It wasn't always this way.
Microtransactions didn't used to exist.
People made games because people loved making and playing games.
DLC was free.
You didn't have to watch adverts to retry, when a boss kicked your ass.
Games could be made by a couple of geeks with some spare time and little-to-no money.
Hardware was pushed to its limits by experimentation, not by shaders.
You used to be able to sit together with your friends and play one game on a split screen.
Profiles, password resets, account fees, subscriptions. What a joke.
Occasionally, some small startup will make a game for the passion of it. They will try to bring back the good old days of game playing and game development, but it never seems to work. Times have changed too much. It doesn't matter how many people think like me, and support these small productions, we are not large enough in number to cover the costs now involved, and subsidise the living expenses of the employees while their publisher takes the bulk of whatever they do manage to earn anyway.
I was always an advocate of multiplayer games, I loved split screen more than anything. It brought me closer to family members as well as friends and neighbours. Gaming was a social act. Sure, it was seen as geeky or nerdy, and some people didnt approve, but we didnt need them. As time rolled on, gaming platforms became more mainstream, and now you will be hardpressed to find a household that doesn't have some sort of console. It looked like the nerds won, yet somehow, I feel nothing but a sense of loss.
With the masses came the corperations. Games are no longer labours of love - they are one-arm bandits in disguise. How the vast majority of 'app games' count as games is beyond me. They are distracting time-wasters, designed to extract dollars and cents from bored, addicted humans, who have that horrible feeling in the back of their skulls that something's amiss, but they cant quite put their finger on what it is. That multiplayer that I used to love, and that I used to enjoy with my friends and family, pushed each of us into our own, soundproofed, padded corners. Split screen is now a highlighted feature whenever some indie game introduces it, because of how rare a commodity it has become. For the most part, you need a paid account, an expensive device, and your own copy of the game before you can play with friends. Then you each sit in your own rooms, headphones on, lights down, door locked. Somehow, to play with others, you must first isolate yourself.
It wasn't always this way.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I'm just being nostalgic for my childhood, as who doesn't want to be young again? Perhaps the games back then really sucked, and I didnt have as much fun as I remember, and any enjoyment that I did get was purely because I was a kid and had no cares in the world, and I isolated myself more than I can recall, and I spent way more money on each game back then that the average gamer does now. Perhaps the whole system has been corrupt from the start, I could just never see it back then, sheltered as I was. Perhaps.
But I don't think so.
If you've lost your love of games, it's okay. It died within me, a long time ago. Many of my friends continued playing, as a habit - no longer showing signs of enjoyment, more or contempt or defeat. I thought that it was gaming itself that I had outgrown, but recently I found an old console and picked up a few games that I had not played before, despite hearing praise for them as I was growing up. Let me tell you, I'm enjoying the crap out of it. Despite the age of the games, they are extremely playable, challenging, rewarding, and story rich. I'm enjoying playing these old games more than I've enjoyed any of my Steam purchases in the last decade. It's not gaming that I'm sick of - it's the current state of the corporate-gaming-machine.
Please, let us stop settling for second rate garbage.
Don't be loyal to sellout franchises that are producing unfinished, buggy messes that have been designed not for your enjoyment, but for your dollars and addiction. Until we stop supporting them, they will not ease their grip on genuine game designers struggling to survive the storm.
I know you've noticed it, too. It's so blatant that it hurts, yet still we feed the machine, and wonder why the games aren't as good as they used to be. Because let's face it, they're not. They suck.
- Aluca Sol 