The State of The Gaming Industry and why it pisses me off.

Iv'e been holding off on posting this one as like i say in every review or opinion piece I do, gaming is subjective, your experiences are different from mine and vice versa, but it wasn't until i saw the fucking piece of shit investors in EA announce what they're going to do if EA removes Micro transactions from games in the future, now i'm not naive enough to believe that this won't happen but it speaks to a larger problem in both the developer/producer world and the gamers themselves, so this is going to be a massive rant that I need to get off my chest i expect to piss a few people off, but i feel like this needs to be said.

Corporations are the worst thing to happen to the gaming industry.

I want to say from the outset, i'm a very pro capitalist, pro business conservative, i studied economics and understand the basic and finer points of the industry of currency and supply and demand, i don't fault the market for doing this but rather the gamers and developers for this, it's been an incredibly slippery slope into the market we have now, and both parties are to blame, some more than others.

I'm not old enough to be one of those nostalgic obsessed "in my day" types, but it's really getting to that point, before gaming went mainstream, developers had one person to answer to, us the gamers, this rapidly changed when gaming got more attention, when company stocks became a valuable thing to hold, and developers stop "catering" to the people they're selling their fucking product to, rather they pander to the stock holders for fear of having their own company ripped out from under them.

And even this I don't blame, these studios go into these deals with their eyes wide open, but the problem is maybe one company i know of actually needed to capitulate to a massive studio and that nearly torpedoed their company(Hey Blizzard) and still does to this day, looking at their stocks, blizzard gets bled by Activision daily in terms of income and the worst part is, Blizzard actually accepted that at the cost of their integrity.

When it was "Actiblizzion" the next expansion saw the cash shop come in, a decrease of content and arguably the worst expansion series til Legion, of course I can't prove this empirically, all i know is that as soon as Blizzard partnered with a company known for copy pasting their games, we got the worst expansions possible to the point the game was on the verge of death, also the cash shop got filled up with useless cosmetic items and instant end level characters for $66 a pop that has Activisions prints all over it.

But this is the new way of gaming studios, they understandably hire the best managers and accountants they can to manage their sales to make as much money as possible, the only problem is instead of listening to the people who actually fucking pay them for their product they listen to the person THEY pay who is only interested in how much cash they can bleed out of gamers for as long as possible, whats up Skyrim.

However not all the blame rests on their shoulders, it also rests on the gamers who buy into every marketing ploy they come up with, buy every DLC, every map pack, every weapon skin and new characters and who pay to get ahead, these are the people who opened up the market for these kind of leeches to sweep in an attach themselves to all of us regardless of if we asked for it or not and every time you try to smack it off you get abused by these companies, saying their fans "just don't understand" what goes into making these games or getting them out there, like we're too dumb to understand a culture some of us have been in for 30 years.

But the most recent thing that pissed me off enough to write this article was EA with their recent stupidity in Lootfront 2, their Reddit AMA was a fucking joke trying to save face and even that was phoned in and most of the proper questions were ignored, they actually had the audacity to tell players it didn't take "that long" to earn them in game, even though some people put out numbers in the 1000's of hours to acquire everything, but the final straw was their investors today.

It's important to know, most of these investors are not gamers, they don't understand the culture and they don't have a history in it, they're there to make as much money as possible, and today they said they would have to "seriously reconsider" their stock options if EA continued to "yield to public outrage".

Are you fucking kidding me, public outrage? who do they think is buying these games exactly? it just goes to show the massive disconnect there is between the investors, developers and gamers in this cycle, now the reason Battlefront 2 got blown up was because these things were discovered a few days before the official release, so word of mouth could spread and eventually everyone in the gaming world knew about and knew to stay away from the game if you didn't want to be gouged.

But it brought up another question, how many studios are going to look at battlefront's incineration, remove their micro transactions and cash shops for launch, then add them in a few weeks down the track, this is the problem i'm talking about is that studios are looking for ways to gouge their consumers at the behest of increased profits, sadly DLC and loot boxes became a part of gaming life like this so quickly that people couldn't really react to it and head it off, and companies know this, even though people hate it, they can still find some way to get around the outrage and blame the player for it.

CS:GO is a prime candidate for this, i'm not saying that they actively gouged the players or even had malice with their loot boxes but it gave ideas to other companies to use these skin crates to generate even more money than the actual game made, by adding skins and cosmetics behind a paywall you're effectively cutting your player base into quarters as there will always bet that rich player who wants these things, and i have no problem if they're obtainable in game but for the vast vast majority this isn't the case.

And as we're seeing with new games coming out they're actively making players buy this by throwing it in their face as much as they possibly can, CoD's Loot box lobby, EA's nonstop "patches" of paid content that appear every time you log into a game and Activisions whole "lets pair players with people who bought all their weapons to make them buy it as well", again i'm not blaming supply and demand, but companies like EA and Activision are creating artifical demands and producing supply at the same time, it's like a guy that goes around shooting people in the foot then offering them first aid at a price.

Which actually leads me into my next topic.

Indie companies are exactly the same, and gaming journalists have the integrity of a drug addict.

This is where i may piss a few people off, but the vast majority of Indie games don't deserve to be on the market, yet they're treated like an endangered species, the same thing has happened with literally every "Indie" industry since the dawn of man, they respond to a market trend, build on it, then create an industry that is anything but independent and go on a crusade against people who call them out on this.

This was made readily apparent when "indie gaming" caused one of the worst things to ever happen in the gaming industry in GamerGate when the corruption between Indie developers and Gaming journalists was uncovered which sparked basically a internet civil war that painted all gamers are [Insert buzzwords here] and led to SJW's infecting games with their political ideals and changing the way gamers were perceived for a long time.

Thankfully GamerGate died out, but this ties into what i was saying above, was it because of fan outrage? no, was it because the people involved were innocent? no again, was it when they realized they were actually in the wrong and had no grounds for insulting gamers, no and no, they only put it to sleep when, you guessed it, they were threatened with the loss of money.

You see indie companies are a tale of two cities, on one hand you have the nepotistic self important "developers" who would rather make a name for themselves than actually make a decent game, then you have the selfless "stay in the shadows" type of indie developer who doesn't get recognized because he's not screeching on twitter and this is exactly what happened with gamergate and zoe quinn.

After the sponsors realized just how much it was hurting their business and their ad revenue they essentially told sites like kotaku and ign to either shut the fuck up about it or admit they were wrong, and a few days after those memos went out, suddenly the "biggest story in gaming" just vanished forever to the point that those companies involved don't even acknowledge that it happened, but like most money hungry fiends the damage they caused wasn't retracted or corrected they simply went on as business as usual.

But this is the kicker and this is why i trust indie developers about as far as i can throw them, the game that started all this was fucking horrendous, it didn't even deserve to be on steam or be review constantly by supposed leaders in the gaming journalist world, it was literally a text simulator that a woman had slept her way into popularity and instead of having a god damn backbone these games journalists blamed everyone else but themselves and it fucking worked, it actually worked and that's what pisses me off.

I'm a gamer, the vast majority of my day is playing video games or reviewing them, the only thing i give a shit about in the gaming world is what's coming out, what's interesting and what i can play with friends, I like most of you, don't need to be told what's hot in the industry, we already know, we do our own research and talk to each other about these things , imagine if one day instead of a review about the game i ran the title "The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt game review" and proceeded to tell you all why your choices, life choices and personal beliefs suck, it'd go about as far as a fart in an elevator.

But luckily for gaming journalists and Indie developers they don't have to worry about this, the devs get paid through a closed echo chamber of "indie gamers" and the journalists get paid by ads and the companies that employ them, i get paid by you guys and you decide what my content is worth, so insulting you guys(even though i wouldn't anyway) is not exactly constructive to what i want to achieve on steemit or in the gaming world as a whole, but most indie devs don't have this problem as they're usually friends of people in power as is shown in the massive corruption exposed during gamer gate.

Where exactly is the line?

This is question I keep asking myself, where exactly is the line that these people draw for themselves that they won't cross because it doesn't seem to exist for them, they've have gouged, lied and abused gamers and consumers for no other reason than that we dare to question the choices they make or the company that they keep, for years now gaming quality has been on a slow decline where every market trend is flooded as soon as the sharks get a whif of blood in the water and ultimately destroy the thing that makes it great.

This is a large issue in the gaming world, one that keeps getting kicked down the road the only problem is the road is starting to crack and become dirt under our feet and the longer it goes on the harder it is to root it out, DLC, Micro transactions, loot boxes etc are just the first salvo in this and we're only just now starting to see how far companies will go to squeeze you of your money even if it means lying to you and basically extorting you out of the money you've already paid.

Thankfully a lot of people stood up to EA and this has killed their cash grab for the time being but as we've seen in the past this will come back in a more insidious and potent way once developers figure out how to get around it, it's like DRM, it only ever affects the people who actually pay money for it, pirates crack games in under 2 hours after release yet the players who pay honest money for it are left with broken games on launch because companies want to protect their bottom line.

Again, I understand that, but all research points towards pirating games actually increasing sales, i myself never pirated a game until 2012 when i started to realize just how much the quality of the content was slipping while the price was rising, and while there are a lot of games i pirated and never bought, it allowed me to actually test a game in it's full release and make my mind up before that if i want to purchase a game, but even that is sad, we used to trust developers and studios that the released game was going to be great, now we just don't know what bullshit they're going to pull.

My most recent let down was Dawn of War 3 which i bought on release at full price because they had an amazing track record of games only to find that it was so dumbed down that even the most hardcore Warhammer fans hated it and we realized they'd turned an amazing RTS franchise into another Moba in already bloated market, but the thing that really gets to me is, is that i didn't do what logic dictated I should do, for the time in years i trusted a recognized, solid company with my money straight out of the gate and was left with a joke.

And i'm afraid that this is the way in which the industry is inevitably going to go, where gamers are just gouged at every single faucet, lied to about what they can expect and ultimately abused when their expectations aren't met remember the "privileged gamer" fiasco? but the maddening thing about that was that people actually bought it, they actually believe they have no right to complain about a product they received that was substandard, i mean Jesus Christ.

The only thing i can hope for is that the companies out there that resist all of the above are handsomely rewarded by gamers and they usually are, but they're a dying breed in a market that used to see it's consumers are extended family, who made games for the players that is now switching to corporate's in suits pushing for developers to get as much money as possible out of walking ATM's.

Thanks for reading my article, if you enjoyed it feel free to up-vote, follow or resteem, do you think i'm on the money or wrong? or just have something to add, please leave me a comment below, thanks!