The future of gaming……..

I have recently heard so many people speak about the future of gaming and whether gaming as a hobby is dead. What with the console wars, Xbox moving away (apparently) from consoles, AI becoming many game companies main focus to cut costs, the increase in cost for games compared to game sales, the quality of old favorites and the lack of interest in them by the buying public, DEI in gaming being a divisive entity, corporations altering the focus away from games as a pastime and aiming towards the bottom line and eternal growth and so on. The lists are endless and usually the people speaking really have no clue or are seeing this from their certain viewpoint. Gaming is not dead by any means. It is in flux and changing and I will argue that if we want it to continue and we want to have the focus remain on good games then we need to as gamers focus on playing good games and ignore all this crud that the media (who needs views and clicks), podcasters (often people who have no real information but instead extrapolate) and fanbois say. There are very few people I feel have their finger on the pulse of the gaming industry. 

Matt Piscatella has been pointing this out as has his fellow analyst Matthew Ball when he released his detailed document aimed at investors that lays out what is happening in the gaming industry and where it will be heading next. I have already stated that they and their data are often taken out of context or have their information cherrypicked in order to fit a narrative that the person reporting wants to highlight. The crux of the matter is that all these things that are always being raised are an issue. The gaming industry has bloated and yet become really small at the same time. It has more players than ever but many of those increased number of gamers play a small selection of games. With so many free to play, games as a service style games there is little incentive for these gamers to pay for a game (Concord, Highguard and so on). People are tired of the same old tropes in gaming (Ubisoft’s climb a structure and highlight points of interest as an example) and there is a feeling of people wanting games that don’t have an agenda and are just games. People want interesting games that push the envelope and do something new but also complain when the game isn’t as it always is or even worse say the game is interesting but don’t buy it (the new game by Double Fine as an example.) There is a huge amount of negativity in gaming and I feel that gamers are quick to add to the noise and jump on the bandwagon often without having any firsthand knowledge of the game (Highguard for example). AI and the RAM-pocolips that is currently going on is going to change the landscape of gaming as we know it and I don’t think there is anything that the developers or publishers can do about it. Mobile has skyrocketed in the last few years and the money made there dwarfs consoles and PC combined. 

There are essentially 10 games that dominate player time and realistically only 3-4 of these games are then main winners when it comes to sucking people in and dominating their time. Roblox and Fortnite essentially are the thing that gamers play when they get home. I see so much scuttlebut around this but the figures do not lie. The most important slide for me in the Matthew Ball PDF document ‘State of the video game industry’ is the slide that states the breakdown of how people spend their time gaming. The fact that free to play games hold 45% of PlayStation and Xbox playtime and 55% on PC. Only 3-7% of playtime goes to new non-annual releases and there are 5 games that take half of that time. 46% of users buy less than one game a year and only 86% buy between none and 4 games. 33-55% of playtime on consoles are games that are between 9&27yrs old on consoles, whereas that is between 28-48% on PC and the median Steam user only plays 4 games on average a year from their entire catalog. Basically people are not buying many new games and are playing the same games, for most of their time and those games tend to be free to play titles and titles older than 9yrs. Essentially not what you would want to hear if you were a game dev or a CEO. 

Bluepoint is a great example of where the C-level execs heads are at. After the incredible Demon Souls remake (I assume as I never played it because it is on PlayStation only) the team was let go. They were on a God of War multiplayer game that was cancelled. They apparently pitched the idea of a Bloodborne remake, a logical shoe in for them as the Demon Souls was a success and they had the tools and had proved they could remaster a souls game but the answer was no whether it was PlayStation or FromSoftware is unclear. There is also the fact that PlayStation, their owner, has just announced the remakes of the God of War series and they were working on a God of War property already and made remakes. 

This is why Phil Spencer leaving Microsoft is a big deal. Looking over this document makes me see where they had been heading. Xbox had been making inroads into China for years (Chinese developers publishing on Xbox, support for Chinese developers and publishing their games for westerner benefit and so on) and now China is showing the biggest growth and this is mostly due to internal studios. Xbox has seen the shift by young people onto their phones and the hope was to harness the studio. I am also wary of people who state that this and that was not successful as we have no idea what the internal prerequisites are for success for the brand, the publisher, the game and the studio as a whole. He was also in my opinion a translator between gamers and gaming execs. He spoke both of our languages and seemed to walk that line. 

PlayStation is said to be moving back towards exclusives and away from PC or so the rumor goes. Again I take this with a pinch of salt. If this is so then it goes against what they told investors at the end of last year and what other companies (such as SquareEnix, CapCom  and Xbox) are doing. All the executives of all these companies have made it clear, they need to diversify their portfolio and that may include multiplatitude. Whichever way this goes, only buy their games if you want them.

Gamers need to move away from gaming companies, if Xbox wants to move away from consoles then let them. Who cares? If PlayStation wants to limit sales of their games to one device then let them. They have stated that putting their games on PC was ‘like printing money before so even if this seems to be a questionable decision let it be. We as the market should be dictating what we want, where we want it and what we want the companies to do in order to have our limited disposable income especially in this climate where they are all fighting for our money, not the other way around. Companies have managed to make us think that they dictate the market.

Steam Next Fest has solidified my belief that there are more games than we can possibly play and publishers and developers need to appease us. If the Next God of War game is a PlayStation exclusive then that’s ok. I will not play it as I have over 1000 games on my PC at present.

Crimson Dessert is about to release, that is a 40-1000hr game dependant on how you play it. I still have 40 odd games on my ‘Games to Play’ Steam list and 160 games on my ‘Games I Own and want to Play’ spreadsheet that collates all my games across my various storefronts on the PC. These have a total of 3800hrs of playtime (or 2.6yrs playing 4hrs a day) based on the average playtime according to How Long to Beat. I, and many people who would read information like this, are not the norm. We are the ones that are likely to buy more than the average gamer, are likely to play less of the ‘free to play’ and ‘games as a service’ games and are more likely to be more aware of AI and the not-so-lite touches of corporate entities. 

The long and short of it all is that there are too many new games (2400 on PlayStation last year and 20 000 on Steam up from less than 600 and 8000 respectively in 2019) and not enough people to play them. People are buying less and either playing games they already have or playing free to play, games as a service games. Newer games have an uphill battle just to be seen and they have to battle public perception and the internet being the internet. Publishers and owners are expecting a bigger and bigger return on their investment that ever before and a constant increase in growth across the board. AI is having an impact on how games are developed and is a driving force behind layoffs and the creation of smaller game studios. There is a lot for gamers to be worried about and reason for them to doubt that the industry will get any better. 

Enter Steam Next Fest. The sheer number of games and more importantly good quality games being made by smaller teams using small budgets and game engines that enable them to do things that in the past would have required a whole team of experienced developers. This also means that they can charge less. They have less oversight from corporate pennypinchers and oversight committees. Have less of a need to reach a large user base to ensure good returns. Have more creative control and freedom to create the game they want to and that will be loved by a smaller but more committed user base. 

If anyone thinks the gaming industry is dead they are not paying attention. We need to ensure that we as gamers don’t get involved in what the bigger entities are up to. We need to not buy or play a game that doesn’t sit well with us for whatever reason we choose. We need to support developers we believe in and who create games we want to play. I am going to head back to Mewgenics and looking forward to the imminent release of Crimson Dessert (please be good….) and the other myriad of games that we probably don’t even know about yet.