Editorial: How AAA Gaming Ruined Gaming

With gaming still in a relatively young state, there is much it can do and much more growing it can do. However, before hopefully coming to a state of maturity, it will no doubt experience growing pains. One of which is attempting to shed and break some unsavory habits that it picked up while in its rather rebellious teenage years.

Yet, one would think that companies growing larger would be anything but rebellious. The misunderstanding lies in that the companies are rebelling against the consumers, the very force that keeps them alive and gives them profits the likes of which boggle the mind. Back in the old days, if there was ever anything that came with the game and drove the price up, it was often worth the additional money in the first place. Yes, that includes a Ghaleon rock’em, sock’em hand puppet that came with Lunar: The Silver Star Story.

In the earlier days, it was thankfully limited to things that had actual use outside of the game, such as a soundtrack and if the soundtrack of the game was especially good, then all the better. The Killer Kuts disc that came with Killer Instinct for the Super Nintendo was more than worth it, as this was during an era when Rare was coming into its own and had amazing composers for the games it made. The same could be said for the Arc the Lad games that, while mediocre, was enough to warrant a purchase.

It is all about the perceived value for the customer and the kind of audience that the developer should be striving for. Unfortunately, the larger companies and publishers reached a threshold that has rendered them beholden to shareholders who probably do not even know what video games are in the first place. It turns the companies into a black hole swallowing up smaller studios like a Pac-Man based analogy, only funnier and less depressing, so they can fulfill the need to make more money. While the pursuit of capital for the sake of keeping a company alive and kicking is a laudable one, their methods have started many trends which seem to show that the publishers who pull the strings of the nigh on lifeless corpses of video game studios do not seem to care how they get the monies in the first place.

Remember the infamous Horse Armor from The Elder Scrolls: Oblivionback in 2006? Some could consider that the first sign of developers and publishers beginning to lose their way. Fast forward a few years and the mind eventually comes to the dearth of MMOs trying, and failing, to emulate the seemingly limitless success of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. Then, there is the consistent and repeated whining of publishers blaming used games as a source of lost revenues, which resulted in EA and Ubisoft attempting to combat both Steam and used games, er, piracy as they called it, with their half-baked, half-hearted, and half-completed storefronts whose functions were dubious at best and downright insulting at worst. Add in the online requirement for games to activate paid-DLC and it comes crashing down even more.

Then, Capcom’s feeble attempt at trying to hide all the DLC on disc of their ill-fated Street Fighter vs Tekken, which has been all but forgotten and the companion game made by Namco shelved and swept under the rug in hopes that people will forget they wanted to do such a thing in the first place. Then, there was the Diablo III announcement that in order to play this single player game, a persistent online connection would be required. Add in the now defunct Real Money Auction House, which went over like a lead balloon, the less than satisfying excuses for it, and playing the game with the expansion pack shows just how different, and how far, Blizzard had to backtrack in order to make the game even playable. It is still jarring that they have yet to create a satisfying offline mode.

The general consensus is that among the larger publishers and developers, they seemed to have developed an attitude that short-changing the customers that have been buying their games for years is the way to earn more money than they did in the past. Instead of creating just a single good and complete game, they feel the need to break it apart, piece meal, and sell it as DLC when it should have been in the game proper. See: Mass Effect 3. Instead of keeping to a formula that a game was originally known for, i.e. Horror, they turn it into an action game to appeal to a wider demographic instead of trying to make a better horror game. See: the Dead Space series. Name a single contributor to the AAA Games Industry and it will inevitably lead to some sort of kerfuffle that showed complete disregard, if not outright arrogance, towards the people they wanted to peddle their wares to.

It certainly does not help when developers of some of these companies agitate the situation when they do not learn that what is said on the internet stays there forever. Adam Orth learned the hard way when he showed complete lack of tact when questioned about people that do not live in metropolitan cities with easily accessible broadband. Maxis learned the hard way when they tried, and failed, to spin the repeated and aggravating outages on their servers for their latest Simcity game, claiming that it was the enthusiasm of the playerbase that brought the game to a standstill, not their atrocious and short-sighted design goals. The list goes on and will, sadly, continue to go on.

It is times like this where some grumble and groan for another game industry crash to take place. The largest companies, gargantuan sloths, crushed under the weight of their own hubris and overblown expectations to break even, would be almost akin to a fresh start. It would have allowed the survivors of the catastrophe to band together and start anew. As nice as that sounds to some, it would not be possible in this day and age. In addition, the resulting fallout from other industries connected to it would no doubt suffer as well.

What can be done?