1. The Same Bad Business Practices Haven't Stopped
On top of all this, the industry is just as cynical and conniving as it ever has been, if not more so. EA continues to drive your favourite IP into the ground, Activision is pumping out cynical sequels on an annual basis, Capcom is as incompetent as ever, and Ubisoft is still being Ubisoft. The same bad business practices that have been plaguing the industry for years - especially on consoles - hasn't just carried over to the new generation, it's gotten worse. Games like Watch Dogs, once considered to be the spearhead of the eighth generation, are building up hype with fake promotional material that gets worse and worse until the game itself finally releases, revealing a sad shell of a game that's painfully average, especially when held side-by-side against its E3 build. Publishers are still continuing to push people to pre-order games about which their entire knowledge is based solely on advertising, a lot of which ends up being a boldface lie. Content is still being sliced off and offered as paid downloadable content, and DLC in general continues to be more of the same, for more of your money. Development budgets of AAA games continue to escalate to ridiculous proportions, forcing publishers to push bad business practices.The fear of risk continues to cripple the industry, and the new console generation has done nothing to change that. Creativity and innovation, whilst nice buzzwords, are never actually put into consideration as developers continue to pump out the same formulaic titles they did on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. We're not even a year into this generation, and we're already getting "HD remasters" of games that came out last year. The seventh generation of consoles, as cynical as it could be, at least had an identity. The eighth however, just feels like more of the same.
Ken was born in 1994, and before the turn of the century, he was already a gamer for life, starting with Pokémon Blue Version. He has a passion for storytelling, especially in the gaming medium. Growing up on a healthy diet of JRPGs and point and click adventure games, young Kenny grew up playing Nintendo and Sony consoles, before becoming a snobby member of the PC Master Race. Nowadays, he resides in a time warp, refusing to believe the nineties ended as he fills up his Steam library with old point and clicks and cRPGs.
