What's the biggest elephant in the room that the gaming industry is avoiding right now?

What's the biggest elephant in the room that the gaming industry is avoiding right now?

I feel like quality in general is dropping to almost unacceptable levels because devs can just "patch things out" later on

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Big corpo shilling for NFT because microtransaction earn less

Yea, i'm gonna second the appalling lack of quality.
Games somehow manage to look worse than 10 years ago, the love for little details is gone. Netcode has also gone to shit i feel.
Games release with about half the content, the rest is DLC/preorder shit.
Publishers fire up the hype-train as soon as the game is announced and keep raising expectations, which then gradually get crushed by leaks that are nowhere near the quality of the handcrafted media-slice shown at the big events. Then the games get rushed out the door to meet the Christmas Sale deadline even when it should be in development for another whole year.
And normies still suck up the dirt shoved in their faces and get excited for more.

Its dead

whats gonna happen to gaming then?

>games somehow manage to look worse than 10 years ago, the love for little details is gone. Netcode has also gone to shit i feel.
This is the most baffling thing.

These, the industry needs a crash. Shit is being shoveled at breakneck pace. Most games are unoriginal, uninspired and technologically inferior to releases 10 years ago. The lack of urgency and innovation has led us here.

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It lives on as a soulless husk, surviving on the cancer practices you see now
or it crashes

People dont realize that Graphics ultimately peaked in 2015, Consumer products are just super slow are keeping up with it while making it affordable, so a "Dumbing" effect is occurring.

Graphics will stay in a similar quality as to right now or more stylized games will appear in order to keep tricking costumers into thinking "Games are looking even more real!".

In theory you could have the level of quality of CG of the best looking Hollywood movie for any game, but the issue is that the tech to run it would cost around $500k and the size of the console would be around the size of a school locker.

Unironically this, the last time the industry had a jump in "innovation" was the Wii, but Nintendo fucked that up and cheeped out with "dummy motion control".

A "Brain Drain" of sorts, before you had quality programmers and people who werent all idea guys, now it's fresh out of college mediocre programmers who all want to play director.

>games releasing in broken, buggy states
>netcode getting worse
>online matchmaking is no longer about matching lowest ping with each other, it's all about maximizing engagement (eg; call of duty: put player in a server of shitters to make him feel good and keep playing for 5 matches, then put him back to his "real level" to get beat down, repeat)
>rehashing the same shit over and over (ubisoft, ea sports, activision/cod are the main culprits)

i don't think graphics are getting worse as a whole, it's more that devs/publishers no longer need to actually try because everything still sells just as well. i think it's more of a third party thing
pokemon is a perfect example. looks like shit, runs like shit, still sells millions. yes the switch hardware is awful, but botw and astral chain manage fine
le "snoy snoy snoy movie game reeeee" aside, playstation exclusives almost always look better and perform better with every generation
i haven't played many xbox exclusives, but forza looks and plays just as well too

I'm glad i stopped caring, and i regret stressing out over this shit for years.

Games don't take any risk. All new games very much look alike.

>What's the biggest elephant in the room that the gaming industry is avoiding right now?
That marketing has seeped so hard into the consumers that low quality products are the norm and not the exception. The inflation of the cost of production while the price of games remaining the same also doesn't help.

We've gotten to the point where stuff like Fallout 76 is the industry's expected experience of a AAA game at launch, that is an unfinished bug-ridden mess that zeroes-in on aggressive micro transactions and multiple times the base price in DLC. And any modern gamer that started playing video games ~5-10 years ago believes this is the rule.

That's not to say i enjoy modern games, but rather i stopped using games as an outlet for escapism. You need to face reality at some point, you don't get any younger

>i don't think graphics are getting worse as a whole, it's more that devs/publishers no longer need to actually try because everything still sells just as well. i think it's more of a third party thing
Also diminishing returns for graphic improvements

>but rather i stopped using games as an outlet for escapism
This is true for me. I kind of started being more critical towards fiction in general. I like to see a good movie with friends sometimes, but on my own I'd rather listen to some music or play multiplayer. A form of escapism too, maybe, but it's harder to disappear into a plot-driven game. Those 2 weeks when I played and replayed Hotline Miami 2 were fun though. Still got Dead Space 3 and Wolf Among Us unplayed, maybe I'll get on that sometime. Or finally read a book again.

Microtransactions in decline, big triple A investments not worth it even for half-assed multiplayer projects

Big companies are trying to move in two different lines of bussiness:
1.NFT and play to earn
2.game as a service focused subscription services

None of the two quite taking off as of yet. Still really soon to judge NFTs. Both anti-consumer anyway since the overall quality is going down quickly already and the subscription prices will only go up over time. Also, subscription services are quickly declining in the tv and movie industry.

NFTs are just a desperate attempt to monetize thin air. Focus is on markting and convincing people that NFTs are a desirable product they need, described as "selling the poor kids the worst air jordans available for the highest possible price"

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My biggest gripe right now is that despite game budgets skyrocketing and development time being 5+ years per game (up to 10 for some companies), the actual quality of the gameplay, the amount of things to actually do in games, all has been stuck in the same place it was 15 years ago. Modern AAA games are spending more money and their games have less features, not more. So much so that the games that get the most praise literally have the same exact gameplay and amount of content as games 20 years ago did, the only difference is the resolution of the plants and the NPCs faces sometimes.

So games cost more to make, they cost more to buy, they have to be monetized post-purchase, and despite all of this we're STILL getting less game for the dollar than we were, because companies have to cut corners during development or just literally can't comprehend doing "more".

>that pic
What phenotype is that?

man-made horrors beyond your comprehension

The fact that Nintendo can be so stuck in the past in terms of development ability/ideas/creativity etc and yet their games still are the best, sell the best, and are discussed the most. Seriously, it's like they make their games in a time warp but that's ok

Investors. The same problem with most industries

It's not enough to do as well as last year. It's not even enough to do better than last year. You have to "above market growth average" better than last year or you're "failing the investors" because you only made them a little money rather than a lot.

Profit-focused investors are a cancer and any company that goes public will inevitably become a husk of its former self.

That you don’t need a fuckhuge Dev team and over half of them being modellers/artists, or a disgustingly huge budget. If you do get a huge budget, why not hire some of the best programmers? I know that’s the main reason so many games are shitty now is basically they don’t have people actually making the games now but Watch Dogs Legion was coded on Scratch for fuck sake

We are going to go through an awful 3-5 years phase of god awful low effort content for subscription services and aggressive monetization. They will then dial back production costs massively and develop decent smaller games again after a few big companies crash and burn