Observations on the Changing Popularity of Computer Games

I sometimes think about how much games have changed over the years. At some point I realized I was focusing mainly on how hardware and software drove the types of games developed. But now that hardware and software have pretty much achieved capabilities that make just about anything you can imagine possible, hardware and software are no longer the determining factors.

Oddly (for me anyway), today's games are driven primarily by the populous. Mainstream games are developed by the big house publishers who most likely do market studies to see what the average gamer wants. So the big hump in the bell curve rules and as such we are constantly being presented with games that are for the most part the same old same old wearing different clothes. In short, creativity in game development has flat-lined.

I think to some extent it's also the change in the generations of people who take an interest in gaming. I'm a baby boomer. I grew up with the space race and the cold war. My father fought in WW2 in North Africa, Sicily and Italy as part of the Army Air Corp supporting General Patton's Army. I saw JFK in person when he visited Great Falls, Montana about 3 months before he was assassinated. My father was by then working on missile silos and part of the Air Force. He spent a year in Vietnam in 1966 and retired a year later.

Hobbies were big growing up. I built model jets, warships, flying model rockets from Estes Industries and also Control Line flying aircraft from Cox and Guillows. I also got involved in electric trains and slot-car racing (Aurora HO cars).

When home computers arrived in the early to mid-eighties I was in heaven. It seemed like every company out there was working on making games that simulated real world things like space flight, aviation, warfare on land, in the air and sea, fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons and a host of other imaginative offerings. I witnessed a lot of the things I was fascinated by being translated into a computer game.

Today it seems that has all but dried up. Perhaps it's because young people today have no real sense of the significant world events that I grew up with. Hobbies are no longer popular like they used to be. They have been replaced by being obsessed with a smartphone and social media. The world at large seems more chaotic than I ever dreamed possible as a young man. I don't want to go back to the good old days. I just miss the rich creativity I once experienced.

 

Very well expressed, scrapper.

 

I couldn't have said that any better. :thumbup:

 

Yes well said. Could you imagine one of those old text-based adventure games getting released today? Or my personal favorite, Day of the Tentacle. Of course you have the internet today to read any walkthrough guide available. 20 years ago, games required the player to be creative and use their imagination. Today you just have to spam buttons most of the time.

 

Agreed! Its all about twitch gaming and no originality. I'd love to see Jane's flight sims come back. More single player games. Not everyone wants multi player in certain games. This isn't the Golden Age of Gaming,like the 80's & 90's. Its the Age of Fleecing the gamer. Give you 1/4 of the whole game for $59 and then charge you another $40-60 for the rest(DLC). They know they can't charge you $120 up front. Its like TV shows now. If it isn't a Cop/Forensics/Lawyer show.. Or on a Secondary network like the WB or Sci Fi, its going to fail ! There is just a handful of games that they cut and paste. Add some new stuff, but its the same game. There is no originality anymore. Mechwarrior 2 anyone? Battlezone? Prey? So many games I could name that were so great back in the day. Decent 1 & 2 anyone? Sigh..

 

Play an indie game, grab hold of a sim.

There are still plenty of interesting games out there that are nothing like Call of Duty. From Pong to Mario to DOOM, gaming was never exclusively rocket science and it still isn't. You can still find what you're looking for without too much trouble. The biggest difference is probably that the mainstream market that you were never interested in, is a lot bigger now while the market for niche games is relatively small.

I'm seeing this negative attitude from some people who can't find what they're looking for and all I can think is, have you never dug a little deeper into Steam's store than just the front page. Whether it's Elite: Dangerous or Star Citizen, Euro Truck Simulator, IL-2 Sturmovik or DCS World, Assetto Corsa, Never Alone, Papers Please, Remember Me, Cities: Skylines, This War of Mine or Thomas was Alone, not everything has to be Call of Duty or Ubi Soft: Open World.

There is plenty of originality and innovation in today's games. It's just not the bombastic releases where you'll find it.

 

hell i never got past the intelligent door in hitchhikers.

Nor do i think i ever beat beyond zork.

Duuno if i ever got through a text adventure.

Would love to see janes combat sims come back.

But originality? You can find some in the indy scene, but what is there to originate? Its all been done.

 

very few pc games these days are quality, its a handful of games, its just that we need those sims back that were so great, i can relate to gunship from 2000 for example, a great game, never done in this gen. the mainstream market is getting too many mainstream releases but i can definitely name games of the genres that i like that are very good.
from farcry 3 to alien isolation, the 2 new wolfenstein games , dying light, gta 5, tomb raider and its sequel.
its just that back in the 90s we had the best arcade games pc games all of the releases where quality, and u wouldnt have to worry abt optimization because the package was full back then.

 

Business overtook gaming. Game publishers changed.

When you see another "point and shoot" brainless COD being released, and it sold million copies next week, well, thats what publishers and investors jerk off to.

They don't care about game quality, story, modernization, all they care is $$$.
So by the end of the day, publishers try to spend as little as possible, by cutting corners and forcing developers to finish games asap and release half done game!
But wait! Now that developers worked their asses to release build within deadline, instead of patching/fixing the game, they forced to work on brand new ****ing DLC!

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Another problem I see is, more people got into gaming. So if you create game and want as much as many people to be able to play it, you have to make it simple. Game became so easy, developers literally spoon feeding the gamers.

I think TES is great example to it. Going from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim, its getting more and more simple and dumb.
Need to find super secret location for a quest in Skyrim? Open map, its right there.
"You saw a dragon, holy **** I gotta trust you". "You killed a dragon (with dozen of other people)? Holy ****, you are the best of the best".
I just quit playing Skyrim, because of it.

No matter how much you mod Skyrim, you never achieve game depth and story strength what Morrowind had.

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Of course there still decent publishers like CD Project, Tripwire, Valve(?), etc... and indie developers that pursue game quality over $$$.

So in this time, people with some brain don't buy best selling game. They have their favorite publisher and developers to follow, they check reviews and find new beloved titles.

Edit: fixed rage spelling.

 

I totally agree with that sverek. I mainly buy indie games now. I say indie titles, basically they are the type of titles we all used to play on ZX Spectrum and C64 etc so I have basically gone back to what gaming used to be about.

Gaming for me has gone full circle! Back where I started. So much better.

 

Those big companies making CoD and other trash & recycle games every year are growing new generation of people.
They will sooner or later realize that they are not getting what they want and will shift entire market into another direction. That's consequence of growing huge single minded crowd.

One thing which technology allowed and is better is story telling. Today, your character is in middle of all things, back then you was lucky to get games with cut scenes where someone talks to you and presents mission for next map (CC games).

I now play Blade and Soul, and I can say that Koreans are enjoying new trends in gaming years before we. It is PvP MMORPG but entire progress of game from level 1 to final level is driven by good story. I do not know about original, but EU/NA version which came this year has no grinding. (If you excuse few dungeons you actually are better off running several times anyway.)

But I agree that most publishers out there which are focused on Western countries give very little for what they ask in return.
... it will backfire one day. But I think that even if it did today, they would not even care.

Anyway, people who want to find good game can find it. It may be older, not so good looking, but they may be surprised by greatness behind it.

 

Wow, spot on man.
Our brains are getting more and more like sponges (at least mine is).

 

It really is a shame the direction the gaming industry is heading. . .

Business Executives (Suits) having say over the actual developers, and programmers, is what has led to the dumbed down, consolized, half baked ****e we are seeing today.
(These 'Suits' don't even play computer games)

Any individual, unique edges are filed off, and it's homogenized as a whole to appeal to the broadest user base possible.

When around half the development money is being spent on advertising - then the product will, of course, suffer.

The name of the game is: excite people who have no will power with their 50% budget - a pre-order before any work is done is even better. Once they have the money - no it's not time for patches and fixes - it's move on to the next scheme/advertising/graphics whoring to get the pre-order/day one money.

Creativity is but a tiny stifled voice in the big business of games these days, and is on life support.

Gamers need to vote with their wallets and then, just maybe, the creative people will get a chance to actually control and direct their creations/labor of love.
But whilst 'Suits' are in control - we'll just be served more of the same. . .

 

If anything I've got too many hobbies to devote enough time to, annoyingly (including PC gaming): wargaming (40K/other systems), music (guitar/bass) and most recently, medieval reenactment, on top of trying to fit the gym in a few days a week. I spend too much time working, and spread time between too much other stuff. Really need to prioritise, I think!

 

Remember that games were extremely small back then too. Like only fitting on a few floppy disks or only filling half a CD. Just the size of games today alone makes it impossible for devs to find and fix every problem.
I agree that optimization is always an issue today but again, there are so many variables that you have to account for with today's hardware that its just so much easier to build for a console and then make a port.

 

I agree with the trends you observe, just not the reasons for them. While old games were often limited by technology it led to games costing less money to make. While now it is a multimilion dollar investment that must pay off. So there is no surprise that publishers invest heavily into advertisement and use tried game models that they package slightly differently, because it is a sure bet that they will sell and make money. Now it's not really a hobby for a few fans it's a huge buisness.

I do agree that most of these AAA games are garbage. Luckily there are plenty of indie developers that sometimes produce really awesome games. Plus a few developers that still tend some small but loyal maket with a specific genre games like say Arma or EU4 instead of producing AAA games which do encompas everything, just not really good enough.

Also I'm 25 so I'm probably one of those people with "no real sense of the significant world events" if it helps at all.

 

On the note of Optimized games... there's always been issues since the adoption of user customisable systems. I'm sure I'm not alone in recalling the annoyance of trying to get sound or allocate virtual (or extended) memory in DOS or early windows versions, only to have the game still not run properly, or at all in some cases (I'm looking at you unpatched Final Liberation on Windows 95!!).

 

Well computers do a lot of that for you now. Back then you had to tell the game what kind of soundcard you had, how many channels, what IRQ port, etc.... Most of the time mine wasn't listed so I just had to go through every option until I found one that worked.

 

No kidding lol. Totally hear you though.