I've been playing video games since I was 5, and been working in the industry as a Producer since 2005. In that time, I've seen the average game launch go from a complete, polished experience to a quick cash-grab with little content in return for our money.
Seriously...the average play time for a game in 2000 was 40 hours. Now, it's FOUR. You pay $60 for a game, and then take it home to find out that you can't play with your friends unless they've bought their own copies of the game, and also that there's content already on the disk that you must pay for to unlock.
Microtransactions make me especially mad. Just look at the latest Dead Space game. You paid REAL money for ammo and weapons. Not only did this make the game laughably easy, but it ruined the balance of gameplay and made me feel almost dirty playing it.
"But you don't have to buy it!" Well yeah, of course. But that's not the point. Why is it there in the first place? Why design a game, sell it at a ridiculous price (digital games especially since there's no overhead for disk production), then make the game too difficult to beat unless you buy these extra items? It just reeks of corporate greed, especially when it comes from multi-million dollar businesses like EA, Ubisoft, even Blizzard! It never used to be this way. What happened?
I know this is a polarizing issue, so please don't think I'm trying to spark an argument. I'm just very passionate about this, since I've watched it deteriorate slowly before my eyes and it makes me sad to see so many game companies I've worked for succumb to dirty tactics that end up driving off their consumer base by implementing all of these anti-piracy measures which -newsflash- don't stop pirates at all. It just makes us gamers feel like we're being punished for buying a game legitimately. And the worst part is it's not going to stop until we have another video game crash like we did back in 1982.
Seriously...the average play time for a game in 2000 was 40 hours. Now, it's FOUR. You pay $60 for a game, and then take it home to find out that you can't play with your friends unless they've bought their own copies of the game, and also that there's content already on the disk that you must pay for to unlock.
Microtransactions make me especially mad. Just look at the latest Dead Space game. You paid REAL money for ammo and weapons. Not only did this make the game laughably easy, but it ruined the balance of gameplay and made me feel almost dirty playing it.
"But you don't have to buy it!" Well yeah, of course. But that's not the point. Why is it there in the first place? Why design a game, sell it at a ridiculous price (digital games especially since there's no overhead for disk production), then make the game too difficult to beat unless you buy these extra items? It just reeks of corporate greed, especially when it comes from multi-million dollar businesses like EA, Ubisoft, even Blizzard! It never used to be this way. What happened?
I know this is a polarizing issue, so please don't think I'm trying to spark an argument. I'm just very passionate about this, since I've watched it deteriorate slowly before my eyes and it makes me sad to see so many game companies I've worked for succumb to dirty tactics that end up driving off their consumer base by implementing all of these anti-piracy measures which -newsflash- don't stop pirates at all. It just makes us gamers feel like we're being punished for buying a game legitimately. And the worst part is it's not going to stop until we have another video game crash like we did back in 1982.
