Wednesday, December 18, 2024

A civilian friend sent me an opinion piece about video games from the New York Times. It covers the move to live, free-to-play games over single-player games you play once and move on from. Which, predictably, it bewails.

Fair enough. Live games do make it harder to release a new game. The "next Fortnite" is probably also Fortnite. 

On the other hand, I'm working on a live game that releases March 6, and I'm happy that I won't be unemployed on March 7 (inshallah). And if people didn't want live games, they wouldn't buy them.

The article is off base on two points. One, yes, some games do have a lot of sidequests that can come off as grindy chores, but then also, that's an issue that game devs have identified and rejected. We often have conversations like, "We're not going to ask the player to collect one thousand feathers."

The other is that it's ridiculous to say games used to be better. Of course the MOMA is collecting old games. Museums collect old things, after their worth has been proven. There are amazing new games all the time, just as there was filler and trash twenty years ago. Games like Disco Elysium, Balatro and Hades are future classics. The present always looks worse than the past, in any medium, because we only remember the good stuff from the past. Not all ancient Greek epics were Homer. It's just, most ancient Greek epics have gone the way of the ancient Greeks. 

1:49 PM

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