The Industry is Changing, and I’m Scared

One of the worst feelings a person can have, in my personal opinion, is that of helplessness. Being completely powerless over something and seeing absolutely no way to change it. It feels awful, and because of that, I will try my hardest to avoid experiencing it as much as I can. Sometimes though, I just can not avoid it, and recently I have had to come to terms with it and accept that I am powerless over the direction the gaming industry is taking. I realized that I must really love this industry to get so worked up about it. It is completely true, I really do love it. So you can understand how hard it has been to watch something you love turn it’s back on you. Some may scoff at this, but watching this industry alienate the Hardcore Gamers in favor of Casual Gamers is tearing me apart, and I need to vent on the subject. Here is my plea to the industry.

 

Most of this may just be a simple history lesson of the past decade or so, along with my ever vocal opinions. You’ve been warned.

 

I have read plenty on this subject before, as I am sure you have as well. There has been plenty of heated arguments over the impact of the Wii, and the casual craze. Some believe that this is good for the industry. The Wii has brought a whole new demographic to gaming, and to some, this can bring nothing but good. I can see their point. Having non-gamers suddenly understand the industry and begin gaming will spread the appeal of games and help cement them as the leading form of entertainment. That obviously does sound like a good thing, and it can be hard to argue it. However, the other argument is that while this may have helped non-gamers opinions of games, it has also changed the opinions and strategies of developers and publishers. Suddenly, the hardcore gamer isn’t as important as this new “casual” gamer. Sure, it is always easy to fall back on the hardcore crowd if they are in need of some cash, but the casual gamers have a certain ignorance that can be milked of many shiny pennies.

 

So, who is right? I do not know, but I can tell you what I see, and that is that games and gaming as we know it is going away, and a new era of games is coming in for a crash landing. What does this mean exactly? Well, it means that a huge money train is blazing past Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. The train is carrying millions of gamers. Only, the hardcore gamer isn’t on that train. The hardcore gamer is sitting at the station, waiting for the next one. The Big 3 are going to milk this new craze for everything it is worth, and there is almost  nothing we can do about it. Nintendo, for instance, has all but forgotten about the core gamers who have supported them for their entire career. Microsoft and Sony stood by and watched Nintendo make more money than they could count, and are currently chasing down that train while foaming at the mouth. Can you blame them? We let them down. The hardcore gamer stood by and let this happen. Of course we aren’t 100% to blame, but we are far from innocent.

 

Take Nintendo for instance. They tried twice to capture our hearts. First with the Nintendo 64. The N64 was a great system. We ate it up at launch, and if there is a gamer who reads this that hasn’t spent hundreds of hours dominating their friends with double shotguns in Goldeneye I will be surprised. Then, a funny thing happened, we stopped supporting it. We moved on up and started hitting on the new girl on the block, the Playstation. Sure, the Nintendo 64 was more powerful, but Sony was so hardcore. While Nintendo was trying to serve us Banjo Kazooie and Mario Party, we were too busy crashing our $200,000 ride in Gran Turismo and trying to stay alive in Resident Evil. Granted, Nintendo did sort of give up. They simply stopped caring. We stopped seeing releases for the N64, and anything we did see just paled in comparison to the onslaught of awesomeness that Playstation was serving us with a silver spoon. We never looked back.

 

The Gamecube should have been the first sign that Nintendo was changing. I am sure some saw the slow metamorphosis Nintendo was going through, but I was too ignorant. Again, if there is anybody reading this who wasn’t flying around in an X-Wing blowing their friends out of the sky in Rouge Squadron I will be shocked. That purple little lunchbox was awesome. The games looked so good, and everything just felt right. I still remember the feeling I got when I saw Metroid Prime for the first time. Awe struck doesn’t do it justice. However, the feeling didn’t last long, because once again, Sony blew the doors off our brain and came in guns blazing. The Playstation 2 had arrived and we were ready to rock. All of a sudden we were right back where we started and none the wiser. Nintendo was trying to serve us Super Mario Sunshine and Luigi’s Mansion, but we were to busy doing flips with a naked dude in Metal Gear Solid 2 and ripping the heads off of mythic beasts in God of War. Again, Nintendo gave up. The games stopped coming, and the PS2 took off into the greatest selling console of all time. It was glorious.

 

If only we had known that Nintendo was conspiring against us. Would we have done anything differently if we knew what Nintendo was up to? I for one would have supported them more. If only I was more attentive, I could have seen what they were up to. The Gamecube was purple for God sakes, but I still did not see it. Nintendo was fed up trying to cater to us hardcore, and they were going to make the riskiest move I have ever seen someone in this industry do. They were going to try and make more gamers. Their plan? To create a system that did not focus on graphical enhancements, but instead ease of use. Nintendo was going to hijack the industry and capture the hearts and minds of humans that did not play games. This new market was completely untapped, and Nintendo was ahead of the pack. When they came out of the gate, they were ready for war, and no one was ready. Nintendo stole the industry.

 

Now that the history lesson is over, where are we now? Well, Nintendo succeeded. We are in a gaming economy filled with both the hardcore and the casual. Nintendo did the impossible, and single handily created an entire demographic out of thin air. Or did they? The casual market is an allusive bunch, aren’t they? One minute they are making Wii Play the most successful game ever created, and they next they are letting down almost every third party publisher who tries to captivate them. I have met people who believe they do not even exist.  Are they actually real? Do they exist, or was Nintendo just in the right place at the right time? This is the most important question, because this ties into everything. The answer to this question will decide the fate of the entire industry. And we will have an answer soon, because both Sony and Microsoft will answer it for us.

 

Most hardcore gamers started seeing the changes less than a year after the Wii hit, especially when you only look at Nintendo. Their games were childlike, and after an initial push by the third party developers to cater to the hardcore, their failed attempts were replaced with Mini-Game compilations and more childish shovelware. By that time we had already accepted it, and I was personally glad that this new market of gamers had a console of their own. I never dreamed that my beloved hardcore systems were about to change. Despite that,  I started to see changes in the games I played. Difficulty levels seemed to decrease, and everything began feeling streamlined. Interviews with developers stopped being about how awesome their games were, and more about how their games “appeal to a wide range of audiences”. Sure, we still had out Gears of War and our Killzone’s, but more and more subtle changes started popping up everywhere I looked. Then, seemingly out of thin air, Microsoft dropped a megaton. Natal was announced, and I knew at that moment it was over.

 

I knew we were done right then and there. We had let Nintendo down when they tried to cater to us, and in retaliation they were going to steal the industry away from us. Microsoft took notice, and when they decided to drastically change their dashboard, it was like raising a white flag. What happened to our hardcore system? What happened to Microsoft? Suddenly I have to be face to face with juvenile avatars every time I turn my system on. This wasn’t what I signed on for, this isn’t what the Xbox 360 is about. And to this day, I am still furious at Microsoft. How could they do this to me? I have supported them through everything. I bought new consoles when mine broke and they sent me another broken one to replace it. I bought their severely overpriced Hard drive and accessories and dozens of games. I paid them good money every month to use Xbox Live and this is how they say thanks? Essentially giving me the middle finger. Why Microsoft? People argue that if I was really a hardcore gamer than I wouldn’t care what the dashboard of the Xbox 360 looked like, and I would only care about the games. What they don’t realize is that a console has become about much more than simply the games. It is about the community, and having everything I could want at my fingertips when I turn it on. Unfortunately, I can not experience any of that without having to experience Microsoft’s version of a Mii.

I finally answered my own question as to why Microsoft did it. That is where the money is, that’s why. When Sony announced their motion controller, combined with Microsoft’s Natal, it became crystal clear. Maybe I was an idiot for thinking otherwise, but I never mattered to them. They are going to go where the money is, and right now, it isn’t with us. This goes more for Microsoft, Sony still has a chance. Microsoft has made it crystal clear what their intentions are. They are going to try and cater to both the hardcore and the casual. This means that we, the hardcore gamer, are going to get less attention. Surely, I thought, the developers wouldn’t be stupid enough to go along with this, especially after how many times they have been burned on the Wii. Boy, was I wrong. Multiple developers announced that they  had multiple games already in development for Natal. They were already on board, and we had no idea.

 

Why are they on board? This is what I want to know? The Wii has proved time and time again the the casual crowd is a very difficult bunch to tame. How is it that they expect to capture them, and why are they so sure they even exist? Look, I am glad that the Wii is such a hit. I want nothing more than to be able to share the beauty of gaming with everyone who wants to experience it. I am not trying to be selfish here. The more the merrier, but I will be damned if my gaming habits are going to have to change to make room for them. Call me selfish, call me jaded, but I did not ask for this. When I bought my Xbox 360 and PS3 I did not buy a casual system. I bought them because they were going to provide me with what I wanted, balls to the wall action that only a hardcore gamer could love. Now I fear that I may soon walk into my local gaming store only to find the 360’s shelf cluttered with Mini-Game Collections and shovelware, and there is nothing I can do about it. I am helpless to change it.

 

I have started seeing more and more articles about how game journalists do not want a new console, or how Microsoft is considering Natal to be a new console. Call me old fashioned, but a new console is supposed to more than double the power of the previous. A new console is supposed to wow me with it’s graphics and give me experiences that I simply can not get anywhere else. Natal is not a new console. Natal is a camera that let’s me wave my arms around and play Mini-Games. Suddenly, the Big 3 think that they no longer need to release new hardware every five or so years, and instead need only to milk the current consoles for everything they are worth first. Who knows, maybe I am alone on this, but I want a new console. I am already tired of what Microsoft can offer me. I have seen everything that the 360 can do for me, but it is too late. They already made up their mind, and changed the industry forever.

 

I have a hard time trying to think about what the industry might look like in another five years. If things keep going the way they are going, I am afraid that we may never have what we did just a few years ago. Sure, we will still get out Hardcore games, but not the way we used to. We now have new neighbors who also want a piece of the pie, and it looks like they are going to get their way. Am I overreacting? I am not sure. Some people will tell me that Microsoft and Sony would never be that stupid and completely alienate the hardcore gamer in favor of an unproven demographic like the casual gamers. However, all I can think about when someone says that to me is how the Wii Fanboys and Nintendo both swore that they wouldn’t forget about us either, and look what happened their. Money is a powerful thing, and the developers would be more happy making cheap shovelware that will sell like hot cakes instead of spending millions on a hardcore game that may not sell. Maybe we are the unproven demographic, instead of the casual. We are the ones who let them down too often, and forced them to look at other options. Just look at EA. They answered our call for more original games with Mirrors Edge and Dead Space, but we turned our backs on them just when they finally listened and didn’t buy either of them.

 

I may not know exactly how the industry will look five years down the road, but I do know one thing for sure. I have been gaming for over 20 years, and I love it. I love it so much that I will sit in front of my computer for 3 hours typing an article that probably no one will read because worrying about where the industry is headed has caused so much built up stress that I was about to pop. I needed to vent, and vent is what I did. I care about the industry enough to ask you to do the same. If you are a hardcore gamer, I ask that you show it. Buy more hardcore games on the Xbox 360 or the PS3. We may not be able to do anything about what Microsoft and Sony are doing, but we can remind them that we were here from the start, and as long as they are willing to support us, we are willing to stay. I hope they can find a way to cater to both us and the casual crowd, but we can not expect that to happen if we just sit back and do nothing. The casual crowd deserve attention as well, but not if it means that the core gamer needs to suffer.

 

Plus, I want to see what pwning a fool looks like with Unreal Engine 4 on the Xbox 720 one day.