Anthem – BioWare’s folly (Picture: EA)
A reader is frustrated that toxic gamers and impossible expectations, along with pointless microtransactions, are ruining the video games industry.
My name’s Ryan. I’ve been gaming for about 30 years now and it has been, and will continue to be, my outlet in life. Some of the best memories I’ve had are of me and my brother gaming together. We started with Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt and it stirred something within us. And from there, well… the game world was our oyster. We moved on to bigger and better things after a while, like Mario Kart, Battletoads, and Double Dragon. I remember when GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark changed the game forever and when us and two friends would spend entire nights playing Mario Party with one controller.
We would take turns night after night playing Final Fantasy 6 to 9, because we could only ever afford one system and so only had one controller, two if we were lucky. It was itching to get my next turn and saying to myself, ‘Those games are better than any movies or books could ever be.’ We remember Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast being the first console MMO, even if it didn’t really operate like a traditional MMO does, but we loved it anyway. Then Halo: Combat Evolved kickstarted the LAN party scene and The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind absolutely consumed our lives for weeks on end.
My brother and I built our first PCs together with pride, from the ground up with no training or advice, and started snapping headshots on Counter-Strike Source. We would be stunned when the graphics on every new generation would blow our mind and we would wonder and ask ourselves, ‘How far can they go? How good will it get? I bet it’ll look like real-life eventually!’
I remember when I drove 40 miles just to see the Xbox 360 that was about to come out in its display case at Walmart, where you could play the demo of King Kong (It blew me away). We would spend hours after work, sawing hundreds of locust in half or grinding to that next level in whichever MMO was hot at the time.
I’ve seen industry giants rise and fall, I’ve seen promises made and broken by every single game company, publisher, and developer out there. At one point or another, they’ve all dropped the ball. And in this industry it will happen more than others. Game development and investment is a high risk operation.
Growing up, we as gamers have been patient. We’ve been lied to, screwed over, let down and pushed around. We’ve helped some companies or dev teams become a household name (If you’re a gamer even remotely aware of current events, anyway) practically overnight. We’ve made some of them billions of dollars. We know the risk involved in becoming hyped up because of the buzz of whatever the next big thing is. It can be crushing, having your hopes so high just to be let down so hard.
30 years… it’s happened a lot. But you know, after enough times, I started thinking about how these things happen. I got involved in learning about dev teams, how they work and what they do. I learned about publishers and their sinister motives. I started seeing patterns and it smacked me in the face as hard and running into a brick wall. This is our fault. We did this. We fed them our hopes, our excitement, and our ideas. And for that, we’ve created a monster.
Publishers thought to themselves: ‘Is there a way we can make money after they’ve bought our game?’ And at first it was great. We got things like Diablo 2’s expansion packs That added almost as content as the original game. We got things like The Elder Scrolls add-ons that added countless hours of fun for like 20 bucks. We practically opened our wallets and handed it them, saying ‘I’ll buy whatever you guys make.’ And so, logically the next thing for them to do is take the money and run, right? Especially the publishers. God knows, they love their money.
I digress, it was great for a time. But then they got greedy. They started adding things extremely non-relevant to the games. Non-functional would be a better way to put it, I suppose. Things like simple animations and cosmetic items. Things that have no business being sold for real world money. I thought it was the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in the business. To my surprise people fell for it. And they’ve crushed our industry as a result.
Horse armour – the start of it all (Picture: Bethesda)
It’s not just that of course, but I feel as though that was the seed that’s grown into a tree of bitter resentment. They stopped making expansion packs, started making small content at higher prices. They began charging people multiple times for the same thing, calling them Season Passes. They pushed out loads of meaningless content, charging exorbitant amounts for basically nothing, and I thought, ‘This is it, we’ll finally say no.’ But to my dismay… this didn’t happen. Not only did people across the planet fall for it, they threw their money at them. They couldn’t get enough.
Well, fast forward to today. Publishers are doing the same things they did 20 years ago in some cases. Hype is normal, it comes with the territory, but to blame the dev team because something didn’t live up to what you thought it should be? What even is that? People writing posts and blogs and news articles about how any particular game or company better hold up their end of the deal or else? Suing them when it didn’t make as big a splash as they thought/wanted it to? How do people not get it? This is part of the industry. it’s literally part of the game.
I think it’s the next generation, honestly. They really think they can blame someone else for their actions. They point blame and fault anywhere but themselves. So, it wasn’t what you thought, so what? It sucks, yes. But by doing the things we’ve been doing, they’re actually changing the way dev teams operate. Would you want to make something beautiful for people like that?
You see… the entire point of this, we’ve become worse than the ones we’re pointing the finger at, but our hands are plenty dirty. Just go read the comments on Redfall or any Games with Gold game in the last two years. I mean it guys, go read them. Posting toxic comments and ratings because a game came out one hour late or because the settings don’t have one option that they think they should. Blaming Game Pass for their life sucking, basically. It’s pathetic. It’s sickening.
We used to respect the developers. Do any of those people have any clue as to how much work goes into a big game? It’s like the longest grind of your life in any game times a thousand. Times 10 thousand. The team at BioWare said they worked 90 hours a week for 15 months and that morale was very low, half because of the publisher/developer disagreements and the other half was, you guessed it, because of gamers and their toxic spewing nonsense. And what did we get? A game that could’ve been Game of the Year no problem. Could’ve been a GOAT in my book, with just a few tweaks. But we didn’t get that.
We’ve become a sickening, toxic pool of poison. Never satisfied, spreading malice, distrust, hate, and misinformation everywhere we go. When I say we I mean them… those people with zero understanding or hope. With no faith or trust, most of all, zero respect or understanding for the teams that bust their ass day after day to bring them whatever it is they’re currently crying about. And believe me, they can never be satisfied. If you look at a toxic comment and follow it to said poster’s profile, then look at all of their comments they’ve left on other games, you’ll certainly see a pattern. Always negative, always find the worst in everything no matter how good it might be.
People are never happy (Picture: Microsoft)
This generation of influencers is sick. People will now bash on anything when someone else tells them it’s not good. They’ll probably jump off a cliff if they tell them to. All the while, dev teams are sitting back like, ‘Is this actually for real?’ Yes, we pay for certain things, and we expect certain things in return, but this has gotten out of control. For real, would you want to make… well, anything, for a person like that?
I’m pretty certain BioWare wasn’t/isn’t the only team that has been disheartened to a point that something potentially wonderful was pre-emptively destroyed by this crowd, this deafening roar of spoiled brats that were clearly never set right as a child. Like that girl on a YouTube video I saw 10 years ago, got like a Porsche for her sweet 16 and bawled her eyes out and threw a tantrum because it was blue and not pink. People need to get right. Because this has and will continue to harm the industry. And with the pattern I’ve seen emerge in the last eight years or so, I fear where they may lead it.
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They’re destroying something I love. And we need to fix this, because they’re changing the status quo and that will change the quality of the things we want them to make for us. In what world do actions like those get the results one wants? We’re asking them for something. But if we demand it? We demand that it be… perfect?
30 years. My bro and I, we saw it all happen. And with all the bumps along the way, it was an excellent ride. But we see the road ahead and we want nothing more than to change course. The path we’re heading down… it ends with industry wide standards being changed.
It ends with no one wanting to take a risk (publisher investment). It ends with teams saying forget it, not worth the trouble. Not everyone can be satisfied, of course, but in this world, no one is satisfied anymore. And until we can get that respect back, that understanding, that patience and integrity, it’s going to be a dark ride forward, and we can’t see it, but there’s a cliff right in front of us.
By reader A Gamer and his Bro
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A reader is frustrated that toxic gamers and impossible expectations, along with pointless microtransactions, are ruining the video games industry.
