8 Reasons The Video Game Industry Is Headed For Disaster (Again)
The games industry needs to pull its socks up.
Isn't it odd, how games released in today's modern industry are often singled out for not including microtransactions and aggressive monetisation models? It was once the case that triple-A stalwarts like Call of Duty introducing loot boxes would have generated backlash on a cosmic scale, but now? It's a (reluctantly) accepted part of the triple-A market that has wormed its way into normality through desensitisation.
That outstanding games like Breath of the Wild, God of War and Spider-Man, to name but a few, are congratulated for shunning such shady practices shouldn't be an extraordinary occasion, but the norm.
Instead, it's mega-publishers like Activision and EA that have standardised the rules and in doing so, inflated their profit margins with unsustainable growth. The bubble is going to burst eventually, and when that day comes, it'll be the increasingly corporate-minded entities mentioned above that, quite rightly, attract most of the blame for the industry going to hell in a handbasket.
Then again, if BioWare and Bethesda's current trajectory is any indication, they'll both have plenty to contribute to the games industry's headstone. If there's one growing trend that popular opinion hates enough to rival loot boxes, it's being treated as unpaid beta testers for so-called 'triple-A' experiences.
Will Anthem and Fallout 76 achieve their final forms before or after the crash, I wonder?
8. Live Services
Contrary to what the likes of EA and Activision believe, time is not an infinite resource.
Ever since Bungie popularised the model in 2014 with Destiny, publishers have been infiltrating the market with their own alternative 'Live Service' games, vast playgrounds filled to the brim with an unending gameplay loop meant to keep its player base running the hamster wheel until the end of days.
The Division, Anthem, even Ubisoft's flagship single-player series Assassin's Creed: all of them have taken cues from Destiny in pursuit of their own slice of the pie, ignorant of the unsustainable saturation resulting from total homogenisation.
Diminishing returns is all that awaits any of the inevitable copycats to come, as the available pool of potential 'one-game' players shrinks until sooner or later, the bubble bursts. Even for the fortunate few able to sink hundreds, potentially thousands, of hours into several such games at once, familiarity will inevitably lead to fatigue.
Hell, if BioWare's beleaguered Anthem is anything to go by, the downward trend has already begun.