Is gaming dead for you?

[Lt._nefarious]

I think gaming is... Well not better so much as changing... Sure violence has become somewhat more graphic in the mainstream and dark and edgy (or grey and boring depending on how you view it) is in and colourful and camp (or dizzying and stupid) is less seen but in a way these changes are for the best and... Ugh, I really don't have the right words... It's not dead it's just different and whether that is good or bad is up to your personal tastes, It's definitely not "dead" though.

As for Tomb Raider always having been sexist I beg to differ because Tomb Raider taught that it doesn't matter what gender you are because with enough exercise and practice we can all kick ass and look good doing it...

 

[Canadamus Prime]

No, I wouldn't say it's dead; but it sure isn't what it used to be. And no it has not changed for the better.

 

[natster43]

Not dead. It at worst is just stagnating due to a lack of risk taking in formulas as of late.

 

[Joby Baumann]

Nope, I've simply come to realize how stupid people are.

 

[TheProfessor234]

I could care less about main stream gaming and what's popular. I really hope we can move away from shooters but in the end, they bring lots of people into gaming as whole, even iOS games as well, and that only adds to the gaming community. People may hate, "fratboys," and, "casuals," but they still keep the industry alive.

Of course, I might end up eating my words if we get Angry Birds 15: The Reckoning and Battlefield: Eternity.


Sidenote;
As someone else has said, Kickstarter is a very interesting area in the gaming industry right now. If the few large titles that are coming out are successful and keep promises, then I can see that turning into a thing, more than it already is.

Letting companies go around the publisher and strait to the consumer is a great idea but in this early stage it can still fall flat on its face.

 

[Unsilenced]

While there are undeniably great games in the past, I think people really, really tend to underestimate how much utter shit there was. Same goes for movies.

You can probably list a dozen or so movies coming out this year, and most of them will be mediocre, but if I gave you an earlier year, you'd only be able to tell me the biggest box office smash hits of that year. Why? Because we forget shit. You have any idea how many movies have been made of the Titanic? Me neither, but holy fuck is it a lot. Even the Nazis made one. But you only remember one, right?

Can you name any films from 1912? Probably not, but there were an asston of them. They just weren't great, so we forgot them. Most stuff of that period was, in fact, mindless fucking tripe.

Now tell me all the movies you can think of from 2012.

You think anyone will give a fuck about most or even any of them in 2112?

Fuck no. They'll just remember one or two from the entire decade that were considered the best of the best, and they'll look back at right now as the golden age of film making and they'll moan and wail about how companies are so caught up in 5d that they can't make good films like they used to and how commercialization has ruined film in the 22nd century and oh god why couldn't things be like they used to back in good old 2012.


Going back to games... Good god, I hope you realize what utter shit many old games were. The gaming industry nearly choked and died from it. ET became famous for being shit, but there was plenty of shit that was shitty enough to be shit but didn't achieve legendary shit status. Seriously.

There was a lot of shit.

There were also a lot of games that were just O.K. Games that were decently playable but not memorable. Most games are, were, and will always be just mediocre. We don't remember those either.

We look at the past and see only the shining paragons of gaming. The games that withstood the test of time and became classics. We don't remember the release bugs, or the controversies that happened over a decade ago. We just don't care.

I'm pretty young, I'll admit, but for as long as I've been able to track, the entertainment industry has been "failing." Constantly. It never fails, just stays failing. Next years films and games will be always be horrible. Any good ones last year were the last of their kind. We believe this year after year, on and on, apparently to the end of time.

If the sky is falling, it's been doing it very slowly.

I don't think we should be worried.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Well I'm currently in a gaming forum, meaning I care enough about games to make stupid post on the internet about it so... no. If you're so bothered, then stop playing games and stop visiting this forum. It's just a hobby and one that people here are interested. You can find a new hobby.

 

[[REDACTED]]

Well, my xbox library consists of Red Dead Redemption, Skyrim, Minecraft and Portal.
So... NO. Good games are being made in the present, and good games were made in the past. The only difference is that they're prettier now.

 

[GundamSentinel]

Hell no.
For me, gaming is the best it's been. So many good games are being released, and stuff like Steam makes finding and playing new games really easy and convenient.
I hate when people nostalgia it up and say how gaming was better in "the old days" because there was still a fair amount of shit back then, we just remember the good stuff.

This fine person speaks truth. Stop all the gloom and doom, there are tons of good games being released, and great new IPs coming out every year. For me personally, there are very few games over 10 years old that I can still enjoy. Gaming really wasn't better in those days.

Sexism? *shrugs* Bugs and glitches? There were just as many (if not, more) glitches in those days. And in the time of cartridges and before internet, there was nothing you could do about it. I'm happy stuff can actually be patched or modded these days.

"I could care less,"

*cringe*

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Gaming is worse now than it was before because more suits have moved into positions of power throughout the industry - and that is always an objectively bad thing for any creative industry. This generation has given us an endless loop of military fpsers, gears clones, yearly rehashes, tacked on multiplayer, on-disc DLC, buggy/broken premature releases - all because a board room full of non-gamers decided these were the best ways to separate us from our money.

There are obviously bright spots. Valve, Bethesda, some of the medium-size console devs. But for the most part, the big corporate maws have been swallowing up the best studios and spitting out the same boring, soulless garbage for years. They're sucking every last morsel off the bones of AAA gaming before the inevitable collapse, and then they'll move on to some other burgeoning industry to siphon off whatever they can with the same unsustainable ideas.

 

[lord.jeff]

Gaming isn't dead and your orginal post shows it, we wouldn't be having this new focus on violence and sexism without the increasing fanbase bring new prespective, also every medium has stages like this at some point remeber things like the comic book code and tv never having a king bed.

 

[DioWallachia]

Not dying but removing the Cancer know as EA and Activision may help the patient to look a lot better.

But if you really look around you may find that there is plenty of games that not necessarily will die as soon the mainstream AAA dies.

 

[Olas]

For a site that pretty much revolves around gaming this seems like a weird thread. No gaming is not dead for me, otherwise I wouldn't be here. If new games stopped coming out, period, I still wouldn't say gaming is dead for me. I replay games I like all the time and there are still thousands of games out there I've never played or tried before.
Way to not be negatively dramatic escapists.

 

[Kyber]

Not for me, i love gaming, in my opinion better than ever, and i think they'll be even better in the future

 

[Vegosiux]

For me personally, there are very few games over 10 years old that I can still enjoy. Gaming really wasn't better in those days.

I'll ask you how many games that are 10 years old or older you enjoy once we're in 2022. It's not exactly an accurate comparison, you'd need to compare how many games you enjoyed then as opposed to how many you enjoy now.

Not how many games from then you enjoy now as opposed to how many new games you enjoy now.

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

But it's not only that. Games are being released in less that satisfactory condition. A lot of them are in poor quality, have tons of bugs and glitches, and this is quickly becoming the norm.

This, however, is inexcusable. Developers are using the freedom of patches to shove substandard products out the door, watching to see if they promise a return on investment before actually making them work. I didn't buy any of the Elder Scrolls games because of this, and I won't do so until Bethesda cleans up a bit, and starts showing that they think of artistic integrity and customer satisfaction in the same ballpark as money.

I love this false illusion that buggy games are increasing in number because games can now be patched. That games can be patched is a good thing because bugged as fuck games were always there. Especially back in the days before the market crash.

I'm not saying that "bugged as fuck" games were not there before; that's obvious. Likewise, I think that patching is a great thing, because it can fix errors. And the Crash of 1983 was caused, at least in part, by massive amounts of buggy shovelware.

But I do think that the number of AAA, top-quality games that have serious flaws in them are increasing. It's not nostalgia to recall the strict guidelines that companies had to follow to earn the Nintendo Seal of Quality in the N64 days, for fear of the 10NES chip. Even the biggest publishers (what few there were) knew that trying to ship sub-standard products wouldn't fly. The result? Games had less serious, game-breaking flaws (although there were plenty of minor bugs).

However, the competition in the market has grown, and while that means plenty of great new games, it also means that console makers have to ease up on their guidelines or risk losing out. Combined with the relative ease of patching (compared to recalling thousands of discs/cartridges) and the exponentially greater amount of time and money invested in making a game, this means that both console makers and game publishers know that they can get away with more. The result? More games have serious, game-breaking flaws, which developers hope to fix post-launch, like Skyrim.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

I'm with the "gaming is the best it's ever been" camp, for several reasons. If you don't like the big, mainstream AAA releases, they're easy enough to ignore. It's far easier to find and purchase alternatives now than it has ever been and there are still some real gems being released from all levels of the industry. On top of that it's also far easier than ever to go back and the classics of yore! With services like GOG providing us with hundreds of classic PC games and emulators allowing us to play games from any system up to and including the Wii on our computers it's never been easier to be a retro gamer.

Not only are there still fantastic games being released (in amongst a lot of crap, yes, but that crap has always been there) but we now have all the best games of yesteryear to play, too. We're more than a little spoiled for choice.

 

[GundamSentinel]

For me personally, there are very few games over 10 years old that I can still enjoy. Gaming really wasn't better in those days.

I'll ask you how many games that are 10 years old or older you enjoy once we're in 2022. It's not exactly an accurate comparison, you'd need to compare how many games you enjoyed then as opposed to how many you enjoy now.

Not how many games from then you enjoy now as opposed to how many new games you enjoy now.

Good point, good point, my bad. Then I'll say this. I first came into contact with gaming when I was about 4 (in 1991, when we got our first PC). There were a few games I enjoyed at the time (some platformers and racing games mostly), but the greater majority of them just couldn't hold my attention. My father played more games than I did and he only played Captain Comic.

By the time I was 7, I just didn't play any games any more. Why? Well firstly, they were ugly as sin. And not just for that time, they just didn't particularly look like anything recognizable to me, so were not very relatable. Secondly, games were quite dull. Again, even without modern games to compare them to, there was just very little to do in them. When I look back at games I played at that time (like Pacman, Tetris, Test Drive), I can hardly believe that video games had a future after that. They were fun, but just not for a very long time. Sure, there were a few that were of a much higher level, but I've seen very few. So why play games, when I had Lego? Thirdly, they just didn't run very well. Operating systems (or any program for that matter) at that time weren't very user friendly, so even getting a game started often felt like performing an arcane ritual. Consoles often weren't much better, though in that case it was more dust blowing and cartridge slamming.

I only picked up gaming again when I was 13, when there were games like Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, Age of Empires 2, Homeworld. But again, those are the titles that stand out. It's just like when people often say that the PS2 had a great library; it just had a very large library. For every great game there were a dozen crap games. So at that time gaming was a very small hobby for me. There was of course a vastly superior PC, and I sometimes played Playstation or N64 games with friends, but not much more.

It's only been in the past 5 or 6 years that I've found enough entertainment in gaming to really get invested in it. There are games I'd happily spend hundreds of hours with without getting bored, something I couldn't dream of when I was little.

 

[shrekfan246]

It could be ALOT better.

EDIT:

Spoiler: The Alot: A mythical creature that one rarely sees, but when it is spotted, one must be prepared for anything.

OT: Hey, I just noticed I never put my own opinion in here.

Nah, I don't think gaming is dying or dead. I'd say I get bored of games a bit easier than I used to, but there are still plenty of fun things that catch my attention. Just wish they'd release some worthwhile things during June/July every now and then.

 

[Savber]

It has never been better.

Watch Kickstarters, the indie developers, and platforms like Steam and I can't help but feel optimistic.

Also we still have companies like Valve, Bethesda, and CD Projekt Red all of which are dedicated to better the gaming industry while also being pretty good heavyweights at their own rights.