The baby boom in the USA was a real demographic phenomenon but every “generation” after that gets fuzzier to the point where its now just rage bait nonsense or just a proxy term for complaining about changing fashions. Even within the Boomer cohort people had wildly different experiences growing up across such a large span. That said, every game studio I ever worked for was run by Gen X and Boomer aged people.
When they started in the industry it was small teams, tight budgets, a new frontier with a low bar to entry. Now it is highly corporate, capitalized, shareholder driven behemoth (like everything else). This transform happened when the millennial cohort was in our 20s, we had no influence on this, and it mirrored similar larger-scale transformations in the rest of society.
I’m fortunate in that I basically retired early, although I wouldn’t mind going back to work with a good group of people, even for cheap. Like the old days again. I still like the work I just hate the business. But it doesn’t matter, the whole industry is in ruins now.
Most definitely can be refuted. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of amazing games out there made by young and old people that appeal to both young and old people. The issue Anon is struggling with is non gamer capitalists running game companies and milking games for every last penny at the cost of quality.
I know it’s a tired example, but look at the company and team responsible for BG3. A game that is widely considered one of the greatest games to be realsed in at least the last 10 years, maybe even longer. This game was made by a company owned and operated by old people and young people. The teams directing, designing, creating, and writing this game were made up of multiple generations of people, and what was made, unimpacted by corporate greed, was a masterpiece.
Good games are products of passion and creative freedom, not money.
There’more great games now then ever there ever was. So many choices. Plus, the older games didn’t disapear and there is no such thing as “the Golden Age of gaming” lol. It’s just that a bunch of low- losers are spending their days on the internet crying about “woke runing my videagame” because they see a woman not having huge boobs and a bikini armor.
I get the joke but I never understood the idea that gaming nowadays is “bad”. Just as there are many games that have shitty practices or are just bad, there are just as many that are good. Indie gaming is booming for a reason.
Sometimes I wonder that if the people that keep parroting this idea are just… Getting old? Getting fed up with gaming? Or maybe it’s just a nostalgia thing? All of these combined?
Anyway, Clair Obscure just came out and it’s a great JRPG, highly recommend it
Indie games are where it’s at.
Big companies like Bethesda and EA are still run by fucking boomers and gen xers. The millennials and younger that work for them end up working on one game, and then they get fired after management fucks everything up.
- Hollow Knight (Silksong soonTM)
- Stardew Valley
- Factorio
- Outer Wilds
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Clair Obscur
Gaming is fucking phenomenal right now, OP is looking in the wrong direction.
Games made by gamers vs corporations are two different worlds indeed
Nah, not really, it’s only shit if you only play AAA suit-driven slop. There’s a ton of awesome games being released and the older ones are still there to (re) play.
STOP blaming age groups! It’s a divide and conquer tactic. It’s not your parent’s fault. It’s not your grandparent’s fault. It is the fault of the rising Oligarchy Super Wealthy. Their system works when we work against each other. We’re even suspicious and blame our parents and grandparents these days. WTF??
Ironically they blame their own children too
It’s the system slowly and successfully corroding your class conscience, they’re taking away your awareness of it so you fight sideways instead of fighting the people above you
Gaming is insane right now. I can buy a game for $10 that would have won game of the year every year straight for an entire decade. Even saying this there’s probably like 15 games that fit this category.
Gamers today get what they deserve. If they want to consume triple A slop they’re going to get fucked. Its really simple.
I almost never pay more than 5$ for a game, get the free game from epic each week since last year, and I have hundreds of amazing games in my livrary. I litteraly could stop working and play super fun games 24/7 for the next 2-3 years without spending a dime. Up to a last year, I was litteraly playing on an overclocked i5 750 (16 y/o cpu) with a 1060i gpu, and can’t think of a game that wasn’t playable. I even worked on a small VR project on that computer lol.
I agree. There is a lot of great content for reasonable prices and a lot of terrible content for high prices. It’s a thriving industry. We just need to be intentional about our purchasing decisions.
Obligatory:
No war but class war.
It went to shit because big corpos realized there was money in the games industry. It went to shit because capitalism took the reins.
Bu-but Asmongold and Kirsche Verstahl told me the problem was woke gamedevs! /s
I’m aware this was sarcasm, but want to point out Asmongold is a Nazi sympathizer. No idea who the other person is.
Asmongold is a priest of Nurgle.
The other is a Nazi VTuber, with her name allegedly being a dogwhistle (positive christianity if I recall correctly).
No one I know can afford to buy a house because our generations been so royally fucked in every which way, yet somehow we are responsible for steering the entire game industry in our twenties. Right… lol.
Like they didn’t realize in the 90s
Institutional money didn’t take it seriously until the mid to late 2000s.
Big video game companies were already doing the same as today though.
That’s why most of the money hungry games were in the arcades back then. PC gaming wasn’t nearly as big.
You have a very different memory of that time
Young millennial/zillennial AAA game dev speaking.
It is 100% a top-down issue. Most devs are talented people. When you’re incentivized by quarterly returns as management, over a long enough timeline you begin to care less about game quality and more about stock prices and net revenue in addition to whatever else you need to satisfy your bloated ego, even if you started out as a passionate dev initially. The Indie and AA space is currently thriving because these incentives don’t factor in as much for them.
Just like game design, it’s an issue with a series of carrots and sticks, not necessarily the people involved (although psychopaths do exist and tend to be overrepresented in c-suites worldwide).
I’m just so sad that it seems most execs in the field go play tennis or golf after work and think videogames are for losers. there is a lot of contempt and expectation that losers will just forever dish out money. if it wasn’t for this strange phenomenon that game engines are so available nowadays, we would be screwed. thank god for the indie space
tldr; Capitalism ruins everything.
Not that I disagree with you but it’s more like greed ruins everything
Capitalism doesn’t ruin everything. Corporatization ruins everything.
Who runs capitalism bozo
the local coffee shop isn’t a corporation
The worse thing that can happen to your niche hobby is for it to go mainstream. US anime has been consolidated into the Sony/Crunchyroll/Funimation/Rightstuf monster.
^ ^ ^ This is true, but I also think it’s important to note the role repeated financial and cultural success has on one’s mind and ego when elevated repeatedly by both the market and culture. You are not only just financially incentivized not to innovate, but your ego continues telling you “my ideas are always good no matter what others think” after these successes, even when that’s not necessarily true and you need to be reined in by others so your good ideas can still shine and the bad ones can be challenged. This is how top-down cultural problems in studio disciplines calcify in addition to financial incentives. It’s important as a person(s) running a successful studio to not surround yourself with yes-men, which is not an easy task due to the previously-mentioned perverse financial and egoist incentives.
The funny thing is, I’ve heard about quite a few Indie studios that are just as bad. They do the very same thing we condemn AAA for - crunch, micromanaging, and even harrasment.
I was very surprised to hear that the person who lead the development on monument valley was a massive dick to his employees.(Repeatedly would use management tricks and neg people to the point of depression and feeling worthless).
So, I can totally understand the cultural success thing. Though I’d like to believe that we are better than the corporate management suite, I have to remind myself that anyone can be a dick. You can be a progressive left leaning animal lover and still be a horrible parent.
I have worked only in the indie/AA sphere, and my experience here hasn’t been all that great either. But, I had always believed the problem was in the work culture of my country itself, and that I would probably find it better to work with those outside my country. No, people are the same everywhere, just of different flavours.
Though I’d still prefer to work with like minded people vs those place capital over everything else.
Gamers gamify a system that can be gamed. More at 11.
It started roughly around the ps3/360 era, when corporate devs began prioritizing turning their games into skinner boxes that were designed to motivate players to keep playing, so they would be more likely to engage in microtransactions, see more ads, or continue paying subscriptions. Of course gacha garbage is a fuller expression of this kind of manipulation now days.
Still plenty of great games out there, and in some cases we have a real renaissance.
Nailed it. When casino and packaged goods marketers and executives started malignantly metastasizing into the games industry.
Holy shit, it was Microsoft. Microsoft ruined gaming.
Bethesda pioneered MTX with horse armor long before MS bought them.
EA and Valve pioneered in game ads and loot boxes.
Horse armor.
Gaming hasn’t gone to shit.
Some of it is shit, but that’s true for literally all media and art across all of human existence.
Gaming is better than ever. This whole discussion is ridiculous, with everyone blaming this or that for something that just doesn’t align with reality.
I think the main difference is that we mostly forget about the shovelware titles of 20 years ago. Meanwhile the predatory monetization practices of the popular kids games of this current era will not be forgotten.
You can’t say that gaming is better now when Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Roblox are the most popular games for an entire gaming generation. There are still masterpieces being made today and there was plenty of shovelware back then but there will never be another year for gaming like 1998.
You get like 3 games worth playing a year now and studios that would make all timers year after year now release a game once a decade and sell micro transactions or 50,000 ports of it.
I’d agree with the 3 games worth playing a year comment if you limit it to bigger budget games and anything new over $50. But indie games and games that are around $20-40 at launch. Naw, you need to raise that number significantly or expand beyond a single genre.
Right, and let’s not forget that Retro gaming is completely legal.
