The Nightlinker wrote:
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?