Will Holt ‘23
Opinions Editor
I don’t know about you, but I loved playing video games as a kid. I still do—albeit to a lesser extent. When I was in middle school and even high school, every month I would get a magazine (the publisher of which I cannot remember) in the mail and eagerly scour the pages to find additional scraps of information about games that I was playing or hoped to play in the future. Naturally, considering they were given space in what I assume was a media outlet of some significance, these games were high-profile, big-name titles known—and still known—as “AAA” games, aimed at providing entertaining (yet profitable) products to young people such as myself. Independent, or “indie,” games (as well as free-to-play ones) were of much lesser concern, and I would save up my dollar bills to purchase a high-quality gaming experience from one of the major studios. I am no longer fourteen, unfortunately, and the gaming industry is no longer what it was when I was that age. Today, there are more games to play than ever before, but the biggest and most sophisticated games now routinely fail to innovate, live up to expectations, or even release a playable product not inundated with technical bugs and glitches. Microtransaction systems, such as the one that was initially present in Star Wars Battlefront II, prey upon young players, while older players fail to see the level of improvement and creativity that was shown in new video games a decade ago, such as with the Call of Duty franchise. None of what I write should surprise the gamers amongst my audience, but I hope even those of you who are uninitiated are beginning to wonder why this has happened.
I believe that the downward trend seen in AAA games can largely be attributed to market trends and incentives in the gaming industry. From the 1990s until the early 2010s, video game development was a rapidly growing enterprise. Not only was computing technology expanding at a break-neck pace, but gaming as a hobby (and, for some, as a lifestyle) was growing even more popular and normalized. In short, developers could leverage new technology to grab a piece of this novel and rapidly-expanding market. There was no status quo, or the status quo was fluid, so ingenious teams could create and innovate with significantly less pressure than they could in a well-developed and well-saturated market. Over the past ten or fifteen years, however, the video game industry has matured, and the market has crystallized. Gaming is no longer being normalized; it isnormalized. The stakes for video game developers, therefore, are much higher today than they used to be. Not only are games more expensive to create, as developers begin to see rapidly diminishing marginal returns from improving existing franchises, genres, and technology, but the opportunity costs of releasing a failed game have skyrocketed. We need a new video gaming revolution to break out of this slump. Such a change, however, seems like a distant hope, rather than an accomplishable goal.
The video gaming industry is no less immune to the weakness of modern corporatism than is the movie industry, the car industry, or any other segment of the economy dedicated to providing a matured product or service. A plateauing market and diminishing marginal returns on investment in existing systems are not compatible with the economic standard of endless growth in profits and shareholder value. Because the risk of innovation is so high for giant developers like EA, Ubisoft, etc., and because the standard by which these corporations are judged prioritize short-term growth over long-term investment in technology, labor, and new ideas, the AAA gaming industry has, for years now, resorted to cutting corners and to unethical business practices to meet their quotas. Such compromises in integrity include releasing unfinished games to meet unrealistic deadlines, the proliferation of microtransaction systems which prey on younger and more addicted players (in addition to occasionally veering into the realm of gambling), and unimaginative world-building and gameplay. In short, the realities of the growth of the video game market, combined with perverse economic systems, have turned our legacy game studios and franchises into hollow versions of their former selves.
The gaming industry is not doomed to decay forever. As we speak, countless indie developers, alongside much of the rest of the tech industry, are fighting to fill the demand for high-quality, boundary-pushing games. Remember how Mojang shook the gaming world when they released Minecraft—and expect more of that in the future. The technology sector as a whole has continued to make good, albeit imperfect, progress, and there is little to limit what human creativity can devise. I say, don’t look at the spiraling of FIFA, Call of Duty, and Far Cry and despair. Rather, look at the gaming industry as a bird that needs to molt its feathers in order to become even more beautiful.
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wjh4ew@virginia.edu