I think the biggest issue is unfair manipulation of the thought process through false reviews, those lying and vague trailers etc which is all to common in the game industry.
Bought and false reviews are a problem, but I think the real solution to that is to just boycott the people putting out those reviews and for truly concerned gamers to get together and start making more honest and critical reviews themselves.
Or watch Zero Punctuation. He finds flaws in every game, so you can tell whether or not the flaws put you off it 
Except Portal!
Anyway... kinda late to this thread. So much I want to say. Where to begin...
I think there are some points that haven't been spotlighted enough.
The "voting with your wallet" thing isn't as simple as it's made out to be. If you're a gamer, you probably have gamer friends. If you have gamer friends, they probably pressure you to join them in the games that they play. If you refuse to ever compromise with them, you're probably kind of a dick. Chances are you're going to cave in and spend some time playing shitty games. I absolutely hate League of Legends. Seriously, that game pisses me off so much... but the majority of my gamer friends, including my own wife, play it every single night. I would consider myself a horrible friend/husband if I never joined in. Somebody mentioned much earlier in the thread that they're frustrated how most games seem imbalanced towards multiplayer focus anymore.
This is why! They're very aware of the effect of social pressures. After a while, my frustration builds up and I'm going to feel like raging about the gaming industry.
Btw... I think it's absolutely shitty and one of the most condescending things possible when people take a large chunk of time out of their day to venture into a social space that no one is forcing them to participate in just to tell other people they're stupid for complaining about something. It's essentially complaining about complaining (and I'm complaining about it). What the fuck is wrong with people simply expressing something that's on their mind and bothering them? Isn't that the whole point of communication? It's especially stupid when someone tells others they're wasting their time complaining about something... I can't think of a more hypocritical thing to say. If you think it's so trivial, then why are you bothering to go out of your way to disrupt it. Either you love wasting your time so much that you'll waste it on things that you don't even care about, or you actually do care about it and just refuse to directly tell people you don't like what they're saying. It's would be an entirely different thing if someone was standing on the sidewalk in front of your home screaming about the death of the gaming industry, but a forum thread?... please...
Now... it's kind of a complex issue. The business side of things isn't completely to blame. Neither are the consumers. It's a self-perpetuating and amplifying cycle between the two.
Business wants maximum profit. So they want the broadest appeal possible. It's greed and whatever nasty things you say about it will be true, but here's the other side. Social gamers want games with broad appeal too, because it's the most frictionless social environment. If every game were niche marketed, it would be really difficult to maintain a consistent group of friends that you play games with. You would rarely agree on consecutive games to compromise on. So the natural product of this social phenomenon is mediocre games. If you really like something and think it's amazing, it's because it appeals specifically to your interests. Unless your interests align directly with the majority of the population, this means very few things that you really like will ever be mainstream. This goes for just about everyone.
So I think a large part of the trends we're seeing today are a simple sociological effect. It operates in direct alliance with the corporate pursuit of profit, but I think it would also be a thing in the absence of that pursuit. People would want to play games together with their friends, which means they'd have to find that middle ground compromise, which means we'd still get a lot of games that most people don't really care for but are still willing to play. And then after spending some time with their friends, they'd go off and play their niche interest stuff, just like me and all my gaming friends do after a little LoL.
And let's not forget the pressure to be well-versed in your own culture. Games, movies, and music are culture. If you don't participate, you alienate yourself. Not sharing the same experiences as people around you effects your ability to relate to them. I don't play the majority of modern mainstream AAA titles or see a lot of movies, so I'm regularly left out of much of the socialization around me. A lot of the fun of Skyrim for me has been inclusion in all the meme humor and player talk. So social pressures aren't just for multiplayer games.
There is also the feedback system between marketing and culture. Publishers identify their cash cows (as determined by the above dynamics) and market those games most aggressively, because they depend the most on them to make profit. That marketing puts those games into the focus of cultural consciousness. Prolonged presence of these industry trends as a cultural focus results in normalization. Normalization gradually weakens resistance. The argument that younger gamers don't know any better is legitimate, because they're more likely to accept something that has been marketed to them as the norm for as long as they've known. I feel the industry deserves a little more blame for this one, but still not all of it. It is sort of a natural progression, but it is one driven by profit more than sociology.
So I think it's wrong to say that stuff is popular just because a lot of people like it. There are other forces at work. A person cannot simply choose to avoid the culture that is all around them. You can choose not to play a game, but you can't choose to have friends, family, classmates, co-workers, etc who don't. Many will participate simply to be involved. This stuff even has an official economics term:
The Network Effect, and it's very strong. Once an economic force has the network effect on its side, it's incredibly difficult to break its dominance, even when alternatives step forward that are obviously superior. It requires that everybody abandon that thing all at once. We saw this fairly recently with Google+ challenging Facebook. Most of my friends preferred it, made accounts, and used it primarily for a decent period of time. But they still checked Facebook regularly to keep up with people who hadn't switched. Over time people got worn out on monitoring two social networks. Now only a couple of my friends still use G+ at all. I saw the exact same thing with League of Legends. I have at two different points got the majority of my social circle to switch over to different games as the primary group activity, but everybody still knew people who played LoL and went back now and then to play with them once in a while. Over time, the network effect reeled everyone back in. Not because everybody prefers the game. Far fucking from it. It simply is The Commons, and it's very difficult to change that.
There is a lot of stuff that I do think operates on bad faith and is worth complaining about, and this stuff does come down to intellectual property and excessive profit maximization issues.
The console thing is horrible. Why do consoles exist at this point? I can tell you why they did at one time. Most people didn't have a home computer, weren't familiar enough with them to bother, consoles were cheaper, and internet wasn't a major draw. Now every one of those circumstances has completely flipped. Why do they exist now? They're not even notably different from PCs anymore! The last two console generations have not been able to claim any strengths in comparison to PCs, only limitations. They don't even have different games. I think the only reason they exist is for the sake of a platform that can be controlled exclusively by the major publishers. Nintendo's consoles are the only exception. They at least try to offer a unique experience.
Now everything is skewed towards console support and the entire industry is suffering for it, when consoles should have evolved or died by now. Majority of titles from major publishers are designed for consoles first and badly ported to PC. The design principles guiding console development are bleeding out beyond their acceptable range. It is greatly stifling progression of the art form. They're doing this because publishers want people using consoles. They want you where they have the most control over you.
And it is about control. There's no doubt in my mind about that. Publishers are one of the most vicious lobbies in the world right now, and they routinely ruin people's lives in their quest for control over what content everyone is allowed to consume. It's the same with piracy. They're not shutting down file sharing services because they think it's losing them profits. It's quite plain that all their arguments on that basis are supported by bold-faced lies. They have all the numbers that show all their claims on the issue to be completely false, but they never acknowledge the existence of those numbers when on the issue of piracy.
The reason they're so aggressive on piracy is to shut down competition. The same channels used to distribute pirated content are used to distribute amateur/indie content. This is not the case as much for games anymore, but that's only changed relatively recently. It's still very much the case for other media. Publishers are deathly afraid of going obsolete. They've lost their monopoly on quality content creation tools, and they can't stop people from using the internet to do their own marketing. The thing they can attack is what mass distribution channels they don't control. That's how they're maintaining their relevance. I believe piracy is a legitimate means of protest against that behavior. Publishers have shut down progress by getting it labelled as piracy, and so piracy has simply become the act of carrying on with progress anyway.
That's not to say that I don't think artists/developers should be rewarded for their work, but that's getting into the whole matter of our economic structure being horribly out of date. This whole conversation can be summed up as "Economic pressures are enforcing stagnation, when they're supposed to encourage innovation." It is very important that we do avoid giving out money were it's undeserved, and support people doing honest work.
I'd also like to say that the research argument isn't completely sound. Most games don't have decent demos these days. Many don't have demos at all, and there have been many game demos noted as being completely unrepresentative of the final product. You can't rely completely on word of mouth, either. Fallout 3 is an example there. I waited quite a while before buying it. Everyone I knew liked it. I'm still the only person I know who didn't like it. I watched gameplay videos and everything. It looked amazing. I bought it and tried really, really hard to like it. I did like it at first. But it was after 10-15 hours that the blandness of the environment began to sink in... and the clumsiness of the fps controls... and the horrible imbalance of the VATS system... and I finally had to admit to myself that I was really fucking bored with it. Things that I could only learn about the game through experiencing it myself. I felt robbed. Then Skyrim came out and received much the same hype. After being burned by Oblivion (not as much) and Fallout 3, I decided to pirate Skyrim to see if it would be worth it this time. I actually liked it, and ended up buying it a few months later. If I hadn't pirated it first, I simply wouldn't have bought it.
Then there's the fact that games have lifespans. Buying into a multiplayer game that's two years old is a completely different experience from buying into it on day 1. Being in a game with a bunch of other people who are all experiencing it for the very first time is a huge thrill, and it really sucks to pass on that because you're afraid all the hype leading up to that launch day might be based on deception.
Psychologically abusive game design is another legitimate gripe. MMOs have hit on a formula that is chemically addicting. Not only that, but they have a very strong network effect. I watched my brother ruin a good relationship because of a deep WoW addiction. At least with gambling, people have a pretty good idea of what they're getting into. MMOs seem like just a harmless social game experience... until 5000 hours later when you look back and realize what just happened to your life. And you weren't even having fun most of the time. Just doing mindless repetitive activities as if they were your job. This is another subject where it's not just a matter of people voting with their dollars, or else there wouldn't be fucking rehabilitation clinics dedicated to recovering from the things.
MMOs are a subject that really pisses me off, actually. Grind mechanics are fucking horrible. Not just because of the addiction, but because they basically turn into a required time investment before you can even play the game. The real game in an MMO is always at the max level. That's where the social action is. You can't play the game as it's meant to be played until you put in however many hundred hours to get there. It's incredibly stupid.
The thing that bothers me about it the most is MMOs were the promised land. I was so incredibly enamoured back in the days of Ultima Online (which I couldn't run on my hardware or afford a subscription) with the idea of playing a game with thousands of other people, where the world would be driven by the interactions of the players. Where content would organically generate itself and the game world would be like a real living thing. Then came Everquest and then WoW, and to some extent Diablo II. Publishers recognized the addictive qualities of that game design approach and the massive profits to be had by abusing consumers. So the promised land fell from all our hopes and dreams.
Ugh... I'm going to stop myself here. This is already the biggest wall of text I've written in a long time.
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Topic: Rampant Monetization in the Gaming Industry (Read 71234 times)