LogFAQs > #953276759

First of all fuck off, Breath of the Wild was a great re-imagining of the open world genre and one of the prettiest and most optimistic post-apocalyptic stories in video games. I understand that people have problems with the game, and those issues are valid, but I disagree that it's mediocre and I adore the sparse atmosphere and the sprawling, entirely explorable world that they give you to explore.

Second of all - gamers accepted mediocrity for a variety of reasons. They accepted a lack of backwards compatibility because companies went "oh no we can't make the games work :( you're just gonna have to buy the remasters and ports :( they have trophies now so you should buy them again :) buy the new ones instead of the stinky old games :)", and if gamers have any legacy to their name, it's nuthugging their favorite companies and slurping up all the diarrhea that gets served to them. It's been happening since the "Console Wars" between Nintendo and Sega at least.

I've been bringing this up a lot lately, but another polarising wedge that was driven into gaming was Gamergate. You can see how bringing ideology into the gaming space affected the quality of the games people championed with Hatred - a game decried as a mass shooting simulator by the left (which, I mean, it was) and which was taken off of Steam, only for the right to rise up and argue against censorship of the game. The game wasn't that good, and it was explicitly a controversial cash grab made by a bunch of shitheads - but the way it was talked about, it was as if it was a vital and necessary and needed part of the gaming space, with its exclusion from Steam being tantamount to political censorship. So the political radicalisation that occurred within the gaming space began to dictate the sort of games that certain sides would prop up and try to take down, regardless of quality.

I still maintain that games like Hatred - especially ones that get that much word of mouth - can absolutely survive being sold independently. Even in a landscape without itch.io, all you need to do is put the game files up on your website and let people access the files once they pay the fee. And you don't even need to pay a cut to Steam, which means you're making more money per sale. But that's a tangent.

But overall, gamers accept mediocrity because that's what they're used to. Companies took an inch here, an inch there - then they began to overreach their boundaries for the purpose of proposing something less controversial that "fixes" the issue they were trying to introduce. They said "we can't make games more user friendly" when what they meant was "we don't want to fuck with our bottom line, which we've padded through methods that make games less fun for you to play". And because people tie their identities to the games they play and the companies that make their favorite games, we let them.

It's the same reason liquor brands are introducing these new colourful characters and narratives to their brands. They tell you the infamous history of Smirnoff, how the recipe escaped Russia during the Russian Revolution and found its way to America in the 1920's - they create characters like James Squire and tell you stories about how he stole hops and barley to make beer, and he got a light sentence because he gave the judge three barrels of ale. They're personalising the brand and tying it into an identity that customers identify with. And they're using that personal investment in the brand to get people to spend more money on it, regardless of the end product.

This is a conscious decision by multi-billion dollar game companies. They take functionality and content away from games, and they play on the consumer's investment in the brand to get away with it. And then when people start catching on, they'll do something ridiculous that everybody hates - and then they'll walk it back, and possibly offer a "solution" that's a half-step towards the original problematic action, but which "fixes" the most egregious aspects of what they were gonna do. And more importantly, they've planted the idea in people's heads, so when they try again later on, less people will resist it because it's been normalised.

The PS3 store is a gonner. They were gonna shut it down in July, along with the PSP and PSvita stores, and gamer backlash prevented this from happening. But the store is going down in the next three years, and this first initial backlash was instrumental in normalising the idea in people's minds. The next time the news comes out that the PS3 store is gonna be shut down, there will be more people who see it as a reasonable action - it's been 20 years, the PS4 and PS5 have been out for over 10 years and nearly 5 years respectively, it's time for the PlayStation 3 to go. We're angry now, but it serves to plant the idea in our mind - hasn't the PlayStation 3 been out for a long time now? Haven't people had enough of playing PlayStation 3 games? If less people use the online infrastructure than the amount of money we use to keep the store alive, aren't we justified in shutting down the online functionality of the store?

The biggest con in gaming, the method that conditions gamers to accept more and more egregious bullshit, is tied to the relationships and identity that people associate with the gaming experience. It can be how much of their identity they throw in with a company like Sony, or it can be their political identity and how it relates to people like them and the issues they champion within the gaming space. People who want to feel like they're chasing out non-gamers and people who objectively want to make their hobby worse by their own inclusion? They champion games like Hatred regardless of whether the game is good or not. People who view companies as benevolent enterprises with their best interests in mind, and sympathise with the company line as those companies add advertisements to the home screens of their new consoles and neuter backwards compatibility to sell ports and remasters of games you've owned multiple times? Who view other companies as rabid vultures trying to attack the Good Guy - and themselves by extension - and who make pointless excuses which paint their favorite company's actions in a good light even if it's only to fatten up their bottom line? They eventually call for the end of online services for older consoles because their relatable buddy Sony said it's time, or they defend publishing monopolies that don't make any sense except to force people to spend money on one company's platform.

The way that people tie their personal identities into the gaming space, and all of the conflict and polarisation that results from people defending their identities by defending their favorite companies or their favorite fan platforms, is the biggest reason why so many gamers will eat horseshit if it's sold the right way.

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Now Playing: Ni No Kuni, Hyrule Warriors, Stardew Valley