Shadow1980 said:
Broken games are hardly anything new, as the James Rolfe has shown us many times. But back then if there was an otherwise good game plauged with a bad glitch (as opposed to a just plain bad game), it couldn't be patched. Thanks to online functionality and the consequent ability to issue patches, game-breaking bugs can be fixed. Driveclub and the Master Chief Collection were barely playable online at launch, but they were eventually fixed and are both great experiences that I play regularly. Sometimes shit happens during development, even back in the day when games were simpler and cheaper to make. Most of the things we gamers complain about aren't recent phenomena. "Nothing new under the sun," and all that. As for DLC, well, maybe if video game prices kept up with inflation then maybe we wouldn't have to deal with it, at least not to the extent we currently do. In the U.S. at least, a new game on the SNES or Genesis might run you $80 to $120 in today's dollars. Rising development costs have to be offset somehow, and while the expansion of the market over the past 20 years has helped a bit (there have been more multi-million sellers in the past decade than in the previous two), the declining inflation-adjusted retail price of a game tends to work against that. Games are technically cheaper at retail than they've ever been. Enter DLC. Lower-cost, higher-margin add-ons can be much more profitable than the core game. Also, when done well it can breathe new life into an aging title. DLC isn't always done well, and sometimes it comes across as a rip-off, but in the end it's purely optional (at least I've never heard of a game that became completely non-operational if you didn't buy the DLC) and it's the price we have to pay for games remaining $50-60 for the past 15 years. Again, I see absolutely no reason to perceive the 5th & 6th gens as some sort of Golden Age of gaming. Hell, I still think the NES and SNES are the greatest systems ever, but while I still think there was and still is plenty of room for growth in 2D sprite-based graphics & gameplay, I still want gaming to move forward technically. It has to advance as a medium, not stagnate with gameplay formulas introduced in the late 90s & early 00s. Maybe one day just about everything that can be done will be done, but gaming isn't quite a mature medium yet (hell, film has been around longer yet still changes as a medium in many ways). Of course, the fact that I never had a high opinion of the early 3D era (as I elaborated on the other day) probably contributes to my feelings on the matter. |
You could see it also in that way,and thats why the industry is in this sorta state.
