| I think the real issue is that we've just left a brief period where the best way to succeed in the market was to make good games. Anyone who grew up playing arcade games knows that, for the vast majority of cases, the pre-console arcade world was about finding the best way to keep you feeding quarters to a machine. Difficult, almost beating the boss, but ultimately simple games ruled the day. Some are classics now but many were very meh. The early home console years, when reviews were still hard to come by and rentals weren't a thing yet, were flooded with tons of pure trash games. Everyone knows how awful any licensed game was, but it didn't matter because all they had to do was to get you (or more often parents/grandparents) to buy the game. By the time you got home and realized the game was garbage it was already too late. I remember owning far more horrible games as a kid than good ones. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a great time for gaming because it was much easier to determine if a game was quality or not before buying, and for a brief window of time the only really great way to make money was to just make a compelling game that got good reviews. We've since seen gaming become a major industry, where heavy marketing can play just as big a factor as initial reviews. With the massive growth of online gaming and digital downloads it's much easier to make a game that is really about a million microtransaction (remember when people used to think that would save the internet?) The truth is games have always been structured in a way to optimizer revenue, it's just that we remember a period when the best way to make money in a game was to actually make a game good. |