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potato_hamster on 02 August 2016
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Veknoid_Outcast said:
pokoko said:

New business models are not inherently terrible and there have been a lot of improvements in gaming over the years.

DLC, in my opinion, has been a net positive.  I've enjoyed some pieces immensely.  Outside Capcom and a few others, DLC now is almost always original content that would not exist at all under the previous model.  DRM has been around since the NES, as Nintendo always had measures to combat bootleggers.  SNES games used to check hardware before playing.  Gaming as a service has, so far, been simply a concurrent approach and options are never bad.

I'm not even going to complain much about subscriptions for multi-player, considering that gaming is now cheaper than ever, even though games themselves generally have far more content than previously.

I'd also argue that brand loyalty is no worse than the Sega vs. Nintendo days, or when Playstation first entered the market.

I've been gaming for a long time and I feel pretty good about where things are at relative to the past.

Based on our conversations, we're never going to see eye to eye on this. You see gaming as getting better every generation. I see the last two gens as detrimental to the industry. Sure we've seen some improvements and newness doesn't automatically translate to badness.

But we've also witnessed a lot of ugly trends and developments, many of them, paradoxically, facilitated by advancements in technology. Development costs have skyrocketed with the advent of HD, and continued to escalate as publishers throw money at voice actors and mocap and other stuff better left to the Pixars and DreamWorks of the world. Online connectivity has allowed publishers to eschew local multiplayer options, push online-only games, and release unfinished games that can be patched with a day one online patch. Advertising budgets have also ballooned, as publishers rely on pre-sales and pre-order bonuses to hook consumers before they know any better. 

These expensive-to-produce games might sell for the same price as an N64 game 20 years ago, but there are extra fees hidden elsewhere: season passes, DLC, online fees, microtransactions, etc. 

Consumers like us are subsidizing this cynical, inefficient, unsustainable business, and unless publishers invest more wisely and more viably in game development the number of game enthusiasts will continue to shrink and those left over will have to pay more and more of the bill.

But don't you see that you come off as a gigantic hypocrite by essentially berating consumers for condoning these practices by supporting those practices with their money, when you do the same yourself. You have a PS4, and from what I can see from your signature, have many games for it, and have played many games for it. You probably have a PS + subscription as well based on your ownership of games that were free on PS+ recently. You also own games like The Last Of Us, and Heavy Rain, which have tons of mocap and voice acting. You're supporting the very thing your railing against. So what does that make you?

What gives you the right to criticize the industry and those that support it when you support it so heavily yourself, and consume the very things you claim developers should not be making?