Welcome to Gaming! Come chat with us in the GoatChat network (desktop users click here). We also have an Official Steam Group.
All sub rules are defined in detail here and open for feedback
-
Submissions must be related to gaming.
-
Titles must be clear and reflect content of the submission. Include game titles where necessary.
-
No Clickbait (defined).
-
No links to illegal torrents or other illegal downloads/content.
-
No link posts to merchandise and/or unrelated products (exceptions).
-
Mark all spoilers with: [](#s "Text goes here")
-
Mark all NSFW posts appropriately.
-
Submissions reposted within 6 months will be removed.
Content creators, please read our community Content Creator Guidelines
What you're encouraged to post:
Games! We should talk about games more than anything! New releases, old favorites, Speed Runs, Let's Play's, development news, what we love, what we hate and so on and so forth.
Try to post things that create discussion. We want people to feel engaged and feel their voices are heard, rather than to be a place of disposable content.
If you're not sure, ask!
If you wish to, you can archive your posts here.
Check out v/gaming's megathread of gaming-related subverses
view the rest of the comments →
[–] NeaKillerMain 3 points -2 points 1 point (+1|-3) ago
My friend I think your anger is misplaced.
This nonsense going on in videogames is just the way markets age. At first the barriers to entry for making games were high, so there were few game companies. There were also few players, so the market was barely able to function. It was super risky and just wasn't really profitable. People who made games were really passionate about it, since doing it for the money alone would have been silly.
Then as games became popular, game companies started raking in decent cash, but barriers to entry were still high. There was no Unity and no Unreal, so each company had to write their engine themselves or pay another company to use theirs. This was the sweet spot in the market where there were enough gamers to make decent cash but the barriers to entry were still so high that you needed to be already well-established to profit. This is when all of your big companies became big, like Epic, Valve, etc., as did the big publishers. A lot of companies separated out into the 'production' and 'distribution' categories. You either became a publisher or a developer, depending on where your interests lied. That's how you got all of your EAs and Activisions.
Once people started making affordable game engines, selling art assets online, and teaching videogame design classes in college, it became a whole lot easier to make games. You didn't need that one brilliant developer who could code an entire game engine themselves... you just needed to pay a bit of money for Unity and 3D modeling tools. Currently Unity is free and you can get Maya for like $30 a month. A 12 year old who is fed at home and pays no rent is now in a position to make a shitty game and publish on Steam.
But now the market has shifted and you have the reverse problem: too many games (mostly shitty games), not enough players. The AAA game companies still make money, but they're only making money because they're doing this microtransaction and gambling shit. Just look at the evolution of the cost of making videogames. One way to read this is that games are making more money, so the companies can afford to spend more money on financing a game. But the other way to read this is that to stay on top, AAA game companies have to spend more. The amount of gamers available has reached a ceiling, whereas the number of games out there keeps growing exponentially. The market is collapsing under the weight of shitty games, and big game companies need to release cash grabs that they spend millions marketing just to stay big.
The big publishers have been around long enough that they've established an oligopoly. They suck all of the money out of the game sales to the point that the studios they publish for starve and collapse. So on the one hand you have to produce an epic, awesome-looking game to entice gamers away from stupid shit like Minecraft or Goat Simulator. On the other your publisher is taking you to the cleaners. You do the stupid microtransaction bullshit to beef up sales to keep your studio afloat, but then the gamers hate you. It's lose-lose. If you don't believe me go look at the studios that swore not to do microtransactions... they just ran themselves into the ground. They made great games that people loved, but their publishers just took all the money and they collapsed.
This is the same awful shit we're seeing with the internet. All market cycles have a beginning, middle, and an end. It's always great in the beginning and decent in the middle. We're just seeing the end of the videogame market cycle. It's just going to get worse until it collapses so hard that it can restart some different way. But it's going to get worse before it gets better.
TL, DR: We're just at the end of the economic cycle for videogames. It's nobody's fault. Or everybody's fault, whichever way you want to look at it.
[–] ixaxxar 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago
that was one nice wall of text trying to convince me that some how I should support these kikes and their cash grabs instead of laughing as they go bankrupt as more and more people like me don't buy their shit ever under any circumstance.
At some point a company will do things they way they are supposed to be done, and the cycle can repeat.
[–] NeaKillerMain 1 point 0 points 1 point (+1|-1) ago
I did no such thing. I'm just telling you that it's not any generation's fault. You can literally not buy any of EA's shit and they will still pump out games with microtransactions until they go out of business. And you will still have shitty games after that.
That's not even mentioning that gamers don't have collective bargaining power. They're not a union. Maybe you can resist playing the next Star Wars game that's riddled with microtransactions, but the person down the street can't. And that's a reality previous generations didn't have to put up with because microtransactions weren't around, not because gamers back then were grandmasters of boycotting.
[–] Hektik 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
I would say its not a free market when Publishers have to be held legally to increased demand for profit for shareholders. A private company doesnt have that overhead expectation and can run circles around those companies that are expected to generate more via shareholder demand.
Fanboyism and useful idiots shell out the money and AAA developers get increased funds for projects but the capital is split by overhead which screws the developers and gamers. It is built like a ponzi scheme.
[–] NeaKillerMain 1 point 1 point 2 points (+2|-1) ago
Yep, exactly. And the scary thing is it's really turtles all the way up. We think of the publishers as big and evil, but maybe it's the investors. We think of the investors as big and evil, but maybe it's somebody else. At the end of the day it doesn't matter who is big and evil, just that the whole game market is slowly collapsing. Indie games have a much better time getting something original out there without microtransactions, but the market is flooded with indie games, so nobody indie really makes much money. AAA companies get their games noticed easier, but their publishers take all the money. Gamers have to choose between a plethora of shitty asset-flips and AAA games with their favorite IP that are built to nickel-and-dime them. Everybody's just fucked every which way. Nobody at any level is really in control of the videogame market... we're all just at the mercy of it.
[–] ErnieTheEarner ago
Any thoughtful post gets downvoted on VOAT. Yes, this is the end of video games on consoles (Xbox and Sony) anyway. I think Candy Crush put an end to that. Why build a game for a few when you have the masses playing a game so simple with micro transactions. Yea, people who want to play serious FPS games are feeling the hurt. Got a feeling it will go back to PC gaming like the late 90's where their are dedicated servers owned by other players and the code is open enough where you can design maps. I did like 15 maps...all pretty bad, but others did a great job and were used on public servers. Quake Rocket Area 2!