Words By Greywolfe
I wrote this on the 18th of May, 2015.
It is important to note the date, for a change, because I will be talking about the current gaming industry and anyone looking back on this article might have to take it with a large grain of salt, because things might have changed.
Right now, I’m looking at the website for a games store in my local area, scouring the boxes of games to see what’s happening in AAA-land.
Their big “scroll ads” are for The Witcher 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Call Of Duty III, Batman: Arkham Knight, and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. Some of these have added extras such as: pre-order bonuses or “buy now to enter the exclusive beta test.”
Naturally, they have other games on offer: The “reboot” of Elder Scrolls: Online, Mortal Kombat X, Battlefield: Hardline and a veritable wall of AAA-ness that screams “buy me now!” But I’m afraid I can’t. The state of the industry compels me.
I really should have stuck one of those mutilated faces from Assassin's creed here, but I didn't want this article to have nightmare fuel.
Your Games Are Full Of Bugs. Please Fix Them
One hallmark of the AAA industry from about twenty years ago was the rigorous Quality Assurance that used to go into almost every product. See, the internet was just a dream to those developers, for the most part. They would only really get one shot at releasing their game. If the game was riddled with bugs, then you were effectively throwing away $60. So they absolutely had to get it right. [or mostly right. Some games had patches that you could get from magazines and the like.]
Right now, though, AAA games release with showstopper bugs that render those experiences unplayable. But the internet always comes to the rescue with an enormous day one patch, patches which – in some cases – are so large that they’re fundamentally rewriting the game disk you bought.
QA has gotten less and less money over the years because games cost so much to merely push out the door. The result is that actually bothering to test them has become an expense the game companies don’t want to bear. The solution? Shift that expense to the customer, offering them “an exclusive beta” if they’ll just pay over money to the publisher without seeing a great deal of the game at all.
And I want none of that. I don’t want to support a model where we are paying the publisher [of all people!] to beta test. The publisher should be paying QA testers to do that job.
Just like funfairs of yore, your franchise might turn into a yearly affair.
Yearly Game Cycles
The related problem is that publishers want to rush sequels to us as fast as they can. If they believe that something is a hit, then they’ll want to replicate it over and over and over again, every year, until that franchise has effectively killed itself.
You don’t have to look very far to see casualties of this particular design choice: Harmonix very nearly fell on it's own sword to give Activision a whole bunch of Guitar Hero games. The yearly iteration of Call of Duty and Battlefield games is leading to a stalemate where neither game moves forward very much and where at least three teams have to work on each franchise, because burnout would otherwise destroy those teams. [not, of course, that the publisher would care if that happened.]
These yearly game cycles also lead to consumer fatigue. Go ahead. Ask yourself: When was the last time you were really excited for a Call of Duty? Or an Assassin’s Creed? Or a Battlefield? They’re all pretty much the same game with slightly nicer graphics for each yearly iteration, at this point.
I don’t want reskins. I certainly don’t want to help a model along that shuffles teams just to that they can give me a nicer looking shooter every year. It’s bad for the teams involved, bad for the consumers involved and generally terrible for the industry at large.
Ah, my log cabin in the woods. The builder assures me he will put windows in next year! "It's not a bug," he claims, "it's a feature!"
The Game Is Almost Never "Complete" At Launch
Even if that yearly release is managed in some way and happens without bugs [Ha! Not very likely!] there are other related issues to contend with. Right now, if I pick up an AAA game, I am almost assured that I will not be buying the whole game as intended. No, instead, the publisher will parcel out little dribbles of extra stuff in the form of Downloadable Content [or DLC].
The games industry has an amusing way with words. Often, these words say one thing, but mean entirely another. “Downloadable Content” implies that you will be able to connect to the internet and just grab that extra stuff by clicking “download now!” But what’s this? You have to give them your credit card details before you do?
That’s right. The $60 cost of a game has ballooned to $80 or $100 as publishers seek to get you to pay more for less. This is especially true in light of the slow movement to “games as a service” rather than “games as an entertainment medium.”
And we’re not even touching on the crazy, crazy idea of season passes yet.
Long story short: that game you’re buying? It’ll never be done. The publisher will keep foisting “content” on you in little bits until they “stop supporting” the game. Now, certainly, we used to have expansion packs and those were fairly pricy, but they came along about a year or so after the game was out and generally added more to do to the game. Or sometimes shook it up entirely. What you’re getting with DLC often borders on the banal. “Here’s another half an hour mission. Or a map pack we thought you’d like, culled from the last iteration of the game. Are you a collector and need everything? We’ve got a shiny outfit for your characters that you can buy.”
Worse still: the disk you bought at retail might actually not have the whole game. Instead, you will have to sit down with your new purchase and muddle through forced downloads that are sometimes as big as the game itself while your product is updated so it can have “all the features” because of a Day One patch.
I am patient. If it means waiting for the Game of the Year version to show up, I’ll do that just so that I don’t have to sit through the release day silliness. [And even then, I am almost virtually assured that not only will I not get the whole game, but I have to get a patch for that version of the game, too.]
![Just like with music [but on a scarier, more expensive scale] gaming seems to want to reel from one hit to another, with no pauses or thoughts between. And that's terrible.](http://www.twinstiq.com/uploads/4/7/1/6/47165935/4973658_orig.png)
Hit music can be very "hit" or "miss." [Did you see what I did there?!] - The games industry is exactly the same.
The "Hit" Industry
Because the industry was much smaller [hits were marked with far smaller numbers than they are today] reputations mattered. EA was on its way to tanking their reputation, but their brand still carried “enough weight” at the time that you could sort of trust them. Then, they bought a whole collection of companies and destroyed them. And EA was never quite the same.
See, EA were looking for companies that could produce hits, because that’s all the industry seems to understand. Can’t produce a game that sells like gangbusters? Then it must be a failure. And, naturally, the hit industry is great bedfellows with the yearly release cycle: Where one leads, the other inevitably follows. The AAA industry is so tied up in knots about producing giant jackpots that once they score on that front, they feel compelled to keep burning that rope until it’s all gone.
I like experiments. I like games that tread a little to the left or to the right of mainstream ideas. I can’t think of a worse world to live in than one that offers “reskinned shooter, 2015” as a “new, innovative experience” that I “have to try” because “last year’s iteration was amazing!”
[As an aside: Cody Hall recently wrote an excellent piece for Twinstiq about the concept of the Long Tail [and why publishers should embrace it] - an idea I completely endorse/support.]
Conclusion
AAA gaming seems to press all the wrong buttons for me. It’s too generic, too expensive, too buggy and often just too much of a letdown. You expect the sun, moon and stars, because PR [and the publisher, often] promise the above, but what you get is often...lacking.
Next week! We will discuss why, by contrast, I love independent developers.
