I’ve been checking out some user reviews on a lot of different games lately. And I keep seeing the same types of comments over and over, followed by low ratings, like 1-star reviews, or a “Thumbs Down.”
And no, they’re not the types of comments you’re probably thinking. These are games that people think are good, and the reviews are relatively positive, but the rating is, nonetheless, a low one. And they usually go a little something like this:
“Game is fun, really responsive and the graphics are pretty good. But the developers have abandoned this game. They supported it for about six months and went quiet.”
I’ll stress that I’m para-phrasing here, they don’t go exactly like that, but that’s the basic idea. These reviews are on small games from small developers, that are on usually on sale for twenty bucks or less.
Just because a developer has made a game and released a game does not mean they have to keep updating it with new content for the for-seeable future. Sometimes a game exists just as intended. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Has the Fortnite generation gotten so conditioned to expect every game be supported in perpetuity? Nowhere in the games’ descriptions do they ever mention these are live service type games. Just the opposite, in fact. They are small, arcade-style games that are intended to be enjoyed for a few minutes. You boot it up, play a few rounds, try to get a high score, then you move on. And they are priced accordingly.
Are there only four stages? Maybe. Can the entire game be played through in about an hour? Possibly so. Do the developers only charge $15 for this experience? In a lot of cases, yeah.
It is wild to me that the younger generation doesn’t understand the idea of a game being a stand-alone, isolated experience. That a developer makes a game, maybe releases a few patches to iron out some bugs or glitches, then moves on to the next project. This is the way it has been for decades, but the Fortnit-ification of the gaming industry has created a generation of insatiable gamers with the attention span of a gnat.
I’ve become calling them the “now what” crowd. A developer can spend five or six years crafting an experience, then release it to the public. And before they’ve even had a chance to stretch their arms and take a weekend to relax, they have a crowd of people who blasted through the entire experience over the course of a weekend, and are hammering the message boards with “Now what?”
If I was a developer, I’d say, “What do you mean ‘now what?’ Now I take a vacation, motherfucker.”
I literally saw a review in which a gamer stated that they “played the game virtually non-stop for two weeks” (and that is an exact quote) and was complaining that after sinking about 100 hours into the game, he already did all the content and it got boring. He then proceeded to give it a low score.
These are the people that make me want to shake things.
I don’t blame developers for hating the gaming community sometimes. But I also think they have no one to blame but the AAA gaming industry. All the Epic’s and the EA’s and the Ubisoft’s with their market research and psy-ops to determine what the most engaging and addictive content is so they can create a generation of little gaming Cookie Monsters that will gobble up everything you shovel out and then impatiently tap their foot while they await the next thing.
Now, this is a beast of their own making. So it’s hard to feel sorry for the developers for this. But at the same time, there are some small developers out there that just want to make a thing. And if it’s a good thing, it almost becomes a curse. If they create a good, fun game, they’re almost bound to it like a ball and chain, because they now have a gaming community they have to constantly satisfy, lest they be criticised for “abandoning” a game, even if they had no intention of ever supporting that game long-term.
It’s just one more reason why I yearn for the days of old. But this is the timeline we are in now, for better or worse (let’s face it, it’s for worse).
