When I wander down to a high-street game retailer for my latest installment of my favourite game I am constantly disappointed by the longevity and development of modern games. Everything is geared for online multiplayer and everything else is DLC, while other key features are forgotten; like replay value and production quality.
The big dogs of
game development such as Ubisoft, EA etc, never seem to bother producing a
decent game any more. Instead they prefer to just cash in on the multiplayer,
DLC, micro-transactions and other online elements. This kind of economic model was summed up by THQ Vice President Danny Bilson quite well when he said;
“Like any game, if you have a great creative core to it, you just keep exploiting that core.”
Note the wording - "exploiting that core", now exploit has two very distinct meanings and this is a clever piece of double-meaning if I've ever seen one. He's being absolutely honest of course, the game industry is exploiting things; both the games concepts and the gamers. What's worse is that this thinking promotes repetitive rehashing and regurgitation of the same ideas no matter how stale they get, while
not actually creating anything new - as long as you keep handing over your cash they don't give a crap. They're getting paid and that's all that matters.
Plainly speaking, this kind of business model detracts from the game market and our enjoyment.
When I spend £40 on a new game I want
forty pounds-worth of enjoyment. I don’t want 5 hours of rehashed last-generation graphics, story-line (if I'm lucky) and gameplay. I want new, I want gleaming; I want my damn money’s worth. Considering I’m asking this of multi-million pound game
developers, I don’t think I’m asking too much of them to make a game worth the
price.
Considering today’s money tight times, £40 is enough to get you a good
weeks shopping for two people, a years subscription to a gaming magazine, it could pay
for insurance for your console, or buy ONE new game. So as you can see, that
one new game needs to be worth the money it doesn't it?
If we backtrack quite a bit
to the Metal Gear Solid series, we are given a shining example of what a well produced game series can achieve. MGS 2 was supposed to come out with the release of the PS2. Did it? No,
because they held it back to iron out game flaws and make it better.
Subsequently it was more than worth the wait. MGS 3 didn’t just “cash in” on the
previous titles, it offered something new and exciting and probably the most
immersive MGS experience to date, including MGS 5. What's the main gripe from the fans with regard to MGS 5 you might wonder? Online features and the fact that MGS 4 effectively finished the series neatly - many serious fans argue that MGS was simply resurrected for a fifth title to make money, not as a service to the fans and continuation of the narrative, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the view point as a long standing MGS fan myself. 
When MGS 3 came out in 2004 (this game is older than the average CoD player it would seem) the fans realised that they
didn’t just rehash MGS 2 and cash in on previous dynamics and ideas. They also
didn’t spend all their time creating DLC and endless online padding and multiplayer. It was built up
from scratch with new characters and a new engrossing story line. MGS 3 broke
cover late but it was worth the wait. How many times have recent games been hyped beyond reason and we, the gamers, were promised the world in a new game and then it turned out to be substandard at best - Brink, Watch Dogs, BF Hardline... even CoD Black Ops 3 is already getting a bad rap because many think it's just AW re-branded. This would be hard to argue with considering CoD is something of a euphemism for 'over-hyped and undeveloped'.
Take the ever failing (its fans, not
its profit margins) game series we see stacked up on the shelves just
waiting to disappoint us. Assasin's Creed after the orginal and AC2 has steadily gone down hill, some might regard Brotherhood as the last good one but realistically that was just AC2.1. FarCry blew us away with the third installment and what of 4? Again, it wasn't FarCry 4 it was FarCry 3.1. It's like they forgot what moves a game away from being just another generic title that ends up in the second hand bargain bin after 2 months.Titles like MGS 3, Skyrim, Oblivion, Dead Island still have appeal and replay value, they're aren't just throw-away games that you only play until the latest one is released.
Online
play is a great experience, it’s fun and exciting and it’s a big market and
community but don’t sacrifice offline game content and our money for it. All that achieves is to alienate and irritate buyers who when
they spend £40 expect a full game experience, not half developed rehash with
the rest as online multiplayer and DLC (day-1 patches and DLC, y'all know what I'm talking about) after all, shouldn't online content be additional not instead of offline content?
If developers insist on producing
games primarily for online play then halve the shelf
price, because fundamentally you are only getting half the game.
Half the game? Yes. Something that takes less than 6 hours to
complete and the rest is just multiplayer is half a game, especially when you are playing something
that has simply been re-branded for the fifth time. What are we paying for
exactly? Now I'm not saying online multiplayer is short-lived, hell I've put 100+ hours into Battlefield 4 online (only slightly less time than I've put into Dragon's Dogma offline) but what I'm talking about is on-disc content. Which, for BF4, is about an evening's play tops. I'm glad I got it second-hand for less than a tenner, I can tell you.
The games industry
just like any consumer based industry, is very competitive, with producers and
developers fighting for contracts and ideas.Surely taking longer to produce one ground-breaking game that will secure a solid and long lived fanbase, and therefore income base, is better than producing three or four half-baked offerings on time. Quality over quantity….right? If we cast our minds back to before the onset of DLC and online multiplayer in gaming we notice that games were generally more complete (equally you had your dead fish, but you know what I mean). Because content that is now DLC was already included and because online multiplayer hadn’t taken off in a huge way developers spent more time actually developing the game experience for the players.
DLC is a great tool for adding additional content to a game, remember having to try and find the expansions in the shops before you could download them straight to your console/PC?
Many developers and producers claim these techniques as "money saving" and "cost cutting". Considering a non-special edition game sells for £35-40 new on average and you might sell 2 million copies, plus years of second hand and new sales revenue it all makes a steady stream of capital for that one title and no one is just running one title - you do the math.
Then they tell us that they are selling us the best they can offer.
They're not quite fleecing us for cash but it's not far off let's be honest. They just keep driving the cash cow down our high streets and filling the shelves with what comes out of the back end of that cow and the biggest problem?
We just keep eating it up.
~
Thanks for reading.
It doesn't matter what you use, only that you game.
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