This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
Gaming is insane right now. I can buy a game for $10 that would have won game of the year every year straight for an entire decade. Even saying this there's probably like 15 games that fit this category.
Gamers today get what they deserve. If they want to consume triple A slop they're going to get fucked. Its really simple.
Obligatory:
No war but class war.
It went to shit because big corpos realized there was money in the games industry. It went to shit because capitalism took the reins.
Bu-but Asmongold and Kirsche Verstahl told me the problem was woke gamedevs! /s
No one I know can afford to buy a house because our generations been so royally fucked in every which way, yet somehow we are responsible for steering the entire game industry in our twenties. Right... lol.
Like they didn’t realize in the 90s
That's why most of the money hungry games were in the arcades back then. PC gaming wasn't nearly as big.
Institutional money didn't take it seriously until the mid to late 2000s.
Big video game companies were already doing the same as today though.
I certainly wanted to be a gameDev, and had shit ideas. It is my fault.
Shit is subjective. As long as you love your own shit or the process of it, you are good.
You probably don't have shit ideas, you just need help making you ideas work. Even Tolkien had a group of people help I'm improve the Hobbit.
One of the things I wanted to make, is a pixel style build a vehicle game, where you earn parts for vehicles that you build.
Young millennial/zillennial AAA game dev speaking.
It is 100% a top-down issue. Most devs are talented people. When you're incentivized by quarterly returns as management, over a long enough timeline you begin to care less about game quality and more about stock prices and net revenue in addition to whatever else you need to satisfy your bloated ego, even if you started out as a passionate dev initially. The Indie and AA space is currently thriving because these incentives don't factor in as much for them.
Just like game design, it's an issue with a series of carrots and sticks, not necessarily the people involved (although psychopaths do exist and tend to be overrepresented in c-suites worldwide).
Gamers gamify a system that can be gamed. More at 11.
tldr; Capitalism ruins everything.
Not that I disagree with you but it's more like greed ruins everything
Capitalism doesn't ruin everything. Corporatization ruins everything.
Who runs capitalism bozo
the local coffee shop isn't a corporation
The worse thing that can happen to your niche hobby is for it to go mainstream. US anime has been consolidated into the Sony/Crunchyroll/Funimation/Rightstuf monster.
^ ^ ^ This is true, but I also think it's important to note the role repeated financial and cultural success has on one's mind and ego when elevated repeatedly by both the market and culture. You are not only just financially incentivized not to innovate, but your ego continues telling you "my ideas are always good no matter what others think" after these successes, even when that's not necessarily true and you need to be reined in by others so your good ideas can still shine and the bad ones can be challenged. This is how top-down cultural problems in studio disciplines calcify in addition to financial incentives. It's important as a person(s) running a successful studio to not surround yourself with yes-men, which is not an easy task due to the previously-mentioned perverse financial and egoist incentives.
The funny thing is, I've heard about quite a few Indie studios that are just as bad. They do the very same thing we condemn AAA for - crunch, micromanaging, and even harrasment.
I was very surprised to hear that the person who lead the development on monument valley was a massive dick to his employees.(Repeatedly would use management tricks and neg people to the point of depression and feeling worthless).
So, I can totally understand the cultural success thing. Though I'd like to believe that we are better than the corporate management suite, I have to remind myself that anyone can be a dick. You can be a progressive left leaning animal lover and still be a horrible parent.
I have worked only in the indie/AA sphere, and my experience here hasn't been all that great either. But, I had always believed the problem was in the work culture of my country itself, and that I would probably find it better to work with those outside my country. No, people are the same everywhere, just of different flavours.
Though I'd still prefer to work with like minded people vs those place capital over everything else.
It started roughly around the ps3/360 era, when corporate devs began prioritizing turning their games into skinner boxes that were designed to motivate players to keep playing, so they would be more likely to engage in microtransactions, see more ads, or continue paying subscriptions. Of course gacha garbage is a fuller expression of this kind of manipulation now days.
Still plenty of great games out there, and in some cases we have a real renaissance.
Nailed it. When casino and packaged goods marketers and executives started malignantly metastasizing into the games industry.
Horse armor.
Excuse me, but a lot of passion han be found on the indie market.
Frank Zappa ideas; paraphrased by me.
In the 1960's the music execs like Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and had no idea what the kids wanted. They just threw money at the problem and gave contracts to anyone. The result was a vast variety, everything from Sha-Na-Na to the Mamas and the Papas to Iron Butterfly. When the next generation of bosses got hired, they looked at the one consistent moneymaker; Motown Records. Everyone at Motown had a similar look and singing style...
Oh man. Iron butterfly is just...
I have no words. They're very special to me
I knew exactly what this was going to be. But yeah, its a fantastic song in its entirety.
Gaming hasn't gone to shit.
Some of it is shit, but that's true for literally all media and art across all of human existence.
Gaming is better than ever. This whole discussion is ridiculous, with everyone blaming this or that for something that just doesn't align with reality.
I think the main difference is that we mostly forget about the shovelware titles of 20 years ago. Meanwhile the predatory monetization practices of the popular kids games of this current era will not be forgotten.
You can’t say that gaming is better now when Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Roblox are the most popular games for an entire gaming generation. There are still masterpieces being made today and there was plenty of shovelware back then but there will never be another year for gaming like 1998.
You get like 3 games worth playing a year now and studios that would make all timers year after year now release a game once a decade and sell micro transactions or 50,000 ports of it.
Right, and let's not forget that Retro gaming is completely legal.