Nightlinker's Video Game Rant.

[The Nightlinker]

The problem isn't with the developers so much as with the publishers. There are lots of really creative and talented people in the game industry making crappy games because that's the only way they can obtain funding.

This is also true, but it still doesn't justify the truth that video games are on a decline.

Until then, I'll stick with my BlazBlue and VN's.

[Jake]

the truth that video games are on a decline.

I don't think that's true, either, though.

Your argument seems to be that games are in decline because:
- They're geared to sell rather than geared to entertain
- They re-use content from previous games in the same series

But I think those things have always been true. I'm thinking of a time when one can pick up a games magazine and see a movie license tie-in or two; when something like 60% of new games released are all in the one or two dominant genres; a time when you could look forward to the 6th or 7th title in a popular series being released, re-using content from several previous titles in the series, not really bringing anything new gameplay-wise and still selling well.

I'm referring, of course, to the late eighties, early nineties - which featured many movie tie-ins, nearly every game released was either a platformer or a scrolling shooter or both, and you could look forward to the eighth game in a series having pretty much identical game mechanics and features to the first. ZX Spectrum magazines of all people were frequently marvelling at the "smooth-scrolling graphics" of new titles, and other people were arguing that it wasn't fair to reject older games just because the graphics weren't good - graphics aren't everything!

So that was twenty years ago; what's changed to make it worse since then? It seems to me that the difference between the piles of crap we had in the eighties and the piles of crap we have today is mostly that we don't remember the piles of crap we had in the eighties because only the good titles remain in the public consciousness, while today it's hard to pick the good titles out of the mountain of rubbish because history hasn't had a chance to filter them out for us yet. Maybe there are good years and bad years, but that happens, you know?

[prezzey]

I tend to agree with Jake on this...

Also, where I'm from (Hungary), for a long time - before widespread internet connections - games were relatively hard to get, so this already filtered out the bad games in more than one sense. The ones I got to play as a kid were already the cream of the crop, since someone above me in the chain decided they were worth passing on. I suppose the same is true for most people not from the US/UK and over 20. Now we can just get everything online or in stores, of course we stumble on bad games as well.

Furthermore, there are more games being released than ever before, and more people involved in game development than ever before. I say that's a good thing but of course it can also lead to a lot of crap.

Just recently people were saying the Wii and the casual boom would destroy video games for gamers, did that happen? I didn't see it happen.

And isn't it contradictory to assume that hardcore fans ruined MW2 when it sold like crazy = not only hardcore fans have bought it (since that's not such a large market, or is it??). My own example, just as a small illustration: for 10 years I played no FPSes whatsoever, then I bought Gears of War... maybe if my interest in FPS games reawakened a bit later, I would've bought MW2. (To be fair, I bought Gears when it hit the bargain bin, not when it was launched.)