Video games are dying and it’s so depressing to see – Reader’s Feature Achi-News

A reader worries that the games industry is rapidly changing to something he doesn’t recognize and no longer looks forward to.

I knew last week’s State of Play was going to be bad, so I can’t pretend to be surprised by the lack of big announcements, but I still found it incredibly depressing. Concord was so much worse than I thought and so horribly generic and uninteresting it almost looked like a joke. But that’s not the future of gaming as Sony sees it. But rather than the future, to me it feels like the end.

Over the last year or so things have been going from bad to worse for gaming, with console sales falling, publishers laying off thousands of people, the number of new publications shrinking, and the lack of communication from companies getting worse and worse .

It has all happened so quickly. Even the first few years after the pandemic seemed relatively normal but since around 2022 it has been a relentless stream of bad news. What is worse in my opinion is the complete lack of leadership. Sony just ignores the problems, never talks about it – or anything else if they can help it.

You wouldn’t expect Nintendo to say anything, but then Japanese publishers don’t seem to be having the same problems. Microsoft is sure, but even though they talk about the issues, kind of, I can’t believe a word they say. Does anyone really believe that they don’t have plans for more multi-format releases or that hardware is less important to them as a result?

I’ve been playing video games since the early 90’s and I remember on many occasions visualizing what gaming would be like in 20 or 30 years. Back then, there were always amazing advances in graphics and game design, but you could say it was held back by the technology and you could only guess what could be possible when you had such consoles powerful as those of today.

I used to imagine what today would be recognized as open world games, where you could go anywhere and do anything, with any type of vehicle you wanted. Up until the beginning of this generation everything seemed to be evolving exactly as I – and imagine millions of other people – hoped.

Graphics were getting better, games were getting bigger and more customizable, yet prices weren’t really going up significantly. Everyone, I thought, was happy. Then apparently, completely out of the blue, games are no longer profitable and everything has to be live service trash like Concord.

Just like the entire progress of video games as we know them came to a car crash stop and instead we got nothing at all…to be replaced later by live service games, when they are ready.

Suddenly it feels like everything I thought gaming was just a dream and now that I’ve been rudely awakened it all melts away. Am I being overdramatic? Maybe, but look at the current release schedules, or the last Sate of Play, and tell me I’m wrong.

And before people say they don’t care and can retreat to their backlog or play older games again, that’s avoiding the problem. I don’t want to live in the past. I want the exciting future I’ve always imagined for gaming and up until a few years ago it seemed to be completely on schedule. But now, it is all fast disappearing, until I fear there will be nothing of value left.

From reader Clayton

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