The Future of Gaming...

Over the last generation a lot has changed with gaming, how could things look 10 years from now?

Twitter: @SpawnWaveMedia

Like Comment and Subscribe!

Thanks for watching!

#Nintendo #Xbox #PlayStation

[PaulPeavler]

There’s one thing that’s the same as 2013. Grand Theft Auto 5 just came out.

[rolen]

My problem with gaming now is games coming out unfinished and poorly optimized. This is something that has been happening for quite a while and I’m worried it’ll keep going.

[kevinjohnson]

This is why I like my older consoles(Xbox, ps2, and GameCube), mostly finished games and NO micro transactions. Quit buying the micro transactions, broken games, and download only games which is almost everything. Use your money, keep your money in protest!

[patrickpeyton]

One thing I have to say is I'm glad someone noticed this, someone like you and shared this. This whole thing, everything you've said has been getting to me for years. I think this is a scary direction.

[AugustAPC]

If digital only becomes a thing, the amount of money I devote to gaming will probably decrease by 95%.

[DragonsDogmaEnjoyer]

It's crazy to think most modern games are more likely to be unavailable in the future than ones from 20 years ago.

[dkropelnicki]

It’s a good thing I can always fall back on reading. Haven’t come across an unfinished always online book yet.

[lyianx]

Indie games are the future. Indie games is where gaming Use to be. Devs/publishers pushing to innovate and make fun experiences different from others because they HAD to in order to grab peoples attention. Triple A devs/publishers already have peoples attention and have become fat and complicit and are focused on monetizing games, and not focused on making them fun.

[megamix]

In all seriousness, this sucks. What happened to just powering on the console, putting the game inside and calling it a day?!

[captainzib]

Remember when PSN got hacked in 2011. Back then you could at least play most single player games. Imagine if psn got hacked again and went down for over a month, immediately after the release of a high profile, always online single player game like GT7. You’d think Sony would recognize how bad an idea this is. Gt7 being not the only always online game, a server takedown of psn or Xbox live for an extended time period would do huge damage to either company’s reputation.

[chisox]

Driving these days isn’t cheap with gas prices…Sony had to emulate that

[SilverSpireZ]

This is exactly why I don’t bother with most AAA games today, especially on PS and Xbox. It’s being dominated by unfinished, broken live-service games with always-online DRM and microtransactions. Not to mention the heavy-handed push towards digital gaming with DRM and subscription services. Even Nintendo’s not safe from this with their limited-time releases, terrible overpriced online expansion and their mobile games (especially Mario Kart Tour).

There’s always a few exceptions, but they’re few and far between nowadays. I’m just so tired of this nonsense, man…

[Kdawg-rxdb]

Consumers are as much to blame for micro transactions as the publishers are. If people wouldn’t have bought them they would’ve been gone from gaming. But these publishers are making hands over fist with cash flow so of course it’s going to stay in games.

[Lach]

I'm telling you know. The moment cloud gaming becomes the norm is the moment game preservation dies

[colebowman]

I'm 38 years old and I've been gaming all my life, since the early days of the NES. Games got better and better until the end of the Xbox 360 generation. Starting in about 2006 or '07, it felt like every game that was coming out was new and exciting, groundbreaking, like Bioshock or Dead Space. It was a golden age of gaming and it felt like that was over at the end of that generation. Since then, games have been in a steady decline. Games look amazing and have good, fun gameplay but its the same as the last game I played. Games are standardized and homogeneous now. Stories have little or no effort, games release in a broken state and people buy them anyway, and microtransactions are rampant and it only ever gets worse. I would say this is the worst games have ever been during my lifetime while somehow still looking and playing amazing. I fear that in the future I will either have to quit gaming, something I've loved my whole life, or just play the old games I love from decades ago over and over till the end. Neither of those prospects look good to me.

[crabbuckets]

I've been worried for a long time. Can't collect games anymore because half the time the game isn't fully on the disk/cartridge. If I can't play the game in my house 15 years from now when the servers are down.. there's an issue.

[masterofbloopers]

I grew up in the PS2, GameCube, and Original Xbox era. I loved gaming. I would play games nonstop, and there were some truly memorable experiences I’ve had with some games. I still remember the wonder and awe I felt when I first stepped out onto the ring in Halo 1. I remember eating Cosmic Brownies and drinking Minute Maid Orangeade out of a can while blasting Instant Karma by John Lenon on a camping trip, playing Halo 2 co-op with my father (R.I.P. dad).

But over the years, I’ve become less and less interested in video games, and it’s scaring me. I’m sure a lot of you can relate. I’ll be sitting there trying to figure out what game to play, and despite my massive backlog of games I either never finished or never played, I’m just not feeling it. At first I assumed it was just burnout. So I took a couple of months off from gaming, and when I got back into it, still nothing. I’ll play a game for a couple of hours, and then drop it forever because it couldn’t retain my attention.

I began to wonder if the worst case scenario was upon me, and I was just losing interest in gaming. But every once in a blue moon, a game will come out that *is* able to retain my attention, and give me a worthwhile experience that leaves me satisfied, or even wanting more. That’s when it hit me: it’s not me that’s the problem, it’s the games that are the problem. As a lot of folks have already pointed out, games are declining in quality, and have been for quite some time. Favoring shiny new graphics and other miscellaneous advancements in technology over releasing a polished, complete game that isn’t full of additional predatory monetization schemes designed to suck every last dollar out of your wallet.

Eventually this bubble will burst. You can only push people so far before they start pushing back. Gamers *will* get sick of the buggy, unfinished game releases and additional monetization tactics, and go on a mass boycott. Worst case scenario, we have another video game crash. Needless to say, I don’t want this to happen. But these companies only speak one language: money. If we don’t hurt their bottom line, they won’t budge. As long as their investors and share holders are happy, that’s all that matters to them.

Video games *are* art, and when you heavily monetize art, you kill the creative passion. That’s why developers aren’t having fun making games anymore. That’s why they’re treated like machines, and not actual people. The games industry needs a deep scrubbing, right down to the bone. Something needs to cause a massive attitude shift that shakes up the whole industry, otherwise this industry is headed for ruin. I don’t know when this shakeup will happen or what form it will take, all I know is that it needs to happen sooner rather than later. Each year in real life seems to get worse and worse, so we could use something to distract us from the harshness of reality. Now more than ever are video games an important source of entertainment in our lives, and there can be no worse time to have this industry fall to such a low.

[MonCappy]

Yes. Over the last decade or so a number of business practices that need to be outlawed have cropped up in gaming. In the mobile space you have the exploitation via microtransactions that take advantage of psychological vulnerabilities of what the industry derisively call "whales". Then there is the fraud of games as a service, gambling mechanics and loot boxes. All of these combined show an industry that is unable to regulate its own excesses and needs government regulation to curb their worst impulses.

This doesn't even touch on the repeated release of unfinished games. Or how games are now developed such that player progression is made deliberately slow so that the publishers can then sell the solution in the form of exp boosters or level boosters. The entire industry is completely fucked up and needs to have all the rot burned away, preferably without a crash.

[twig-e]

My thought still stands from yesterday. I love my Nintendo games because they are...or most of the game...can be played offline. Some games can be incomplete with content at launch, but the core concept is there. If Nintendo can adopt there own G network to play online anywhere, that would be big, but offline gaming is what I usually play. The only online I usually play is Mario Maker 2's Endless Run, but at least for offline you can still create levels and pre-download levels when not at home.

It will be a sad day to buy a game 10 years from now and find out you can't even play the Single Player side because the servers aren't up anymore...

[JaceOKami]

Something that barely ever gets talked about in regards of game preservation in our current day and age is, that even when you're going the physical route, no big release title is without a Day 1 patch anymore. In some cases, these games simply lack content, necessary features or are straightup unplayable without them. That puts us as customers on the spot where if we still want to enjoy these titles in 10, 15, even 20 years from now on, we better have access to a console with the necessary files, or else, your physical copies turn completely useless.