The "Always Online" requirement even for single player game is the most egregious. It's corporations blatantly ripping consumer ownership rights out of the hands of consumers, so we never physically own anything ever again. We'll just "rent" perpetually until the servers are shutdown. To those who say, "Only buy physical!", that's not a viable solution anymore since games require GB patches to even function (start), and a lot of times, the only thing on a disc these days is a code that a server authenticates to start the download process. The corporate dystopia is real.
I think this is when you, the consumer, have to make your adult decisions and make boundaries. Even if the game looks fun, I just don’t buy it if the company has requirements I can’t/won’t put up with. To give the benefit of the doubt to the “buy physical” crowd, this is what they’re saying too. They just won’t buy a game if it won’t work without a day 1 patch.
@@orbatos If enough people do it, yes it will. That's what the free market IS: the consumer gives money to the things they support, making it profitable, and doesn't give money to the things they don't like, making it unprofitable. The problem isn't the companies; it's the fact that people are willing to continue to give those companies money even as they do blatantly anti-consumer bullcrap.
The developers of Deep Rock Galactic added a feature not to long ago along with season 5 that allows players to specifically replay previous seasons for the unlockables they might have missed out on. It's such a simple concept to implement without requiring the player to spend money on what is essentially a "limited time pass." Plus, the game is just generally fun.
Always online instantly kills my interest in a game. Automatic death to preservation and zero interest to revisit. Also car games in general have 10 year lifespans at the most for licensing
@@premiumheadpats4150 Same. I don't always have wifi or service. Plus I don't like dealing with griefers. If I can't play the game offline I don't get it, it's why I've mainly stuck with my 360 and PS3 these past few years. If I ALWAYS wanted to interact with people I'd just be outside and interacting with people.
the only time i find always online to be kind of okay is when they have an inbuilt server host feature, you would still be technically online just NOT at the liberty of their systems
One trend i dislike is Ultimate editions not actually including all content. Because they end up releasing more stuff in the ingame shops, or another dlc or expansion later down the line.
Exactly. Season Passes too. Hate when they advertise as having everything then you don't get anything and have to hope they do a second one for the remaining items.
@@RickReasonnz That's even in Mobile games now. My Transformers Earth Wars game has a premium pass for 10 bucks monthly to make it easier to get loot and whatnot in the game.
I think I remember seeing Atlus go "oh no dw, Persona 3's remake is complete at launch, no extra DLC over than some costumes and stuff" and then added The Answer (which includes vital contextual information for understanding the ending of the base game) without including it in the "receive all DLC" part of the priciest game edition.
I don't think the thing that sank the Saint's Row reboot was comparing poorly to GTA, it was that it compared poorly to every previous Saint's Row game. And had terrible PR, which is an increasingly common trait in its own right.
Im sure that if the game had been released as an original IP, and not Saints Row, it would not have flopped that hard. It was a fun casual game to pass time, but the comparison to the old Saints Row titles killed in before the first trailer was fully watched.
You just have to look at the trailer alone to see the type of crap it was gonna be. Its like a board of executives asked some random 30 year old "what the young people are all about these days?" And asked how they can 120% avoid PR backlash. And there you go, the latest saints row.
Paying to play early. If your game is available to play on the first of the month, then that’s the release date. You’re not charging players to play early, you’re withholding the game for anyone who doesn’t pay you extra money.
This simply shouldn't be allowed. You cannot make a promise or advertisement saying a game is available on a date, then give certain people access before that date. That means it's available on the earlier date! While changing the wording wouldnt end the practice, it would end the lies in advertising saying a game is available ON DAY ONE when it is not.
More like pay more to be last minute beta tester 😂 Every time I see a game does this trick, it's almost always starts buggy as hell or totally failed to launch and needing day a 1 patch 😂
This alongside Ellen's video on the Funko Pop game is great and I'm enjoying the videos that are more serious and critical of the industry and the direction it's going in. That and the more personal videos like Mike's recent entry on Flight Simulator and his dad are feeling like such a welcome and delightfully fresh approach to the channel while not sacrificing what made it great in the first place. Just love it.
Seconded, it's important to engage critically with the things that are important to us and recognise where improvements can be made (or when failings can be... unmade)
@@basicjenkins Yeah my favorite videos on the channel are the list videos of course but also the ones where they each talk about their favourite of something.
Ellen (and Luke held the whiteboard)’s video about how much in-game currency you can earn in live service games was really good as well, emphasises how little you get for your time in those games. Which is fine if you’re having fun, but you can play other games that don’t try to tempt you with fake rewards
A lot, I mean a very overwhelmingly lot of games are CPU bottlenecked. Even if you have the GPU power of 10 4090s, you would still get 30fps because you literally can't have a 8GHz CPU. When that's the case, games would have no other option but to raise the resolution to make use of excess GPU power. I mean, if having 60 fps means the game can only get half of the NPCs, or the map is half the size, or NPC AIs are half as smart, then usually it's a better choice to just have 30fps. Only very specific types of games would benefit more on higher framerate than better complexity.
THIS, way too many games have such bad performances, im playing 60 fps for a few minutes then out of nowhere my frame rate drops and just stay low then back up and then low again.
The other issue with replacing the old game with a new game is that if it ends up being worse than what came before, you can’t go back to the fun one. It becomes ‘take it or leave it’. See Warcraft 3 for a prime example.
@@KathySage234Or without mods. Various old games that never got their base version re-released.... Like Sonic Adventure 1. They only gave us a port of a port of a port with the current Sonic Adventure DX on Steam. Thankfully in this case, however, fans let you mod the game to be almost exactly like the Dreamcast original. (With some new bells and whistles too.)
Im not a fan of all the spit shine "remasters" of games barely a decade or so old and still completely playable as they are, seems like they're really just there to get existing fans to buy it twice. It also plays into the replacing old games item from this list
The entertainment industry is getting more and more risk averse. Failures like Concord only reinforce the trend of "never risk anything new, if it sold once it will sell again."
@@Santoryu90regardless, it was a new IP, and its failure signals (wrongly, as always) to the money people that "new IPs are too dangerous, approve the next remake"
I think it might be meta-commentary on how games are sold incomplete and are expected to be patched later. In a way, this video is released to us "incomplete" and we expect this to be "patched"/unlisted when the fixed version shows up.
@@MakusinMeringue if it is like that then the "fixed/patched" version will be the sequel which will probably end up being a video titled "# disturbing trends by video game companies that we could happen in the future," not actually addressing current issue lol
Maybe seventh point was about female characters deliberately made less sexually-appealing and less beautiful than before (for example compare women of Mass Effect Trilogy to women of Mass Effect Andromeda, or women of Mortal Kombat 9 to women of MK X, MK 11 and MK One, or women of Injustice Gods Among Us to women in Injustice 2, or woman from Horizon Zero Dawn to woman of Horizon Forbidden West), but then point was muted by radical feminist's lobby.
So… I paid real money for a “limited time” skin in OG Overwatch. Not only did they unexist the game, but they also changed my purchased (with real money) skin. That’s a twofer on this list
There was also a skin that could only be earned by playing Blizzard's League of Legends clone, and another that only came from watching their e-gaming league. Then they just... made them in-game items you could buy. I spent hours installing and playing a game and setting up accounts and links and streaming videos I wouldn't be playing otherwise, because they insisted these items were rare and exclusive.
Can we add battlepasses to the list? "We see you like playing the game and that you like earning stuff in our game. Would you like to pay to do both?" No? "Hmm how about under a strict time limit?" What? "Alright you drive a hard bargin, how about all that plus if you pay more money, you don't have to earn that stuff anymore" ... you want me to pay for a job, and then pay more to not have to do that job "Bonus skin?" I'm going outside.
On the other hand, when done right it can be a good thing. Fortnite for example. I had a friend who played enough that he paid for one battlepass years ago, and has gotten every single one since for free, by earning currency through the pass. He's gonna play one way or another, and being able to get the next pass for free by playing just means he's not spending cash on the game.
@@BobBobson The only battlepass that I've seen that does it right is the Deep Rock Galactic one, but that one basically runs counter to the basic idea of a battlepass. It's _completely_ free, doesn't have that big of a grind, and all of the rewards get dumped into the general pool of cosmetics at the end of the season for players to earn.
@@leadpaintchips9461 There's also Helldivers 2 Warbonds. While they're not literally free, the currency used to unlock them is earned in-game, the player has a lot of control over the order of unlocks (later pages of unlocks require you spend a minimum number of medals, but you can choose which rewards to unlock on a page as you progress through them), and there's no time limit whatsoever. And the only thing that spending actual money can do is unlock the *ability to spend medals* on the Warbond, not actually unlock rewards from the Warbond.
@@leadpaintchips9461 Helldivers 2 Warbonds are also pretty good, for *also* basically not following the normal battlepass format. They aren't technically free, but earning the in-game currency for them isn't very difficult, there's no time limit for accessing the rewards, the player has a bit of freedom in choosing what to unlock as they go through it, and spending money can only give you access to the Warbond, not any of the actual rewards.
The worst part of the always online aspect is this isn't a bug but a feature. The intention is so we don't fully own our games so we are forced to play whatever comes next, if it even does.
On the topic of Always Online games, theres a movement in Europe and I think a couple countries in other regions called Stop Killing Games. If you're interested in making sure that your games don't just stop working when the developers decide to stop supporting online features, please google Stop Killing Games and sign the petition to have legislation passed to prevent games like The Crew from being destroyed.
The EU is an unelected bunch of busybody bureaucrats that want nothing good for anyone except themselves. Don't encourage them to impose regulations on anything. If you want "always online" to stop, be consequent and don't buy always online games.
@@LordBaktor There's nowhere near enough people willing to do that. The games are good. They're worth buying. The problem is that, despite BUYING the product, you don't get to keep it.
True, realism is expensive so I can see why AA tend to focus on style. So fun playing a AAA game that has the MC in pedestrian clothes instead of creatively designed ones.
@midweststyle, yeah, it's frustrating, because these, "Massive Hit--or Notihing" studios (or, more accurately, the corporations that own them) too often don't consider a "minor" success worthy of carrying to the next level--or next sequel.
I honestly believe that the decision to close Tango Gameworks was made even before Hi-fi Rush was released. They didn't even advertise the game at all and were obviously expecting for the game to fail thus giving them an excuse to close them down.
@@AdderTude It still sold decently well though I would guess that due to its higher marketing budget it didn't make that much money. Hi-fi Rush on the other hand was a smashing success both commercially and critically. They had one mediocre game between 2 succesful ones. The closure of the studio doesn't make any sense from outside point of view.
Everything converging into a single genre and gameplay loop. Halo, Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge, Zelda, Gears of War, Forza, and Dragon Age all basically have the same open world, map unlock, faux-progression gameplay loops and level structure despite starting as entirely different genres
What Andy said: "Star Citizen too" What I heard: "Start Citizen 2". I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the sequel was in process before they released the full game, but I thought I might have missed a thing.
Then I point out GTA 6, no launch date, 2 billion to make (so far), not demo or anything, while taking the same amount of time as Star Citizen. I'll keep playing it, just like I keep playing No Man's Sky.
Oh there’ll be a Secret Sextuple Deluxe Giga-Admiral tier promising (but not necessarily providing) early access to Store Citizen 2 for the token fee of an average annual gross before this thing gets to 1.0, just be patient
The AAA or indie really pisses me off. AAA studios will say "making games is expensive" then some guy alone in his free time using 100 dollars worth of pre-made assets manages to make a game. How about instead of expending 300 million dollars on ONE AAA, they spend 10 million on 30 AA games? So even if one goes full Concord, you still have 29 other chances of success.
It's in the pursuit of better and better graphics which, imo, has gotten out of hand. Up until the PS4 era, yes, graphics increases were noticeable. But now, it seems to require exponentially more money for marginal improvements in graphical quality. Do these companies not understand that the human eye can only see so much on a monitor?
@@Vilamus A lot of games on my steam account with the most playtime are either over a decade old, 2d, or deliberately go for a retro/pixel artstyle; I don't need to see skin pores to enjoy my gaming. If I see a game with over... let's say 50GB, I automatically consider it as something that values style over substance.
There are people already complaining about bad graphics in AAA games if they are not of the highest standards. Games like Armored Core 6 or SW:Outlaws deal with critics about having PS3 Era graphics. And while there have been more failures overall lately in that AAA Business, they are still a good margin above the average failurerate in the AA and Indie sektion. For every Life is Strange there are hundreds of failed AA titles. For every Among us there are tenthousands of failed Indies. In the AAA Industrie those failures seem to stack up, but the ratio is still reversed. For every failure there are still several AAA titles that made a good amount of profit.
That isn't even my main problem (although it is just as important) but that it takes away more development time which is why we get so few games together now and suddenly a bunch at ones.
If they made B tier games they wouldn't need so many successes. The only reason a single game failing shuts down a studio is because the games they're making cost tens of millions of dollars, if not more. Cheaper games allow for more failures, that's an obvious fact that these studios just don't understand.
It’s a similar problem with films right now where everything is a bloated-budget “blockbuster,” because it’s not about making money, it’s about making THE MOST money. It’s short-sighted and bad for art.
@@chellyfishing Was just going to say that. Increased revenue led to increased budgets, which led to increased bloat at the companies (huge HR departments, way to many managers, etc.), which led to mid budget movies and games not being viable anymore.
@@LordBaktor I think Matt Damon spoke about this aswell. Before you could make a film for 25 and put in an additional 25 for marketing for a combined 50. but now you put in 100 with an additional 100 meaning you'd have to make 4x more to break even, let alone a profit. I mean... Marvel just paid 90 mill for RDJ aparently...
You forgot number 7: Insult your player base when you produce low quality products. I don't know who pioneered this baffling anti-profit, ego tripping trend, but two major examples I can think of is Warner Brothers studios calling their PC playerbase "entitled" for complaining about the completely unplayable and unoptimized Arkham Knight port that they deliberately skimped out on by hiring a cheaper dev team to port it, The result shocked nobody except Warner Brothers. More recently, we have Ubisoft, with their recent fiascos regarding Assassin's Creed and Star Wars, throwing all kinds of popular insults towards their players.
Disparaging critics is something that creatives of all sorts have been trying to do for a long time now. When people say bad things about product and people hear those bad things about product, they're less willing to buy product. This is just their horribly short sighted attempt at delegitimizing critics so more people consume product.
Applies to Saints Row more than its own listing. Competing with GTA is not why Volition died. They did it to themselves with this idiotic "modern audience", "if you don't like it, don't buy it" schtick. Frankly, their garbage reboot couldn't even compete with the studio's previous work.
If those companies expect their customers to get comfortable with no longer own their games, then those companies should get comfortable REAL FAST to not getting their customer's money anymore. That level of corporate entitlement is found generally with the younger generation, as is the political agenda that generation is pushing nowadays. Like the newest assassin's creed.
The other side of eternal Early Access are the games that magically hit 1.0 status the moment the publisher abruptly pulls the plug, no matter how far the game is from meeting promised features or how "unfinished" it obviously is. The disturbing aspect of Star Citizen isn't its eternal development, but rather how it has been sold and what it sells. The disturbing aspect of The Day Before wasn't that it died due to being released too early, but rather that it was a scam that was never going to deliver on its promises. (Fun note: Although Fntastic was shut down after The Day Before, they are now on Kickstarter asking for $20k to fund their revival and next game. For extra fun, the first promise of this new Fntastic is that *from now on* their development and marketing will be based on the principle of honesty.)
Here's the ultimate disturbing thing.When a game like destiny, 2, which at launch had no contracts later makes you sign a contract a year later with their next big DLC and then in the following years, they proceed to remove almost all of the original game and still have the audacities to charge you money for more content that they also will later remove.
I think the fact that single player based experiences like Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3 came out and were such a phenomenal hit, should have led to a change in what the consumer obviously wanted at the time. Quality titles that were complete upon release, but could be added to with dlc or patches. But it feels like you can't go a week without hearing about a live service game that was hyped to oblivion and then either fell apart immediately or was a disappointment. I expect there will be lots of Concords in the future.
And the concept isn't even a new one. I think most of the industry just forgot how to make single player games (although, BG3 is also a lot of fun with a friend. Optional story co-op in a single player game is one of my favorite things)
keyword should but when those games came out you seen so many in the industry downplay or claim they where anomalies thing is the industry does not want to change it will not change to it crashes again
@@SammaclauseGamgee They didn't forget, they just saw the financial successes of multiplayer, GaaS games and wanted a piece of that. I mean look at how stupidly successful PUBG, Fortnite BR, and FIFA was/is. A business would be negligent towards their shareholders (IIRC a felony for CEOs and boards of directors in 'Murica) to not at least attempt to get some of that bag.
@@leadpaintchips9461 for companies like Bioware, just as an example, their strength was in making single player games. If every company chases the same audience, only some of them are going to be successful. Gamers usually don't buy every multiplayer game that comes out; they only have time to really play one or two of them. Diversifying your portfolio isn't just a good idea for individuals.
The always online bs is really ridiculous. Best example was when the PSN went down for hours last night/this morning. Yeah, games that actually use the online for core gameplay, whatever, but hey, EA? Why the heck couldn't I play The Sims 4 instead? You know, a very single-player experience. :/ At least Elden Ring had my back. FromSoft just let's you play offline without the few online needed things like bloodstains, ect.
i hate the switch to online only single player games. spotty connection or no connection already limits the games you can play, we don't need every game to be out of reach when there is no reason for it.
I'm glad you're addressing some of the more insidious tactics game companies are using to try and get more money from people, it needs to be talked about more.
Maybe I'm just old and tired and slow and poor, but there seems to be a trend toward having 2^64 polygons and colours on each model, 8k x 4k resolution, 120 frames per second, twenty information feeds to the player active at any time, reaction windows measured in clock cycles and gameplay roughly equivalent to the stuff we were playing in 320 x 256 resolution in 256 colours at 20 frames per second back in 1988. Remember caring about characters and their stories and taking the time to read the text?
Yeah, I'm certainly sick of my friends always talking about how great games look. I couldn't care less. I want intresting mechanics and/or a great story. "Why don't you buy a PS5? You can even play your PS4 games on it and they look better." - yeah, but I can also play them on my PS4 *shocking* And all those games getting a re-release for the new system, with slightly better optics. Why? I already played it or can get the already existing version (which happens to also run on the newer console). There's just so much annoying stuff going on...
and funny thing is most of the time you wont rly feel a difference like why do i need to see that the dirt on the floor is actually its own model i wont zoom into it while playing it
Since I've seen a few commenters making the same point, I'll join in with the "cranky old-timer" complaint: I couldn't care less about hyper-realistic graphics. First Person games give me motion sickness and nothing shuts down my brain faster than conversations about frame rate. Just give me a nice-looking, fun to play game with a decent story and likable characters, and I'll still be playing it in a decade when all of the cutting-edge tech games have been long forgotten.
Hell, I'll take _Morrowind_ being ugly as sin but with a unique setting that stands out from the crowd over something that looks like a live-action film while melting my computer into toxic slag.
I agree. One of my favourite games to this day is Dragon Quest 9 on the DS, which has that half 2d half polygonal "3d" as its style. It might be ugly by today's standards, but I love it all the same
@@emberinferno6227 DQ IX has plenty of other avenues to dislike it (post game being a massive series of grinds, having quests on the cartridge locked behind Nintendo Wi-Fi or whatever their proprietary thing was called), it actually looks outstanding for a DS game, imo.
@@tornadoawe that's why emulators are awesome. After an honest, grindy attempt, I added an exp multiplier cheat to the emulator so that I could enjoy the game in a reasonable time frame
Games with a good stylistic art style will hold up for years compared to realistic art style, and if the game itself is really good then people will care less about the graphics anyway.
7: Re-Making the same game every year and expecting people to buy it. Looking at sports franchises such as NBA, FIFA and Madden. Though sports franchises aren't the only games that suffer from this. The frankly insane release schedule for Call of Duty games leaves little room for innovation. Ubisoft development team is also guilty of a similar practice, with all of Ubisofts recent games being open-world sandboxes with very similar mechanics even when they are IPs with distinctively different worlds. A Star Wars game shouldn't feel like an Assassin's Creed game.
Agreed. As much fun as it is to give EA shit, at least they only release new Sims games when there are MASSIVE updates in graphics that the current engine can't handle. So we have Sims 4 plus a bunch of optional expansion packs.
7: pumping out sequels when an update or expansion pack would do the job. I hate all the sequels that some games have that have little to no differences between the old game and the new one. Like Call of Duty. I bet you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in terms of graphics and I'm pretty sure they're made on the same engine. Why not just sell expansion packs? I know it's easy (and justified) to make fun of EA, but at least they're doing The Sims right. They only ever released sequels when it was absolutely necessary instead of every couple of years. I mean, we're only on Sims 4 and how many Call of Duty games are there? Now the base Sims 4 game is free and you only have to pay for expansion packs. These packs give items, more character customization, and interactions. This would work for other games. Have players buy the core game, then let them buy expansion packs with more skins, weapons, maps, and story modes.
Yeah ubisoft tried to say their game "skull and bones" was a quadruple a game. It was basically a worse version of assassins creed black flags naval exploration and combat. The game was a major failure
Basically the amount of "A"s in AAA doesn't really matter. In the movie market, there are only AAA and B movies, and so any other gradings of games should be considered for more detailed description only.
Will never touch anything the Gen AI in it. Was interested in that Inzoi but nope. Never touching it now. No surprise Activision is getting into it at all. As I read at one point, I want AI to wash my dishes, so I can have more time for art, not do my art so I have more time for dishes. A great video as always, thanks team!
I don’t think the new saints row game failed because of its size alone and seeing how they spent some of their money sponsoring TH-camrs and twitch streamers I don’t think it was as small as you say. If you go back to the AA games you mentioned, all three had stellar writing, whereas the new saints row was painful to endure in that regard. I might be wrong but I think a AA game lives and dies by how well it can communicate with the player, mostly by its story but it could be by amazing playability too, like Ghost Runner
Yeah lol. SR3 had an entire enemy faction that was making fun of hip, trendy kids and the reboot turned you into them. OG Boss would beat the new characters up for something petty like the way they dress, while complaining about the fact he/she now has to have an Internet connection to play some very old video game. Edit: at some point either before or after this interaction, Boss would sprint full Tilt into a group of them, drop kick one of them and use their body as a surfboard down a couple feet of pavement. Because that's how the Boss rolls, obviously. The Boss's interactions with that faction just made me think of an 80's kid being mad at 00's kids, and that was funny to me.
Budget and scale weren't the reason Saint's Row reboot failed. It was that the game felt soulless. It was "zany," but somehow still predictable to the core. I don't think they made a mistake following the SR3/SR4 formula, though a return to the serious tone also would have been welcome, but the reboot constantly felt like it was trying far too hard to be cheeky and wacky. It came off like it was constantly explaining the jokes it just told. It's a real shame it took the whole studio down with them, because I really loved Agents of Mayhem. That game was still the Volition I knew and loved.
Yep. Previous entries had a ridiculously high level of variety in mini-games and missions. This felt like a rinse and repeat of the same 2, maybe 3 things the whole time with poor writing on top.
@@ryllharu trying to be wild and zany while subscribing to what's acceptable to say/do is pretty boring. I've heard some whispers about GTA6 and....both franchises thrive on being offensive. Edit: GTA with the pure crime stuff and SR with...."pony cart" racing. I still really enjoy SR2, but SR3 is the GOAT for me. SR4 I can take or leave. But no modern day social turmoil will work in either franchise, unless it's made fun of, in GTA because you have crime to commit, and in SR because you're irreverent, regardless.
@@ryllharuit took me a while but I grew to love agents of mayhem for 2 reasons one like you said it kept the sense of humor it felt like while not saints row it had the spirit of it plus gat was back and still as awesome as ever 😎
On the skins thing, this is what I hate most about Sea of Thieves. In a game where you're supposedly able to express yourself, literally almost every good pirate cosmetic, and damn near every ship cosmetic entirely, require money to buy, and that shit's expensive so you can't actually buy it with in-game currency easily whatsoever
The lack of couch co-op for big title games. Let me play with with my friends. It seems like only Nintendo hasn't forgotten that humans, and gamers, are social creatures and enjoy being near each other.
Exactly! I find it so hard to find games for me and my mom to play together cause they're all either single player or online multiple player only. Like, I remember games use to have both offered, now some reason they're getting rid of local. It's sad.
The loss of the AA game market truly makes me sad. They were almost always my favourite games in the past, full of weird and experimental and often very silly ideas that made for a kind of uniqueness that is really only found in the Indie market these days. Makes me feel so very old.
On the topic of AAA and indie, I've been playing a lot of the middle-tier games, what I like to call AA. Games like Helldivers 2, The Finals, and Remnant 2 are all games that I would describe as "larger than indie" but still not AAA
My favorite series pretty much exclusively makes AA games, and they actually made a profit in 2023! The company is called Tri-Ace, and the probably most famous member of the team is Matoi Sakuraba, aka, one of the composers for the Dark Souls franchise.
I tried Flintlock recently and really enjoyed its take on souls combat with a Tony-Hawk combo system. Really sucks how it got dog piled for starring a Black woman, though.
7: Everything has a battle pass. It's so exhausting. I miss getting sweet rewards for completing special quests or beating bosses. Now, with over-monetization, everything cool is locked behind a battle pass.
Thank you for mentioning Inzoi. That entire AI texture generation will land them in sooo much hot water with copyright holders when it launches theybe lucky if they don't get sued like crazy after launch.
Two things are virtually guaranteed when games allow user-generated content: (1) copyright infringement, and (2) flagrant smut. Sometimes both at the same time, and both with the potential to cause headaches for the publisher.
I know the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover" is a thing that people tend to believe, but AI art on covers or in games is a terrible way to go. People will only remember your covers and your art by how odd and anatomically incorrect it is. Even if AI gets to a point where it is a good enough that the human eye cannot tell the difference between it and real art - it can never truly make something new. Which, with artists already removing their art from places AI can get a hold of it, will eventually result in AI art BASED ON AI art. And since I'm already annoyed with the homogenization of a lot of art being similarly styled in games and animation (studios not trusting their artists or even their own audiences to enjoy or invest in something unique) this will just compound upon that problem.
The always online component to modern gaming has so ruined it for me I have completely abandoned it. Not only is it annoying here where I suffer a break in service 3 times a day (just for five minutes but it’s enough to cause these systems to think I’m trying something)… But it’s made me realize that without being online, I don’t own my games. Without verification, I can’t play. I’ve sold all my consoles past PS2 and Xbox 360. As soon as the publishers decide to shit down servers to any of the consoles past these, they simply do nothing. This is not just annoying, it’s planned. :/ I’m sticking with my older consoles. Physical games. They work.
Valorant isn’t even the only Riot game that #6 applies to. They do it for League of Legends as well. I remember when the Dark Cosmic Jhin variant skin was first announced and nearly everyone had a fit over it. For a while we thought the backlash would make the devs understand we didn’t want that, but instead they doubled down and said “We want to give players who are able to get these special skins the option to have them.” Translation: “We want to give the 1%’ers a reason to spend money on our game.”
Gotta say, the Saint's Row reboot didn't fail because of comparison to GTA it failed because of comparison to the original series, yeah it had a few jokes, and some whacky gimmicks similar to the originals, but when I played it to 100% only one joke actually got me to laugh, the rest were kinda forced and while the gameplay wasn't bad, it just didn't feel like a Saints Row game
"Oh, I've gone offline" he says while his LIVE streaming which is still running, this is the real issue. Servers crashing and complaining about your internet connection, then shutting down the single player game.
@@runningthemeta5570 yeah, the rough version of it is the original owners took a state backed loan, and defaulted, so Rhode Island took their assets, including the Amalur IP. It's more complicated than my description, but basically... yeah.
@@runningthemeta5570 It certainly does, the studio took a loan from the state and when the defaulted and went bankrupt, RI took the rights to the game. There was also a time Pepsi owned like the 6th largest Naval fleet in the world, history is freaking weird.
"Always Online" assures these scummy companies can kill a game and not get sued for it after you realize you don't get a refund, they'll keep doing it as long as they keep getting away with it.
Similar to the "always online" thing (which is the future we all rejected at the Xbox One launch and have still ended up with), I downloaded the demo of the new Prince of Persia on the Switch recently. Went to play it and was told that I'd have to sign up to a Ubisoft account and have a stable internet connection to do so. Needing to both be always online and have an account with the publisher just to play a demo is mad. So I went the alternate route of uninstalling the demo and not buying the game. Also, I don't buy early access games. I'm not paying for the privilege of beta (or in many cases alpha) testing your game. Get back to me when it's actually finished.
I met friends through Overwatch's random matchmaking, and ended up playing in tournaments with them. Those were some of the best memories I have gaming in my entire 37-year life. I miss OW, but won't touch OW2's hideous changes and monetization. It really does feel like losing a friend. I miss the days of dedicated srvers. If I want to play Unreal Tournament or UT2004, favourites from high school, I still can.
I was never that into OW but I have friends who still play and I simply can’t because of the predatory monetization. Sorry something you had such a good time with is gone 🙁
I very much appreciate the existence of this video and every entry on it, but especially 1, 3, and 6. The option to play offline will always be something I appreciate greatly, loot boxes were fine as long as they weren't pay to win (or, at least they were much better than the systems we have now), and the end of Overwatch was painfully tragic.
Regarding it being more lucrative to hate: I actually prefer content about liking games that's why Oxbox and Oxtra are the only gaming channels I'm subscribed to. I no longer have the time or energy to waste thinking about things I hate.
I've found myself disassociating with communities that have nothing but negative things to say all the time (ex. Star Wars fandom, Superhero fandom and generally most things that have become pop culture). It's exhausting hearing people whine and moan all the time. I think the thing that has kept me here with the Ox crew is that not only are they positive to listen too but the culture they've fostered with their fans is a mostly positive one as well.
@@darnell9806 Yeah exactly like why are you even here if you hate the thing? On that note I find Baldur's Gate and Yakuza fandoms to be among the best. Just there to talk about and enjoy the games.
@@LunaPPK I think it's perfectly fine to criticize something and to respectfully debate. Unfortunately people think they are invincible and anonymous on the Internet so most of the time there is no debate or criticism and simply personal attacks and threats from cowards. And those are completely worthless to engage with. Also you're not going to change someone's mind arguing with them online the best you can hope for is to eventually respectfully disagree. Why bother? Usually what happens is once they run out of arguments or talking points they switch to insults. How boring.
The lack of difficulty settings in games because there are so many, "Souls like" games around. As both an old AND disabled player I would love to try out Sekiro or Elden Ring but the lack of difficulty settings makes it impossible for me to play them. I KNOW that the punishing difficulty is part of the package but as with any other game I would play at a level I find challenging. Nothing would stop you from playing on the highest hellish level, it would just open up the game to more players which is a GOOD thing. Health problems can happen at any time and we are all getting older, they will sooner or later effect all of us. Till then you can happily ignore the difficulty level adjuster in the accesibility settings for the rest of us it will open up a lot of the games that are currently being released.
We've been over this before and you people still don't get it. I'll start by saying that while it sucks that you're disabled, you can still play 99% of games, it will always be weird that you think you're owed that 1% too. There are people who hate reading, they don't get to play games with heavy text dialogue. There are people who just don't have quick reflexes, so they don't get to play a lot of games that require fast reflexes. Everyone has games they can't play for one reason or another, and no one else demands to be accommodated in every game. All of that aside, the lack of difficulty settings means that every single player who beats Sekiro or Elden Ring did so at the same level. We fought the same bosses with the same amount of health and the same access to the same weapons. That's why there aren't difficulty settings, because we lose the community we've built if they added them. That's the price that has to be paid for those communities, that some people are left out of them. Again, it sucks that you can't be a part of the community, I am genuinely sorry that that's the case, but the answer isn't to destroy what we have just so you guys can be a part of a new community. I'm glad FromSoftware sees this the way I do, because otherwise you'd be excluding the rest of us just so you could be in the community.
Difficulty is a bit more complicated than that. It's not a slider that makes sense with every game. I agree with accessibility being a problem. But difficulty is not the same as accessibility.
People need to learn to stop buying games. That's the only way we'll see change. Developer or publisher does something dodgy? Don't buy in! FOMO or no, it'll only get worse if you buy in! I swear to you that there are better and cheaper games out there that don't have the baggage.
This argument never works. All of us who genuinely care already don't buy these games. I haven't given Ubisoft or Bioware any money in years and will continue to avoid doing so. Other people don't care though, millions of them will still buy this garbage.
@@NottherealLucifer Sometimes we say things not because anyone is listening, but because it must be said. (Seriously though, it cost me nothing to leave a comment so if even one person reads it and thinks "God, yeah, I should really cut back on who I'm giving money to." It'll be a net positive)
That's not how it works with corporations, ever wonder why games and movies are considered a flop or not based on opening sales? They market and sell based on quarterly stock options. They don't want to keep games running unless there is a recurring income like subscriptions and micro transactions.
Yeah if only that was how it worked. All that would do is make the big publishers close down all the studios that make their "failed" games, putting thousands of people out of work, all so that the CEOs won't have to make any less money. Heck, they're already out here closing down studios that make *successful* games. Regulation is the only real solution. Making exploitative business practices illegal is the only way to make it stop.
I have a price cap on games now. It's not a 100% rule, if there's something I really want then I'll save up for it, but otherwise I won't spend more than about US$25. I don't actually think it will change much in the industry, but at least it will make me stop feeling like I've wasted a huge amount of money.
"Loot boxes being phased out..." Errr, didn't the court's of some countries make them illegal because they were deemed 'gambling' and therefore could only be utilised by those over the age deemed appropriate by the requisite courts, with the onus of the checks being the responsibility of games companies themselves, along with hefty fines for failing to carry out those checks?
Hot take: Live service sequels need the game before them to be killed, splitting the player base between 2 games, even if only 10% of hardcore players stay behind, can keep the new game from reaching the heights these huge devs need their game to reach
Exactly, Saints row 3 and 4 sold well and no one on earth will say its similar or competing with GTA 4 or 5. The reboot just failed at being a saints row game.
It wasn't the lack of budget that did in the Saints Row reboot, it was the direction that the reboot took. The previous 2 games leaned into being silly, colorful and fun. The reboot... it tried. It was very obvious that it was trying to be something new and it just didn't click with anybody. Especially not long term fans of the series.
Very good points, I agree with all of them. Not sure if you'd include this as part of the "always online" one, but DRM. Causes more problems than it solve and is blatantly anti-consumer.
Lack of optimization - for both indie and AAA games. And the most issue is that gamers lean into that tendency, expecting an AAA game requiring a new GPU for it; when earlier you would expect an AAA game run better, cuz the company have the money to spend on devs who would optimize the game. That lowers the quality of nowadays games, ESPECIALLY AAA games, since companies would NOT do optimization properly simply because people EXPECT an AAA game to run poorly on a 1 y o GPU. Particles where textures would suffice, dynamic lighting where baked lighting would suffice, 3D enviroments in the distant background where a 2D picture would suffice (e.g.: skybox), etc.etc. And infamous ray tracing - it feels like games are MADE to run poorly to make an illusion of AAA game. To have realistic and/or pretty graphics and smooth gameplay you DON'T NEED to have a supercomputer. You need a supercomputer cuz companies continue to cut costs on optimization and are making games that spend much more resources than they actually need.
and the insane install sizes of some of the new games. I mean hell I look at something like Warframe, still getting content and updates and is only 40gb after all these years. But then some new release with less content wants 150gb.
also the death of the Pc game demo. Somewhere in the nineties the shareware was a revolutionary concept. You couldn't even imagine creating a game without a demo. Now from 10 AAA games, not even one has likely a demo. Don't tell me games costin millions to produce can't afford a demo. In the nineties the Game Demo was the actual selling point!
Splatoon, a game that is built on online multi-player, isn't required to be constantly online. Obviously, you can only play the story mode when offline.
Maybe a hot take, but i don't think games became more expensive to make, i think corporations are inflating costs so they can justify charging more for games, and there is nothing more to it. And that will continue until it becomes unsustainable and the industry collapses in of itself. While that i will be playing my cheap indie pc games on Steam, thank you very much.
I think publishers overcharge, but you have to admit: $100 doesn't go nearly as far today as it did even 5 years ago. So either publishers have always overcharged, or costs have gone up.
Kinda disingenuous to claim the Saints Row remake killed Volition because it couldn't match up to GTA. It also failed to live up the legacy of the Saints Row name. If it was released under a different name, instead of trying to invoke nostalgia, it wouldn't have earned as much hate as it received.
Woah, is that a cameo from Normal Adult Luke during the always online section? How wonderful! (Also, loving the new studio and videos y'all, keep up the great work and brightening my days!)
That's one I only recently realized about Hitman. If you aren't online, you lose all of the challenges and discoveries that are a big part of helping you explore the levels and find all of the cool things they built into it. Deeply annoying.
The fact that 99% of AI is focused on writing and art instead of ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING FUCKING ELSE is moronic, you're making AI that takes away the fun activities and are doing nothing about the stuff we don't want. Make AI that upscales models and textures, improves animation, monitors code for errors and alerts you, AI that provides basic technical information to the people who don't know how to, for example, change CPU thermal paste.
@@ceu160193 Maybe they have now. Back then they didn't. When the fn servers didn't respond I couldn't play my single player game I had bought on a disc. Plus I didn't have control over updates, and since Civ V was an unfinished fn mess when it was released, there were quite a lot, forcing me to wait until I could play my single player game I bought on a disc. And the Steam client made my whole PC fishy, leading me to reinstall my OS and I never went back to Steam or Civ.
6 things? What's with the seventh thing? And my first thougt when reading that title was "microtransactions", but i guess that's no longer just a trend, huh? Already an established evil...
The "always online" thing would personally hurt me even more at this moment cause my router is kaput and a new one comes only next week (thankfully I have enough old games and ones who doesn't have drm) But you can't expect everyone to have a good internet connection in the world
Digital only without a physical release - if you don’t have a physical copy, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to play that game if the digital storefront disappears (like the Nintendo e-shop)
AA games are absolutely NOT on the decline. In fact, they are on the rise. Some of the most successful games in the last few years have been AA. Examples - Remnant II, Sea of Stars, Kunitsu, Hi-Fi Rush, Lies of P, and Pacific Drive. There are tons on the horizon too.
After I rejected these "always online" games, I discovered so many older single player titles that are super fun to play. I'll play those until these stupid trend dies. I'll wait it out.
It all boils down tae the exact same problem the gaming industry has long had. No respect for the customers nor workers. You aren't anything tae them but a possible Whale that they can hook for recurrent spending.
"Video games are a new art [...] so we got a lot of miss-steps to endure." Because music and painting have been around for about 50.000 years, everything about those is perfect. Nothing at all disturbing going on. **watches the Caveman Rock Song for the hundreth time**
I should point out that what we have now isn't *all* the music of the baroque, classical and romantic periods but the small sampling that survived through popularity. A few hundred years from now there may be people thinking that "This Celine Dion lady who sang _It's All Coming Back To Me Now_ was pretty good, and it's a shame she never recorded a version of _Power of Love_ that was popular around the same time."
The issue with AI is that it removes grunt work/entry level positions. If you don't have those, how the fuck are you going to recruit new talent for cheep and have them become your best people, or those employees from other companies doing the same that you later steal, in the coming years? "I need a new art director to oversee all the Ai art. What? None exist because the industry hasn't hired artists for the last 20 years and everyone in those roles were fired, left to do other jobs, or died?"
@@jockpackage1770 you asked how people will hire for upper level positions when experience & merit are no longer considerations? Favouritism & personal gain will hold greater sway in such an event. I did mean to agree with you that it’s a bad scenario?
I'm not usually into horror, but this list is pretty terrifying when you think that's where we are today. Imagine in 20 years from now... As a reminder : Oblivion and its DLC horse armor, controversial at the time, was 17 years ago
One of my issues with more modern games is how many seem to focus, in my opinion, a little too much on the quality of the graphics, leading to the games files getting larger and larger with relatively little pay off. Plus, I don't want pixel style games to go away completely, I was a little disappointed when Disgaea 6/7 used 3D character models, because I felt that Disgaea 5 was a perfect example of how you could have a great game without using 3D character models. Another issue I personally have (that is almost definitely a less common complaint) is that turn based RPGs seem to be becoming an endangered species.
![[TH] 2024 PMGC League | Survival Stage วันที่ 1 | PUBG MOBILE Global Championship](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FVFT-PFwU80/mqdefault.jpg)
The "Always Online" requirement even for single player game is the most egregious. It's corporations blatantly ripping consumer ownership rights out of the hands of consumers, so we never physically own anything ever again. We'll just "rent" perpetually until the servers are shutdown. To those who say, "Only buy physical!", that's not a viable solution anymore since games require GB patches to even function (start), and a lot of times, the only thing on a disc these days is a code that a server authenticates to start the download process. The corporate dystopia is real.
This is pretty much the only one that matters, and I have a lot of complaints about modern games.
I think this is when you, the consumer, have to make your adult decisions and make boundaries. Even if the game looks fun, I just don’t buy it if the company has requirements I can’t/won’t put up with.
To give the benefit of the doubt to the “buy physical” crowd, this is what they’re saying too. They just won’t buy a game if it won’t work without a day 1 patch.
Then stop giving them money. They do it because you allow it. You sit here and complain but yet you still buy and play these games. That's on you.
@@stevenharper9108 While true, you have to understand that this won't affect what these companies do.
@@orbatos If enough people do it, yes it will. That's what the free market IS: the consumer gives money to the things they support, making it profitable, and doesn't give money to the things they don't like, making it unprofitable.
The problem isn't the companies; it's the fact that people are willing to continue to give those companies money even as they do blatantly anti-consumer bullcrap.
The developers of Deep Rock Galactic added a feature not to long ago along with season 5 that allows players to specifically replay previous seasons for the unlockables they might have missed out on.
It's such a simple concept to implement without requiring the player to spend money on what is essentially a "limited time pass."
Plus, the game is just generally fun.
And even before that, the items from the season didn't disapeard from the game, they just became random loot that you could get during missions.
Rock and stone!
also all the seasons are free, so they're not really a "battle pass". its just new stuff you can always get.
Those reasons are why I love DRG and Ghost Ship Games
The catch is that you can only play solo with older seasons. I assume they don't want to split their playerbase. It's a great system, though.
Always online instantly kills my interest in a game. Automatic death to preservation and zero interest to revisit. Also car games in general have 10 year lifespans at the most for licensing
The option to play alone offline has always been a very important one for me.
@@premiumheadpats4150 Same. I don't always have wifi or service. Plus I don't like dealing with griefers. If I can't play the game offline I don't get it, it's why I've mainly stuck with my 360 and PS3 these past few years.
If I ALWAYS wanted to interact with people I'd just be outside and interacting with people.
the only time i find always online to be kind of okay is when they have an inbuilt server host feature, you would still be technically online just NOT at the liberty of their systems
@@Sleepy_Kitsune Check out the StopKillingGames campaign!
Yep. I don't even bother playing the new Hitman games (which I REALLY want to play) because of this. They'll be unplayable in a few years.
One trend i dislike is Ultimate editions not actually including all content. Because they end up releasing more stuff in the ingame shops, or another dlc or expansion later down the line.
Exactly. Season Passes too. Hate when they advertise as having everything then you don't get anything and have to hope they do a second one for the remaining items.
@@sacrificiallamb4568 Especially when it feels like the Season Pass option is like the full game, and without it, it's the budget edition.
@@RickReasonnz That's even in Mobile games now. My Transformers Earth Wars game has a premium pass for 10 bucks monthly to make it easier to get loot and whatnot in the game.
I think I remember seeing Atlus go "oh no dw, Persona 3's remake is complete at launch, no extra DLC over than some costumes and stuff" and then added The Answer (which includes vital contextual information for understanding the ending of the base game) without including it in the "receive all DLC" part of the priciest game edition.
Tekken 8 just did this by releasing a $5 stage that isn't included in the Ultimate Edition. That alone caused the reviews to drop to Mostly Negative.
I don't think the thing that sank the Saint's Row reboot was comparing poorly to GTA, it was that it compared poorly to every previous Saint's Row game. And had terrible PR, which is an increasingly common trait in its own right.
and was woke as fuck
Haters gonna hate!
Im sure that if the game had been released as an original IP, and not Saints Row, it would not have flopped that hard. It was a fun casual game to pass time, but the comparison to the old Saints Row titles killed in before the first trailer was fully watched.
You just have to look at the trailer alone to see the type of crap it was gonna be. Its like a board of executives asked some random 30 year old "what the young people are all about these days?" And asked how they can 120% avoid PR backlash. And there you go, the latest saints row.
@@garjian0 Garbage games gunna garbage
Paying to play early.
If your game is available to play on the first of the month, then that’s the release date.
You’re not charging players to play early, you’re withholding the game for anyone who doesn’t pay you extra money.
This simply shouldn't be allowed. You cannot make a promise or advertisement saying a game is available on a date, then give certain people access before that date. That means it's available on the earlier date! While changing the wording wouldnt end the practice, it would end the lies in advertising saying a game is available ON DAY ONE when it is not.
Unfortunately, Ubisoft didn't get the memo with Star Wars Outlaws and their early-launch saved game issues.
If that's even an option, it turns me off the game so much that I almost certainly won't play it.
Mostly that's a did we miss any bugs that cause too much or too little fun feedback period so they can make the 9 GB patch file.
More like pay more to be last minute beta tester 😂
Every time I see a game does this trick, it's almost always starts buggy as hell or totally failed to launch and needing day a 1 patch 😂
This alongside Ellen's video on the Funko Pop game is great and I'm enjoying the videos that are more serious and critical of the industry and the direction it's going in. That and the more personal videos like Mike's recent entry on Flight Simulator and his dad are feeling like such a welcome and delightfully fresh approach to the channel while not sacrificing what made it great in the first place. Just love it.
Seconded, it's important to engage critically with the things that are important to us and recognise where improvements can be made (or when failings can be... unmade)
@@basicjenkins Yeah my favorite videos on the channel are the list videos of course but also the ones where they each talk about their favourite of something.
Except Mike’s video was 100% sponsored content, but wasn’t labeled as such. No bueno.
Ellen (and Luke held the whiteboard)’s video about how much in-game currency you can earn in live service games was really good as well, emphasises how little you get for your time in those games. Which is fine if you’re having fun, but you can play other games that don’t try to tempt you with fake rewards
@@no_genius I forgot that one! Yeah, that was great
"That's why we will never get a Kingdoms of Amalur II..."
*Ellen screams randomly across town*
and so do I 😂
HERESY!!!!!
Jane has a death wish…
Plus, the developers would probably have a hard time convincing the state of Rhode Island to pay for it again.
would have been funny if we did still hear her scream in the video
7: VERY poor optimization of disk space and GPU usage, AND priority of graphic fidelity over running a smooth 60FPS
A lot, I mean a very overwhelmingly lot of games are CPU bottlenecked. Even if you have the GPU power of 10 4090s, you would still get 30fps because you literally can't have a 8GHz CPU. When that's the case, games would have no other option but to raise the resolution to make use of excess GPU power.
I mean, if having 60 fps means the game can only get half of the NPCs, or the map is half the size, or NPC AIs are half as smart, then usually it's a better choice to just have 30fps. Only very specific types of games would benefit more on higher framerate than better complexity.
This!
THIS, way too many games have such bad performances, im playing 60 fps for a few minutes then out of nowhere my frame rate drops and just stay low then back up and then low again.
The other issue with replacing the old game with a new game is that if it ends up being worse than what came before, you can’t go back to the fun one. It becomes ‘take it or leave it’. See Warcraft 3 for a prime example.
Or Club Penguin
@@KathySage234Or without mods. Various old games that never got their base version re-released....
Like Sonic Adventure 1. They only gave us a port of a port of a port with the current Sonic Adventure DX on Steam.
Thankfully in this case, however, fans let you mod the game to be almost exactly like the Dreamcast original. (With some new bells and whistles too.)
Or Overwatch "2"
@@thornykettle112more like Overwatch -1
Man I loved Warcraft 2..... I would have loved for the same feeling and character of 2 to have been replicated
Im not a fan of all the spit shine "remasters" of games barely a decade or so old and still completely playable as they are, seems like they're really just there to get existing fans to buy it twice. It also plays into the replacing old games item from this list
The entertainment industry is getting more and more risk averse. Failures like Concord only reinforce the trend of "never risk anything new, if it sold once it will sell again."
@@tretretre1111 But Concord wasn’t even really doing anything new part the of the reason why it failed.
exactly, this is why i rarely, rarely, bother with remasters. it's remake or nothing for me.
@@Santoryu90regardless, it was a new IP, and its failure signals (wrongly, as always) to the money people that "new IPs are too dangerous, approve the next remake"
@@soulreapermagnum which brings us to another item for the list: "branding remasters as remakes"
The seventh list entry was too disturbing. We clearly couldn't have handled it.
Thank you for sparing us!
I think 7 was the never seeing a Kingdom of Amalur 2
It's probably just "amogus"
I think it might be meta-commentary on how games are sold incomplete and are expected to be patched later. In a way, this video is released to us "incomplete" and we expect this to be "patched"/unlisted when the fixed version shows up.
@@MakusinMeringue if it is like that then the "fixed/patched" version will be the sequel which will probably end up being a video titled "# disturbing trends by video game companies that we could happen in the future," not actually addressing current issue lol
Maybe seventh point was about female characters deliberately made less sexually-appealing and less beautiful than before (for example compare women of Mass Effect Trilogy to women of Mass Effect Andromeda, or women of Mortal Kombat 9 to women of MK X, MK 11 and MK One, or women of Injustice Gods Among Us to women in Injustice 2, or woman from Horizon Zero Dawn to woman of Horizon Forbidden West), but then point was muted by radical feminist's lobby.
#7 Forcing single player studios to make live-service games.
This could be number 1
So… I paid real money for a “limited time” skin in OG Overwatch. Not only did they unexist the game, but they also changed my purchased (with real money) skin.
That’s a twofer on this list
There was also a skin that could only be earned by playing Blizzard's League of Legends clone, and another that only came from watching their e-gaming league. Then they just... made them in-game items you could buy. I spent hours installing and playing a game and setting up accounts and links and streaming videos I wouldn't be playing otherwise, because they insisted these items were rare and exclusive.
Can we add battlepasses to the list?
"We see you like playing the game and that you like earning stuff in our game. Would you like to pay to do both?"
No?
"Hmm how about under a strict time limit?"
What?
"Alright you drive a hard bargin, how about all that plus if you pay more money, you don't have to earn that stuff anymore"
... you want me to pay for a job, and then pay more to not have to do that job
"Bonus skin?"
I'm going outside.
On the other hand, when done right it can be a good thing. Fortnite for example. I had a friend who played enough that he paid for one battlepass years ago, and has gotten every single one since for free, by earning currency through the pass. He's gonna play one way or another, and being able to get the next pass for free by playing just means he's not spending cash on the game.
@@BobBobson The only battlepass that I've seen that does it right is the Deep Rock Galactic one, but that one basically runs counter to the basic idea of a battlepass.
It's _completely_ free, doesn't have that big of a grind, and all of the rewards get dumped into the general pool of cosmetics at the end of the season for players to earn.
@@leadpaintchips9461 And now you can straight-up just keep playing seasons even after they ended, battlepass included.
@@leadpaintchips9461 There's also Helldivers 2 Warbonds. While they're not literally free, the currency used to unlock them is earned in-game, the player has a lot of control over the order of unlocks (later pages of unlocks require you spend a minimum number of medals, but you can choose which rewards to unlock on a page as you progress through them), and there's no time limit whatsoever. And the only thing that spending actual money can do is unlock the *ability to spend medals* on the Warbond, not actually unlock rewards from the Warbond.
@@leadpaintchips9461 Helldivers 2 Warbonds are also pretty good, for *also* basically not following the normal battlepass format. They aren't technically free, but earning the in-game currency for them isn't very difficult, there's no time limit for accessing the rewards, the player has a bit of freedom in choosing what to unlock as they go through it, and spending money can only give you access to the Warbond, not any of the actual rewards.
The worst part of the always online aspect is this isn't a bug but a feature. The intention is so we don't fully own our games so we are forced to play whatever comes next, if it even does.
On the topic of Always Online games, theres a movement in Europe and I think a couple countries in other regions called Stop Killing Games. If you're interested in making sure that your games don't just stop working when the developers decide to stop supporting online features, please google Stop Killing Games and sign the petition to have legislation passed to prevent games like The Crew from being destroyed.
The EU is an unelected bunch of busybody bureaucrats that want nothing good for anyone except themselves. Don't encourage them to impose regulations on anything. If you want "always online" to stop, be consequent and don't buy always online games.
Or just stop allowing these developers to make games that way. Speak with your wallet. Don't just continue to buy the games and then whine about them.
This movement is headed by Ross Scott. He went with Europe because he believed that the US was a lost cause.
I haven't bought a game since the ps3 era. Yet here we are. Truly sage advice you give.
@@LordBaktor There's nowhere near enough people willing to do that. The games are good. They're worth buying. The problem is that, despite BUYING the product, you don't get to keep it.
AA games are how you get balance and new ideas. Focus and THQ Nordic do a good job. Vampyr and Darksiders were great
Oh hey, a fellow Vampyr fan! Hi friend!
LMFAO no.
True, realism is expensive so I can see why AA tend to focus on style.
So fun playing a AAA game that has the MC in pedestrian clothes instead of creatively designed ones.
my only real complaint about Darksiders was expecting me to believe my guy can't fit through the chasm between the bars of gates
A fellow Darksiders fan, hello!
"A single failure can bring down a studio."
Apparently so can a single success. *cough* Hi Fi Rush *cough*
@midweststyle, yeah, it's frustrating, because these, "Massive Hit--or Notihing" studios (or, more accurately, the corporations that own them) too often don't consider a "minor" success worthy of carrying to the next level--or next sequel.
I honestly believe that the decision to close Tango Gameworks was made even before Hi-fi Rush was released.
They didn't even advertise the game at all and were obviously expecting for the game to fail thus giving them an excuse to close them down.
"Trial and error" is a suggestion. Sometimes you don't need trial. Sometimes it's straight to error.
@@MrQwertysystem
Given the lukewarm reception to Ghostwire: Tokyo (which I thought was good), is it any wonder why they'd think that way?
@@AdderTude It still sold decently well though I would guess that due to its higher marketing budget it didn't make that much money.
Hi-fi Rush on the other hand was a smashing success both commercially and critically.
They had one mediocre game between 2 succesful ones.
The closure of the studio doesn't make any sense from outside point of view.
Everything converging into a single genre and gameplay loop.
Halo, Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge, Zelda, Gears of War, Forza, and Dragon Age all basically have the same open world, map unlock, faux-progression gameplay loops and level structure despite starting as entirely different genres
What Andy said: "Star Citizen too"
What I heard: "Start Citizen 2". I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the sequel was in process before they released the full game, but I thought I might have missed a thing.
Really, we should be on Star Citizen 4 by now :P
I think he just misspoke. "Star Citizen too" doesn't make sense in context either.
Then I point out GTA 6, no launch date, 2 billion to make (so far), not demo or anything, while taking the same amount of time as Star Citizen. I'll keep playing it, just like I keep playing No Man's Sky.
Oh there’ll be a Secret Sextuple Deluxe Giga-Admiral tier promising (but not necessarily providing) early access to Store Citizen 2 for the token fee of an average annual gross before this thing gets to 1.0, just be patient
Game is taking so long the sequel will come out first
Things shouted at 12:19
- Troy Baker!
- HORSE ARMOUR!!! HORSE armour!
- Where did [incomprehensible] go?!
- What the hell is Death Stranding about?
thanks i needed this lol
Doing God’s work.
7: List Videos have fewer items than normal.
It's basically inflation.
That are running out of content
That's _shrinkflation_
Facts
Inflation
The AAA or indie really pisses me off. AAA studios will say "making games is expensive" then some guy alone in his free time using 100 dollars worth of pre-made assets manages to make a game. How about instead of expending 300 million dollars on ONE AAA, they spend 10 million on 30 AA games? So even if one goes full Concord, you still have 29 other chances of success.
It's in the pursuit of better and better graphics which, imo, has gotten out of hand.
Up until the PS4 era, yes, graphics increases were noticeable. But now, it seems to require exponentially more money for marginal improvements in graphical quality.
Do these companies not understand that the human eye can only see so much on a monitor?
@@Vilamus A lot of games on my steam account with the most playtime are either over a decade old, 2d, or deliberately go for a retro/pixel artstyle; I don't need to see skin pores to enjoy my gaming.
If I see a game with over... let's say 50GB, I automatically consider it as something that values style over substance.
@@tornadoawe I think the newest game I play on Steam is Cyberpunk 2077 when I got it a couple of years back.
We all know how well that game launched.
Most likely you will have 30 flops. Do you think same cooks will start cook diferently?
There are people already complaining about bad graphics in AAA games if they are not of the highest standards.
Games like Armored Core 6 or SW:Outlaws deal with critics about having PS3 Era graphics.
And while there have been more failures overall lately in that AAA Business, they are still a good margin above the average failurerate in the AA and Indie sektion.
For every Life is Strange there are hundreds of failed AA titles.
For every Among us there are tenthousands of failed Indies.
In the AAA Industrie those failures seem to stack up, but the ratio is still reversed. For every failure there are still several AAA titles that made a good amount of profit.
About the most distubing thing in videogames 5 years ago, someone say "Horse armor" I have terrible news, horse armor was 15+ years ago
I agree with Jane, there SHOULD be more salted caramel games!
I am glad to say I have contributed on that front.
Salted Caramel 2: ASSAULT of the Pumpkin Spice. Coming soon.
7: Hyperrealism graphics that explodes file sizes and burn processors
As I've held ever since "4k" was announced: I don't need to be able to count the characters' pores, I just need to be able to tell what's going on.
What's worst because this games take way more time and money to make
Also the sheer weight of the games, call of duty shouldn't need like 150 gigs
That isn't even my main problem (although it is just as important) but that it takes away more development time which is why we get so few games together now and suddenly a bunch at ones.
LMFAO dont get cheap equipment then.
If they made B tier games they wouldn't need so many successes. The only reason a single game failing shuts down a studio is because the games they're making cost tens of millions of dollars, if not more. Cheaper games allow for more failures, that's an obvious fact that these studios just don't understand.
It’s a similar problem with films right now where everything is a bloated-budget “blockbuster,” because it’s not about making money, it’s about making THE MOST money. It’s short-sighted and bad for art.
@@chellyfishing Was just going to say that. Increased revenue led to increased budgets, which led to increased bloat at the companies (huge HR departments, way to many managers, etc.), which led to mid budget movies and games not being viable anymore.
@@LordBaktor I think Matt Damon spoke about this aswell.
Before you could make a film for 25 and put in an additional 25 for marketing for a combined 50.
but now you put in 100 with an additional 100 meaning you'd have to make 4x more to break even, let alone a profit.
I mean... Marvel just paid 90 mill for RDJ aparently...
Putting all the proverbial eggs into one proverbial basket.
@@D4C_LoveTrain1 His networth is apparently 300 mil 😅
You forgot number 7:
Insult your player base when you produce low quality products.
I don't know who pioneered this baffling anti-profit, ego tripping trend, but two major examples I can think of is Warner Brothers studios calling their PC playerbase "entitled" for complaining about the completely unplayable and unoptimized Arkham Knight port that they deliberately skimped out on by hiring a cheaper dev team to port it,
The result shocked nobody except Warner Brothers.
More recently, we have Ubisoft, with their recent fiascos regarding Assassin's Creed and Star Wars, throwing all kinds of popular insults towards their players.
Disparaging critics is something that creatives of all sorts have been trying to do for a long time now. When people say bad things about product and people hear those bad things about product, they're less willing to buy product. This is just their horribly short sighted attempt at delegitimizing critics so more people consume product.
"Don't you guys have cell phones?"
I have enjoyed Outlaws but yeah that has to stop
Applies to Saints Row more than its own listing. Competing with GTA is not why Volition died. They did it to themselves with this idiotic "modern audience", "if you don't like it, don't buy it" schtick.
Frankly, their garbage reboot couldn't even compete with the studio's previous work.
If those companies expect their customers to get comfortable with no longer own their games, then those companies should get comfortable REAL FAST to not getting their customer's money anymore. That level of corporate entitlement is found generally with the younger generation, as is the political agenda that generation is pushing nowadays. Like the newest assassin's creed.
The other side of eternal Early Access are the games that magically hit 1.0 status the moment the publisher abruptly pulls the plug, no matter how far the game is from meeting promised features or how "unfinished" it obviously is. The disturbing aspect of Star Citizen isn't its eternal development, but rather how it has been sold and what it sells. The disturbing aspect of The Day Before wasn't that it died due to being released too early, but rather that it was a scam that was never going to deliver on its promises. (Fun note: Although Fntastic was shut down after The Day Before, they are now on Kickstarter asking for $20k to fund their revival and next game. For extra fun, the first promise of this new Fntastic is that *from now on* their development and marketing will be based on the principle of honesty.)
"From now on"? Well sign me right up!
Here's the ultimate disturbing thing.When a game like destiny, 2, which at launch had no contracts later makes you sign a contract a year later with their next big DLC and then in the following years, they proceed to remove almost all of the original game and still have the audacities to charge you money for more content that they also will later remove.
I think the fact that single player based experiences like Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3 came out and were such a phenomenal hit, should have led to a change in what the consumer obviously wanted at the time. Quality titles that were complete upon release, but could be added to with dlc or patches. But it feels like you can't go a week without hearing about a live service game that was hyped to oblivion and then either fell apart immediately or was a disappointment. I expect there will be lots of Concords in the future.
And the concept isn't even a new one. I think most of the industry just forgot how to make single player games (although, BG3 is also a lot of fun with a friend. Optional story co-op in a single player game is one of my favorite things)
keyword should but when those games came out you seen so many in the industry downplay or claim they where anomalies thing is the industry does not want to change it will not change to it crashes again
@@SammaclauseGamgee They didn't forget, they just saw the financial successes of multiplayer, GaaS games and wanted a piece of that. I mean look at how stupidly successful PUBG, Fortnite BR, and FIFA was/is. A business would be negligent towards their shareholders (IIRC a felony for CEOs and boards of directors in 'Murica) to not at least attempt to get some of that bag.
@@leadpaintchips9461 for companies like Bioware, just as an example, their strength was in making single player games. If every company chases the same audience, only some of them are going to be successful. Gamers usually don't buy every multiplayer game that comes out; they only have time to really play one or two of them. Diversifying your portfolio isn't just a good idea for individuals.
The always online bs is really ridiculous. Best example was when the PSN went down for hours last night/this morning. Yeah, games that actually use the online for core gameplay, whatever, but hey, EA? Why the heck couldn't I play The Sims 4 instead? You know, a very single-player experience. :/
At least Elden Ring had my back. FromSoft just let's you play offline without the few online needed things like bloodstains, ect.
i hate the switch to online only single player games. spotty connection or no connection already limits the games you can play, we don't need every game to be out of reach when there is no reason for it.
I'm glad you're addressing some of the more insidious tactics game companies are using to try and get more money from people, it needs to be talked about more.
Comment edition #7 - Changing the terms of the game post launch/reviews. Gran Turismo 7. Tekken 8 etc.
Maybe I'm just old and tired and slow and poor, but there seems to be a trend toward having 2^64 polygons and colours on each model, 8k x 4k resolution, 120 frames per second, twenty information feeds to the player active at any time, reaction windows measured in clock cycles and gameplay roughly equivalent to the stuff we were playing in 320 x 256 resolution in 256 colours at 20 frames per second back in 1988. Remember caring about characters and their stories and taking the time to read the text?
Yeah, I'm certainly sick of my friends always talking about how great games look. I couldn't care less. I want intresting mechanics and/or a great story.
"Why don't you buy a PS5? You can even play your PS4 games on it and they look better." - yeah, but I can also play them on my PS4 *shocking*
And all those games getting a re-release for the new system, with slightly better optics. Why? I already played it or can get the already existing version (which happens to also run on the newer console).
There's just so much annoying stuff going on...
People do, and I've often heard people complaining about bad games that look great. It's basically this.
theres a reason why Astrobot has sold so well it wasn't that type of the game we more games like that .
The two things aren’t mutually exclusive though, we should be able to have both.
and funny thing is most of the time you wont rly feel a difference
like why do i need to see that the dirt on the floor is actually its own model
i wont zoom into it while playing it
Since I've seen a few commenters making the same point, I'll join in with the "cranky old-timer" complaint: I couldn't care less about hyper-realistic graphics. First Person games give me motion sickness and nothing shuts down my brain faster than conversations about frame rate. Just give me a nice-looking, fun to play game with a decent story and likable characters, and I'll still be playing it in a decade when all of the cutting-edge tech games have been long forgotten.
Hell, I'll take _Morrowind_ being ugly as sin but with a unique setting that stands out from the crowd over something that looks like a live-action film while melting my computer into toxic slag.
I agree. One of my favourite games to this day is Dragon Quest 9 on the DS, which has that half 2d half polygonal "3d" as its style. It might be ugly by today's standards, but I love it all the same
@@emberinferno6227 DQ IX has plenty of other avenues to dislike it (post game being a massive series of grinds, having quests on the cartridge locked behind Nintendo Wi-Fi or whatever their proprietary thing was called), it actually looks outstanding for a DS game, imo.
@@tornadoawe that's why emulators are awesome. After an honest, grindy attempt, I added an exp multiplier cheat to the emulator so that I could enjoy the game in a reasonable time frame
Games with a good stylistic art style will hold up for years compared to realistic art style, and if the game itself is really good then people will care less about the graphics anyway.
7: Re-Making the same game every year and expecting people to buy it. Looking at sports franchises such as NBA, FIFA and Madden. Though sports franchises aren't the only games that suffer from this. The frankly insane release schedule for Call of Duty games leaves little room for innovation. Ubisoft development team is also guilty of a similar practice, with all of Ubisofts recent games being open-world sandboxes with very similar mechanics even when they are IPs with distinctively different worlds. A Star Wars game shouldn't feel like an Assassin's Creed game.
Agreed. As much fun as it is to give EA shit, at least they only release new Sims games when there are MASSIVE updates in graphics that the current engine can't handle. So we have Sims 4 plus a bunch of optional expansion packs.
7: pumping out sequels when an update or expansion pack would do the job. I hate all the sequels that some games have that have little to no differences between the old game and the new one. Like Call of Duty. I bet you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in terms of graphics and I'm pretty sure they're made on the same engine. Why not just sell expansion packs? I know it's easy (and justified) to make fun of EA, but at least they're doing The Sims right. They only ever released sequels when it was absolutely necessary instead of every couple of years. I mean, we're only on Sims 4 and how many Call of Duty games are there? Now the base Sims 4 game is free and you only have to pay for expansion packs. These packs give items, more character customization, and interactions. This would work for other games. Have players buy the core game, then let them buy expansion packs with more skins, weapons, maps, and story modes.
It is not a problem. Suply and demand, simple. Consumer wants what consumer wants.
that's not remake, that's re-skin
At least Atlus waits years to do that while delivering even more quality content.
It's not true that we only have triple A or indie games left! Wasn't there a game calling themselves a quadruple A game recently?!
Yeah ubisoft tried to say their game "skull and bones" was a quadruple a game. It was basically a worse version of assassins creed black flags naval exploration and combat. The game was a major failure
Basically the amount of "A"s in AAA doesn't really matter. In the movie market, there are only AAA and B movies, and so any other gradings of games should be considered for more detailed description only.
And there's a AAAAA (quintouple) game coming soon.
Will never touch anything the Gen AI in it. Was interested in that Inzoi but nope. Never touching it now. No surprise Activision is getting into it at all. As I read at one point, I want AI to wash my dishes, so I can have more time for art, not do my art so I have more time for dishes.
A great video as always, thanks team!
Cry.
I don’t think the new saints row game failed because of its size alone and seeing how they spent some of their money sponsoring TH-camrs and twitch streamers I don’t think it was as small as you say. If you go back to the AA games you mentioned, all three had stellar writing, whereas the new saints row was painful to endure in that regard. I might be wrong but I think a AA game lives and dies by how well it can communicate with the player, mostly by its story but it could be by amazing playability too, like Ghost Runner
Yeah lol. SR3 had an entire enemy faction that was making fun of hip, trendy kids and the reboot turned you into them. OG Boss would beat the new characters up for something petty like the way they dress, while complaining about the fact he/she now has to have an Internet connection to play some very old video game.
Edit: at some point either before or after this interaction, Boss would sprint full Tilt into a group of them, drop kick one of them and use their body as a surfboard down a couple feet of pavement. Because that's how the Boss rolls, obviously.
The Boss's interactions with that faction just made me think of an 80's kid being mad at 00's kids, and that was funny to me.
Budget and scale weren't the reason Saint's Row reboot failed. It was that the game felt soulless. It was "zany," but somehow still predictable to the core. I don't think they made a mistake following the SR3/SR4 formula, though a return to the serious tone also would have been welcome, but the reboot constantly felt like it was trying far too hard to be cheeky and wacky. It came off like it was constantly explaining the jokes it just told.
It's a real shame it took the whole studio down with them, because I really loved Agents of Mayhem. That game was still the Volition I knew and loved.
Yep. Previous entries had a ridiculously high level of variety in mini-games and missions. This felt like a rinse and repeat of the same 2, maybe 3 things the whole time with poor writing on top.
@@ryllharu trying to be wild and zany while subscribing to what's acceptable to say/do is pretty boring. I've heard some whispers about GTA6 and....both franchises thrive on being offensive.
Edit: GTA with the pure crime stuff and SR with...."pony cart" racing. I still really enjoy SR2, but SR3 is the GOAT for me. SR4 I can take or leave. But no modern day social turmoil will work in either franchise, unless it's made fun of, in GTA because you have crime to commit, and in SR because you're irreverent, regardless.
@@ryllharuit took me a while but I grew to love agents of mayhem for 2 reasons one like you said it kept the sense of humor it felt like while not saints row it had the spirit of it plus gat was back and still as awesome as ever 😎
On the skins thing, this is what I hate most about Sea of Thieves. In a game where you're supposedly able to express yourself, literally almost every good pirate cosmetic, and damn near every ship cosmetic entirely, require money to buy, and that shit's expensive so you can't actually buy it with in-game currency easily whatsoever
The lack of couch co-op for big title games. Let me play with with my friends. It seems like only Nintendo hasn't forgotten that humans, and gamers, are social creatures and enjoy being near each other.
Exactly! I find it so hard to find games for me and my mom to play together cause they're all either single player or online multiple player only.
Like, I remember games use to have both offered, now some reason they're getting rid of local. It's sad.
The loss of the AA game market truly makes me sad. They were almost always my favourite games in the past, full of weird and experimental and often very silly ideas that made for a kind of uniqueness that is really only found in the Indie market these days. Makes me feel so very old.
Nothing lasts forever. Eventually every company gets too complacent and crumbles.
Check Focus library. Tons of AA games here.
AA games are still made, checkout Terminator and Robocop. Definitely not indie nor AAA.
4:15 "What more do you want?" A good Saints Row game
On the topic of AAA and indie, I've been playing a lot of the middle-tier games, what I like to call AA. Games like Helldivers 2, The Finals, and Remnant 2 are all games that I would describe as "larger than indie" but still not AAA
My favorite series pretty much exclusively makes AA games, and they actually made a profit in 2023! The company is called Tri-Ace, and the probably most famous member of the team is Matoi Sakuraba, aka, one of the composers for the Dark Souls franchise.
I tried Flintlock recently and really enjoyed its take on souls combat with a Tony-Hawk combo system.
Really sucks how it got dog piled for starring a Black woman, though.
They sell big though. People buy consoles just to play FIFA (or whatever it is now) and CoD. Big market, not one they’ll ignore
The Finals? That game that used AI voice assets?
@@martyncurrill2766 yes, and the 2 voice actors consented to using their voice to generate new lines of dialog. One of the few ethical uses of AI
7: Everything has a battle pass. It's so exhausting. I miss getting sweet rewards for completing special quests or beating bosses. Now, with over-monetization, everything cool is locked behind a battle pass.
For me BP is instant "no purchase" for that game.
Thank you for mentioning Inzoi. That entire AI texture generation will land them in sooo much hot water with copyright holders when it launches theybe lucky if they don't get sued like crazy after launch.
Two things are virtually guaranteed when games allow user-generated content: (1) copyright infringement, and (2) flagrant smut. Sometimes both at the same time, and both with the potential to cause headaches for the publisher.
The Saints Row reboot's problems go very far beyond "unfair comparisons to GTA," lmao.
That and "Budget constraints" making it AA, also wasn't a problem
I know the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover" is a thing that people tend to believe, but AI art on covers or in games is a terrible way to go. People will only remember your covers and your art by how odd and anatomically incorrect it is. Even if AI gets to a point where it is a good enough that the human eye cannot tell the difference between it and real art - it can never truly make something new. Which, with artists already removing their art from places AI can get a hold of it, will eventually result in AI art BASED ON AI art. And since I'm already annoyed with the homogenization of a lot of art being similarly styled in games and animation (studios not trusting their artists or even their own audiences to enjoy or invest in something unique) this will just compound upon that problem.
The always online component to modern gaming has so ruined it for me I have completely abandoned it. Not only is it annoying here where I suffer a break in service 3 times a day (just for five minutes but it’s enough to cause these systems to think I’m trying something)… But it’s made me realize that without being online, I don’t own my games. Without verification, I can’t play. I’ve sold all my consoles past PS2 and Xbox 360. As soon as the publishers decide to shit down servers to any of the consoles past these, they simply do nothing. This is not just annoying, it’s planned. :/ I’m sticking with my older consoles. Physical games. They work.
Valorant isn’t even the only Riot game that #6 applies to. They do it for League of Legends as well. I remember when the Dark Cosmic Jhin variant skin was first announced and nearly everyone had a fit over it. For a while we thought the backlash would make the devs understand we didn’t want that, but instead they doubled down and said “We want to give players who are able to get these special skins the option to have them.”
Translation: “We want to give the 1%’ers a reason to spend money on our game.”
Gotta say, the Saint's Row reboot didn't fail because of comparison to GTA it failed because of comparison to the original series, yeah it had a few jokes, and some whacky gimmicks similar to the originals, but when I played it to 100% only one joke actually got me to laugh, the rest were kinda forced and while the gameplay wasn't bad, it just didn't feel like a Saints Row game
"Oh, I've gone offline" he says while his LIVE streaming which is still running, this is the real issue.
Servers crashing and complaining about your internet connection, then shutting down the single player game.
Allow me to speak for Ellen when I say WHY? !WHY CANT WE HAVE KINGDOMS OF AMALUR 2?!
Because the state of Rhode Island owns the IP and don't want to develop it?
@@SymbioteMullet what the hell? A state owns the IP?
@@runningthemeta5570 yeah, the rough version of it is the original owners took a state backed loan, and defaulted, so Rhode Island took their assets, including the Amalur IP.
It's more complicated than my description, but basically... yeah.
@@runningthemeta5570 It certainly does, the studio took a loan from the state and when the defaulted and went bankrupt, RI took the rights to the game. There was also a time Pepsi owned like the 6th largest Naval fleet in the world, history is freaking weird.
Also, the middling success means a studio that would conceivably develop it would be taking a massive risk.
I don’t like the trend of terrible quality control. Star Wars outlaws should not have launched with that game breaking bug
5:16 - Ha! When the game went offline it went to an ad for me 😄
Same
"Always Online" assures these scummy companies can kill a game and not get sued for it after you realize you don't get a refund, they'll keep doing it as long as they keep getting away with it.
Similar to the "always online" thing (which is the future we all rejected at the Xbox One launch and have still ended up with), I downloaded the demo of the new Prince of Persia on the Switch recently. Went to play it and was told that I'd have to sign up to a Ubisoft account and have a stable internet connection to do so. Needing to both be always online and have an account with the publisher just to play a demo is mad. So I went the alternate route of uninstalling the demo and not buying the game.
Also, I don't buy early access games. I'm not paying for the privilege of beta (or in many cases alpha) testing your game. Get back to me when it's actually finished.
I met friends through Overwatch's random matchmaking, and ended up playing in tournaments with them. Those were some of the best memories I have gaming in my entire 37-year life. I miss OW, but won't touch OW2's hideous changes and monetization. It really does feel like losing a friend. I miss the days of dedicated srvers. If I want to play Unreal Tournament or UT2004, favourites from high school, I still can.
I was never that into OW but I have friends who still play and I simply can’t because of the predatory monetization. Sorry something you had such a good time with is gone 🙁
You can add Warcraft III under the "replacing something old with something new" category.
Anyway, this video was on point.
It is still taking some getting used to, to see all members of OutsideXbox on an Outside Xtra video without Ellen (and Luke apart from 1 short cameo)
Yeah, it's weird.
Jane saying "if publishers could get away with it" is pretty much the state of the games industry currently.
"If [noun] could get away with it," is pretty much the state of the world, currently.
I very much appreciate the existence of this video and every entry on it, but especially 1, 3, and 6.
The option to play offline will always be something I appreciate greatly, loot boxes were fine as long as they weren't pay to win (or, at least they were much better than the systems we have now), and the end of Overwatch was painfully tragic.
Regarding it being more lucrative to hate: I actually prefer content about liking games that's why Oxbox and Oxtra are the only gaming channels I'm subscribed to.
I no longer have the time or energy to waste thinking about things I hate.
I've found myself disassociating with communities that have nothing but negative things to say all the time (ex. Star Wars fandom, Superhero fandom and generally most things that have become pop culture). It's exhausting hearing people whine and moan all the time. I think the thing that has kept me here with the Ox crew is that not only are they positive to listen too but the culture they've fostered with their fans is a mostly positive one as well.
@@darnell9806 Yeah exactly like why are you even here if you hate the thing?
On that note I find Baldur's Gate and Yakuza fandoms to be among the best. Just there to talk about and enjoy the games.
@@darnell9806 so you just want a echo chamber but with toxic positivity is what you are saying yes?
We happy few is game about you😂
@@LunaPPK I think it's perfectly fine to criticize something and to respectfully debate.
Unfortunately people think they are invincible and anonymous on the Internet so most of the time there is no debate or criticism and simply personal attacks and threats from cowards. And those are completely worthless to engage with.
Also you're not going to change someone's mind arguing with them online the best you can hope for is to eventually respectfully disagree. Why bother? Usually what happens is once they run out of arguments or talking points they switch to insults. How boring.
The lack of difficulty settings in games because there are so many, "Souls like" games around. As both an old AND disabled player I would love to try out Sekiro or Elden Ring but the lack of difficulty settings makes it impossible for me to play them. I KNOW that the punishing difficulty is part of the package but as with any other game I would play at a level I find challenging. Nothing would stop you from playing on the highest hellish level, it would just open up the game to more players which is a GOOD thing. Health problems can happen at any time and we are all getting older, they will sooner or later effect all of us. Till then you can happily ignore the difficulty level adjuster in the accesibility settings for the rest of us it will open up a lot of the games that are currently being released.
We've been over this before and you people still don't get it. I'll start by saying that while it sucks that you're disabled, you can still play 99% of games, it will always be weird that you think you're owed that 1% too. There are people who hate reading, they don't get to play games with heavy text dialogue. There are people who just don't have quick reflexes, so they don't get to play a lot of games that require fast reflexes. Everyone has games they can't play for one reason or another, and no one else demands to be accommodated in every game.
All of that aside, the lack of difficulty settings means that every single player who beats Sekiro or Elden Ring did so at the same level. We fought the same bosses with the same amount of health and the same access to the same weapons. That's why there aren't difficulty settings, because we lose the community we've built if they added them. That's the price that has to be paid for those communities, that some people are left out of them. Again, it sucks that you can't be a part of the community, I am genuinely sorry that that's the case, but the answer isn't to destroy what we have just so you guys can be a part of a new community. I'm glad FromSoftware sees this the way I do, because otherwise you'd be excluding the rest of us just so you could be in the community.
ehhh
Difficulty is a bit more complicated than that. It's not a slider that makes sense with every game. I agree with accessibility being a problem. But difficulty is not the same as accessibility.
Those games have some hard parts, but the difficulty comes from learning. People beat these games with stupid meme builds all the time.
Git Gud
I think most soulslike games have a way to make them easier, but that usually involves skipping what makes them fun/good in the first place
People need to learn to stop buying games. That's the only way we'll see change. Developer or publisher does something dodgy? Don't buy in! FOMO or no, it'll only get worse if you buy in! I swear to you that there are better and cheaper games out there that don't have the baggage.
This argument never works. All of us who genuinely care already don't buy these games. I haven't given Ubisoft or Bioware any money in years and will continue to avoid doing so. Other people don't care though, millions of them will still buy this garbage.
@@NottherealLucifer Sometimes we say things not because anyone is listening, but because it must be said.
(Seriously though, it cost me nothing to leave a comment so if even one person reads it and thinks "God, yeah, I should really cut back on who I'm giving money to." It'll be a net positive)
That's not how it works with corporations, ever wonder why games and movies are considered a flop or not based on opening sales? They market and sell based on quarterly stock options. They don't want to keep games running unless there is a recurring income like subscriptions and micro transactions.
Yeah if only that was how it worked. All that would do is make the big publishers close down all the studios that make their "failed" games, putting thousands of people out of work, all so that the CEOs won't have to make any less money. Heck, they're already out here closing down studios that make *successful* games. Regulation is the only real solution. Making exploitative business practices illegal is the only way to make it stop.
I have a price cap on games now. It's not a 100% rule, if there's something I really want then I'll save up for it, but otherwise I won't spend more than about US$25. I don't actually think it will change much in the industry, but at least it will make me stop feeling like I've wasted a huge amount of money.
"Loot boxes being phased out..." Errr, didn't the court's of some countries make them illegal because they were deemed 'gambling' and therefore could only be utilised by those over the age deemed appropriate by the requisite courts, with the onus of the checks being the responsibility of games companies themselves, along with hefty fines for failing to carry out those checks?
Hot take: Live service sequels need the game before them to be killed, splitting the player base between 2 games, even if only 10% of hardcore players stay behind, can keep the new game from reaching the heights these huge devs need their game to reach
The Saints row reboot didn't fail because it wasn't GTA, it failed cause it was bad
And it wasnt Saints Row lol
Exactly, Saints row 3 and 4 sold well and no one on earth will say its similar or competing with GTA 4 or 5.
The reboot just failed at being a saints row game.
It wasn't the lack of budget that did in the Saints Row reboot, it was the direction that the reboot took. The previous 2 games leaned into being silly, colorful and fun. The reboot... it tried. It was very obvious that it was trying to be something new and it just didn't click with anybody. Especially not long term fans of the series.
@@Chris_Sizemorethey should have called it Saints Row: Terminally Online
Very good points, I agree with all of them.
Not sure if you'd include this as part of the "always online" one, but DRM. Causes more problems than it solve and is blatantly anti-consumer.
Lack of optimization - for both indie and AAA games. And the most issue is that gamers lean into that tendency, expecting an AAA game requiring a new GPU for it; when earlier you would expect an AAA game run better, cuz the company have the money to spend on devs who would optimize the game. That lowers the quality of nowadays games, ESPECIALLY AAA games, since companies would NOT do optimization properly simply because people EXPECT an AAA game to run poorly on a 1 y o GPU.
Particles where textures would suffice, dynamic lighting where baked lighting would suffice, 3D enviroments in the distant background where a 2D picture would suffice (e.g.: skybox), etc.etc. And infamous ray tracing - it feels like games are MADE to run poorly to make an illusion of AAA game.
To have realistic and/or pretty graphics and smooth gameplay you DON'T NEED to have a supercomputer. You need a supercomputer cuz companies continue to cut costs on optimization and are making games that spend much more resources than they actually need.
and the insane install sizes of some of the new games. I mean hell I look at something like Warframe, still getting content and updates and is only 40gb after all these years. But then some new release with less content wants 150gb.
@@filanfyretracker real 😭
2000: a year when a 700 MB CD can fit 100 games
2024: a year when a 1TB SSD barely can fit 10 games (if you're lucky)
5:19 and an ad pops up😂😂. Talk about timing
😂 same
also the death of the Pc game demo.
Somewhere in the nineties the shareware was a revolutionary concept. You couldn't even imagine creating a game without a demo. Now from 10 AAA games, not even one has likely a demo. Don't tell me games costin millions to produce can't afford a demo.
In the nineties the Game Demo was the actual selling point!
Splatoon, a game that is built on online multi-player, isn't required to be constantly online.
Obviously, you can only play the story mode when offline.
saints row failed because it betrayed everything the previous games stood for. Nothing to do with gta or its budget.
Facts
Maybe a hot take, but i don't think games became more expensive to make, i think corporations are inflating costs so they can justify charging more for games, and there is nothing more to it. And that will continue until it becomes unsustainable and the industry collapses in of itself. While that i will be playing my cheap indie pc games on Steam, thank you very much.
I think publishers overcharge, but you have to admit: $100 doesn't go nearly as far today as it did even 5 years ago.
So either publishers have always overcharged, or costs have gone up.
Kinda disingenuous to claim the Saints Row remake killed Volition because it couldn't match up to GTA.
It also failed to live up the legacy of the Saints Row name.
If it was released under a different name, instead of trying to invoke nostalgia, it wouldn't have earned as much hate as it received.
Woah, is that a cameo from Normal Adult Luke during the always online section? How wonderful!
(Also, loving the new studio and videos y'all, keep up the great work and brightening my days!)
The Day before: "I DIDN'T HEAR NO BELL!!"
Yes the devs are back to try a 2nd time. Who would've guessed?
Numbers 7 to 1001 will come in later lists
That's one I only recently realized about Hitman. If you aren't online, you lose all of the challenges and discoveries that are a big part of helping you explore the levels and find all of the cool things they built into it. Deeply annoying.
The fact that 99% of AI is focused on writing and art instead of ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING FUCKING ELSE is moronic, you're making AI that takes away the fun activities and are doing nothing about the stuff we don't want. Make AI that upscales models and textures, improves animation, monitors code for errors and alerts you, AI that provides basic technical information to the people who don't know how to, for example, change CPU thermal paste.
Yeah but that would be hard. Modern companies only care about making a quick buck off the low hanging fruit.
9:09 that's like a common joke about that game; that by the time Star Citizen comes out it'll basically be the MS Flight Simulator of its time.
Fn "always online" killed the Civilization series for me, made me hate Steam, and estranged me from the gaming industry in general.
Steam has offline mode.
@@ceu160193 Maybe they have now. Back then they didn't. When the fn servers didn't respond I couldn't play my single player game I had bought on a disc. Plus I didn't have control over updates, and since Civ V was an unfinished fn mess when it was released, there were quite a lot, forcing me to wait until I could play my single player game I bought on a disc.
And the Steam client made my whole PC fishy, leading me to reinstall my OS and I never went back to Steam or Civ.
Only 6 things?
7. Lists with only 6 items.
if its a way to get a lot of commenter edition responses, it's clever
@@kamo7293THIS is what you think is clever? Jesus christ, yeah you don't get to have an opinion on things anymore.
@@smashbrandiscootch719 Who pissed in your Cheerios?
6 things? What's with the seventh thing?
And my first thougt when reading that title was "microtransactions", but i guess that's no longer just a trend, huh? Already an established evil...
The "always online" thing would personally hurt me even more at this moment cause my router is kaput and a new one comes only next week (thankfully I have enough old games and ones who doesn't have drm)
But you can't expect everyone to have a good internet connection in the world
Remasters.
Any game younger than 15 years DOES NOT DESERVE a remaster!!!
Digital only without a physical release - if you don’t have a physical copy, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to play that game if the digital storefront disappears (like the Nintendo e-shop)
AA games are absolutely NOT on the decline. In fact, they are on the rise. Some of the most successful games in the last few years have been AA. Examples - Remnant II, Sea of Stars, Kunitsu, Hi-Fi Rush, Lies of P, and Pacific Drive. There are tons on the horizon too.
The yelling from behind "what the hell is death stranding about!?" caught me that s*** is hilarious
@8:40 what he said: "Star Citizen, too". What I heard: "Star Citizen Two". And I was like: "WTF was I in a coma!?"
After I rejected these "always online" games, I discovered so many older single player titles that are super fun to play. I'll play those until these stupid trend dies. I'll wait it out.
It all boils down tae the exact same problem the gaming industry has long had.
No respect for the customers nor workers.
You aren't anything tae them but a possible Whale that they can hook for recurrent spending.
I blame entitled gamers.
@@fireblade295
You're entitled tae your wrong opinion.
"Video games are a new art [...] so we got a lot of miss-steps to endure."
Because music and painting have been around for about 50.000 years, everything about those is perfect. Nothing at all disturbing going on. **watches the Caveman Rock Song for the hundreth time**
I should point out that what we have now isn't *all* the music of the baroque, classical and romantic periods but the small sampling that survived through popularity.
A few hundred years from now there may be people thinking that "This Celine Dion lady who sang _It's All Coming Back To Me Now_ was pretty good, and it's a shame she never recorded a version of _Power of Love_ that was popular around the same time."
The issue with AI is that it removes grunt work/entry level positions. If you don't have those, how the fuck are you going to recruit new talent for cheep and have them become your best people, or those employees from other companies doing the same that you later steal, in the coming years? "I need a new art director to oversee all the Ai art. What? None exist because the industry hasn't hired artists for the last 20 years and everyone in those roles were fired, left to do other jobs, or died?"
Just hire your favourite nephew instead, right?
@@averycheesypotato That's either sarcasm of you're so far off, missing the point entirely, that there's no point in discussing it.
@@jockpackage1770 you asked how people will hire for upper level positions when experience & merit are no longer considerations?
Favouritism & personal gain will hold greater sway in such an event. I did mean to agree with you that it’s a bad scenario?
@@averycheesypotato The point was that that is not how you do that. Hiring that way never works.
@@jockpackage1770 It not working isn't going to stop it from happening. Nepotism is, and will probably always be, a thing
I'm not usually into horror, but this list is pretty terrifying when you think that's where we are today. Imagine in 20 years from now...
As a reminder : Oblivion and its DLC horse armor, controversial at the time, was 17 years ago
One of my issues with more modern games is how many seem to focus, in my opinion, a little too much on the quality of the graphics, leading to the games files getting larger and larger with relatively little pay off. Plus, I don't want pixel style games to go away completely, I was a little disappointed when Disgaea 6/7 used 3D character models, because I felt that Disgaea 5 was a perfect example of how you could have a great game without using 3D character models.
Another issue I personally have (that is almost definitely a less common complaint) is that turn based RPGs seem to be becoming an endangered species.