actual passionate fans of games boycott a company with shitty practises, there are 100x more normalfags that will preorder their games on brand recognition alone
good post betty
Gamergate
Politicizing fucking videogames of all things is the most retarded shit ever.
I just want to go back to the 80s where everything was bloops and beeps and nobody was worried about whether or not some character is gay or not or whether the company you're giving money to is "inclusive" enough.
This
"Vote with your wallet" does not work when 99% of the consumer base is drooling retards, big publishers have gone unchecked and are jewing harder than any before. As a result entire series are going down the shitter because they know the masses will buy literally anything if it's marketed right.
Microtransactions as a practice and investors not being told that they should reel in their ferocious kikery that is one court ruling away from getting pushed out of the legal gray zone into illegality
Production costs havent gone up tho
wasn't 2007 when the Big Bang Theory came out?
>Bare skin, gruesome scenes or other controversial stuff fall under artistic freedom.
These things were portrayed in video games long before most people considered the medium a form of art
paid online while simultaneously also dropping servers in favor of using peer to peer which is almost always ass.
I never thought about the achievements in this way. This honestly changed my view on them. I thought they were a nice little incentive for players to chase after and express to your friends what you achieved. In a way they also did kill personal enjoyment from a game. Maybe getting 100% in a game is something you wanted to do personally instead of a set checkmark on a box. In fact my friend chases trophies all the time. He brags and keeps track of all his trophies. Yet he will do the most boring and monotonous shit to achieve those check marks. Good post
How do these fat fucks manage to kill anything
The left were always mad.. Just smart enough to never show it
I miss single-player campaigns. Industry only seems to care about multiplayer and battle royale shit, which has no interest for me.
SJWs.
$5 was all it took to ruin an entire industry
this, have white children
>harass her
Yeah okay, faggot. Virtually nothing harassing was directed at her besides criticism of her laughably horrible videos, which she relayed to a gullible and sympathetic media as harassment.
they bite really hard and are surprisingly fast
That every game nowadays fucking needs an online multiplayer mode just to squeeze mtx money from kids.
Online multipñayer was a huge fucking mistake and zoomers are to blame.
Microtransactions (Card packs, xp boosts, pay to win), day 1 DLC, Loot crates, live service games, Kickstarter games, crowdfunding, MMO gameplay for more microtransactions, movie games etc etc
This. People used to boo any sort of paid DLC at all. Then that went away and then it became the norm to the point that people stay up at night fantasizing about the next DLC character the companies may graciously let them pay for in the future.
Companies realized this now and just ship incomplete games and promise to fix it with the paid DLCs and expansions.
*notices bulge*.webm
Imagine if he tripped inside the hippo's mouth haha
and what if the hippo swallowed him completely after that wouldn't that be funny?haha
most of the replies to this thread are people who started replying before OP's webm finished thinking it'd be gore
>soliciting for a hornjob
what a slut
The hippo would probably choke
What ever that guy gets paid I'm sure it's not nearly enough.
Us leaving in this timeline, where vidya industry went to complete shit is all Todd's fault.
Don't you guys have a furry thread to flood?
ea
but make it 30 years
>male hippopotamus kills more tourists than lions + gators combined
based animal
No, it wouldn't be funny
that guy would explode like a watermelon
Anacondas and Large Pythons would be more to your degenerate fetish's taste
As much as I liked the game, Modern Warfare made it industry standard for every game to have "rpg" elements.
Now they use leveling systems to hide cosmetics behind time spent vs money paid. yadda yadda blah blah everyone hates micro transactions and shit.
Games were harder to apply this nickel and dime monetization before CoD leveling was everywhere. And that shit popped up fast too
>people getting dumber
That's not why that happens, it's companies playing safe to minmax risk reward in monetary gain.
Horse armour. The beginning of the end.
the invention of the over-the-shoulder cover-shooting moviegame
The introduction of DLC. Once publishers realized they can make people pay for something that should have already been in the game it was all over.
That's not too bad. I'd say MW2 with its health regen was way worse
So we've gone from 8bit to polygons, realistically what's next? Photorealism? I guess Virtual Reality but I feel as if that's almost a niche thing sort of like motion controls. I don't think anyone really knows where to go next or what to do. Does anyone have any thoughts on what they would actually *like* to see in the future from video games? What would be a step in the right direction? (Other than obviously rebuilding consumer trust and ceasing to nickle and dime everything)
>Not too bad
>Industry standard for retarded console plebs
better an FPS than a third person movie
Corporations getting involved with the gaming industry, used to be groups of people working together to make an amazing piece of entertainment, but now its devolved in to trying to make as much money as possible with all the new things being introduced in more ways to profit off a game
so gta 3?
This. I hope valve gets assraped by epic with their bottomless Chinese wallets after what they’ve done to the industry.
no, because that doesn't have cover shooting mechanics and is not a barely interactive movie
The obsession with remakes sequels and reboots.
it completely killed original and creativity to the point Now we only got a new IP every 10 years or so (this decade being dark souls and next decade cyberpunk2077 maybe). Literally every single big game comes from already established franchises
>bottomless Chinese wallets
How much would you have to be paid to brush a Hippo's mouth Yea Forums? The most dangerous animal in the world woth a bite force to snap a fully grown crocodile in half.
Yeah, because AAA keeps chasing expensive high end tech such as photogrammery. It shouldn't even be considered to be necessary. They think the newest tech equates to the most quality games. Its a fallacy. Some old games have aged well due to good art direction and exceptional worldbuilding. Creativity and originality is barely existant in modern AAA.
25-30K burgerbucks a year
That seems pretty small considering you can lose your arm and or head if it's mating season or if the Hippo is pissed off thst day.
horse armour
>lioness claws into hippo's back
>doesn't give a fuck
Based chad hippo.
And they claim lions are kings of the jungle? My ass
You know just like us Lionessess aren't the strongest of their species right?
A Lion couldn't down one either. They'd need to gang up on it.
>gta 3
Wasn't over the shoulder
>difference of a couple of centimeters in camera placement
It still wasn't over the shoulder though
OtS is also often paired with ridiculously zoomed in camera so half of your screen is covered by the character's back
Make room for the real king.
They probably are given complementary ADOD insurance
Patches. Why finish and test a game while developing it, when you can release a broken mess and just patch it later?
This is the one and only answer , the rest of shit just followed with normies since big companies, politics, women just follow easy money and attention. Everything is literally a follow up to games becoming main stream.
I though hippos were dickish as fuck?
This. Triple AAA companies are just complete jokes nowadays and, unironically, feel soulless. They're made with a computer-illiterate executive staring over the developer's shoulders.
Say what you want about AA companies like Paradox or Devolver. And call indie developers fags all you want. At least the games they make (Stellaris, Celeste, Dusk, Metal Wolf Chaos XD) feel like they were made to fullfill the developer's vision instead of the shareholder's pockets.
It's a double-edged blade. Patches also allow game breaking bugs to be removed and game balance to be optimized, but i agree that devs have gotten lasier and lasier because of them.
>brand recognition
this will be the reason lot's of normies will continue buying Pokemon games, PS5, etc... even if it's fucking bullshit. But here is the thing, at some point the thrust can be broken even for normies (it will take a painfully amount of time)
>pssht. nothing personnel, artiodactyl
this. not in the DLC=all downloadable content, as a big enough DLC is an expansion in my eyes. no, i mean horse armor. javik. exclusive to X store preorder bonus missions.
it's been a long time since i saw that chopped up mona lisa analogy but it has always struck home for me
they are
It only wanted to take a sniff
Apple and it’s App Store.
>All that Sony butthurt in a single picture.
Glorious
Apple had almost no effect on the industry
I was expecting something fun to happen.
China's massive population. We will see less and less console titles and more cheap mobile abominations. Western gaming companies will cater to China almost exclusively in a decade or so.
Paid DLC (Not expansions) - aggresive capitalisation of our hobby.
Episodic games - see The Walking Dead example. Rise and downfall of Telltale.
Very soon - an beggining of end and of an era and our hobby - pay per play model.
Everything can be taken back to a single point: Grand Theft Auto III. The moment the industry realized that blockbusters didn't have to just be movies. It set into motion a shift within the industry toward larger, more Hollywood-esque experiences. It led to the proliferation of video games outside of the niche hobby. It changed the entire cultural zietgiest.
Every single problem that has cropped up within the industry since stems from that single point and you can clearly see it on the timeline. Everything began to emulate GTA. Every studio wanted a multi-billion dollar franchise like it. It's what lead to the PS2 game cost price hike, microtransactions, yearly release schedules, minimalist content, massive advertising campaigns, fake E3 demos, cheap knockoffs - everything.
Rockstar literally ruined video games.
This. You could have a match of unreal tournament and then hop into enemy territory with no issue about your ingame progression. Now people focus on one game just for the xp unlockables, and then the game dies down.
On another note, games are now too much reliable on dev support to stay alive. While before there would be a few intrepid modders breathing new life, and some times even new games altogether, i to a game, now you're beholden to the developer's whims to put some new thing into the game which, let's be honest, nowadays is just guaranteed gachashit skins.
No one looked at horse armor and saw innocence. There was only the vain hope no one would be dumb enough to fall for that shit.
Turned out, there was a huge demographic of retards dumb enough to fall for that shit.
SJW and PC faggots.
>one company making huge money from making large open games is what caused publishers to push for small closed games filled with paywalls
... there seems to be a slight misstep in your logic...
If you can't see the path between GTAIII and Fallout 76, I don't know what to tell you, my dude.
You could tell me "congratulations, you aren't schizophrenic."
>Microtransactions in AAA games are so normalized it isn't even a debate anymore
>the whole conversation is literally just "well, it COULD be worse"
>can't even complain about paid cosmetics because all the children infesting the internet grew up on predatory mobileshit
I want to go back
there is no direct line between GTA and fallout 76. There is, on the other hand, a direct line between horse armor and fallout 76. As rockstar is still doing it's own thing and actively rejecting paywall bullshit.
Bethesda not going bankrupt after the horse armour thing.
The point of open world games is for you to dick around and see what you can’t get into. Kinda like the real world, every single interaction you have isn’t going to be extremely memorable. Especially if charname pokes into your moms house. Filling up a world like Skyrim is the devs giving you more playtime for your money. Same thing your mom does.