The Decline of Video Gaming

Gamers today are in fear of what “next gen” is starting to become. Don’t get me wrong there have always been bad games, but back in the day it would be a developer’s goal to make a good fun game that would sell itself. Now we have DLC, expansion packs, games that aren’t fun but just addictive, and the dreaded casual games.

Where did this idea come from? When did money become more important than the product? Truth be told, as much as I wish I could blame the XBOX 360 Marketplace and the PSN, it just didn’t start there. In my experience, I break it down to 3 sources, Neopets, MMORPGS, and Gaia Online. What connects these 3 things? Merchandising, “donations”, and pay to play. The MMORPG figured it out first, the addiction factor. When put in a setting where the player’s main goal is to own rare items and have a powerful character, they know this is the key to keeping people on their games. Not only that, but the fact that you have to work with others means you will make friends, and that is the second factor that keep people addicted. When people got tired of paying per month to play a video game they already bought, some turned toward private servers. A private server is an emulation of an official MMO, and on the surface they are nearly exact copies. The most common comes from Ragnarok Online. They made the mistake of releasing all of their game content in a compressed file, once it was uncompressed, you had all the sprites, environments, items, everything. All they needed was the engine and they were set.

So now you have private servers popping up all over the place like candy from a pinata. As the popularity of private servers increased, the load on the host’s computer and connection increased, this led to the host having to pay for an off site server. Most the people who ran them were between the ages of 15 and 25, which meant they didn’t always have jobs, and some of them just didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with the “donation” system. I say “donation” because generally, it was about 150 for an average decent server per month, but once servers started offering items or game money as compensation, you can bet they were rollin in way more than 150 a month. To put it in perspective, I knew a guy who ran 3 servers, Ragnarok, WoW, and Lineage II, he did  it for a year, made $100,000 in “donations” and used it to buy a house and pay off his car.

Now backtracking, we go to Neopets, they were probably one of the first major web based games that really blew up in popularity. They took the basic MMO structure of addiction and applied it to something web based. Over time they increased the amount of content they offered and started a merchandising campaign that partnered up with kid’s clothing chains. Needless to say, they made a lot of money, but they were missing one factor, the social aspect. That’s where Gaia picked up the slack, they combined everything. In this new age of internet, everything has to be personalized. Your avatar, character, social network, messenger client, ect must scream your individualism from every inch of its being. Gaia knew this, and that’s the drive behind their site. They have items, which improve your character status, which can also be bought with real money, and it forces you to connect with other users. That is the very basic, bare bones minimum you need to keep a mass amount of people interested long enough to profit. This is becoming the future of gaming.

Now that we know where we’re coming from, let’s look to how this has affected the games of today. Social networking is the number 1 offender hands down. Facebook in specific. By now I’m sure by now you’ve heard all the talk about how Facebook is ruining gaming, based on above, I will tell you how. I spent about a week playing Restaurant City on Facebook, it was my first game there. Why did I play it a whole week? Weeell… it was addicting, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed it, in fact I became frustrated by the lack of content and simplicity but it kept driving me back to play. They get away using VERY simple content, but hone in on our other 2 factors, socializing and addiction. A lot of these games give you bonus items for logging in anywhere from once a day to 4 times a day, usually not more. They realize that the majority of people on Facebook have jobs, so they’ve made their bonus intervals match about the amount of time before your breaks and lunches on an 8hr schedule which makes it easy to play while working. Your friends can give you items as gifts in order for you to send them items, you can visit their Restaurants and employ them at yours, the list goes on. They also offer limited edition items for real money which funds all their other stupid games in the future.

XBOX Marketplace and PSN are on board with this in their own way as well. Offering DLC that is already on the game you bought, but you have to spend money to use it? Not cool. It feels like half the time when you buy a game it isn’t even complete. You can argue that developers are forced to offer DLC because people are pirating the heck out of those consoles, but guess what? We’ve always had people pirating games. Not only that, the PS3 is still un-moddable so you’ve got one on the market that makes money on every game. If you ask me, Steam does the best job with offering things for money, and the 360 in specific needs to take a hint. If XBOX really wanted to stop piracy then they could do it in better ways than what they’ve tried to do in the past.  The reason the PS3 is relatively safe, is because they use the blu-ray. Even if it had been cracked, you would still need blu-ray discs, the space on your hard drive to download 50GB games, and a blu-ray burner. The average guy isn’t going to go through the trouble or the money. If 360 had developed their own type of player, they would have been in a much safer position.

Now that we have the Wii, the Move, 3DS (3D DS), and Natal on or coming on to the market, we have to question what the quality will be of the games coming out due to the limitations of the hardware?  The obvious goal is to reach out to a wider demographic, but what does that mean for us as hardcore gamers? Will this formula drive people  to play games that aren’t enjoyable? These are things we have to watch out for when choosing what we play. We can only hope that with the new generation of games, developers can find better ways to keep us interested that aren’t cheap tactics to make money.