Hard Reset: Dreams of a Crash
In 1983 there was a crash of the entire industry. While many factors contributed to this crash, the broad strokes involve an oversaturated market full of unfinished consoles and video games, many of poor quality, from companies hoping to make a buck on a fad. Does this sound familiar? The biggest difference today is that gaming is no longer a fad, but a staple in today’s media landscape earning revenues of over 300 billion dollars globally*1. I’m going to be honest, I’m over it. I’m not naive; I understand video game development is a business that is meant to make money, but we’ve gone from the typical game development team of 10-30 people in the 90s*2 to massive corporations numbering in the tens of thousands. Heck, a relatively young developer like CD Projekt Red can have over 1000 employees*3. Now, that isn’t to say that there aren’t benefits to having large teams ready to contribute resources to a massively ambitious game. However, to put it bluntly, you cannot have something that has been passed around and tinkered with by thousands of different individuals and call it a “labor of love.” It just has far too many fingerprints on it. Let’s put it this way, for any of you that grew up building forts in the backyard, how many kids did you have helping you? Three or four maybe? How many arguments did you have over where the fort should be, what it should be made out of, or how big it should be? Now, imagine trying to build that fort with 1000 people, all with their own ideas of what that fort should be. All this is to say, outside of the indie space, video games are largely no longer the vision of a few passionate artists. There are scores of passionate artists that are following the expectations of a multi-billion dollar corporation that has a specific algorithm on how much money it needs to make to be considered “successful.” I’m not just here to say money is bad either; I’m aware of what bottomless pockets can do for a project. What I want to accomplish is break down the many reasons why I believe a crash of the video game industry is exactly what gaming culture needs right now.
I’m going to start by picking on CDPR again, because I think they are an excellent microcosm of the industry’s ethics becoming “malleable” in a fairly short period of time. In the early days of this developer, you saw a small passionate team whose one goal was to create a game surrounding a much beloved book franchise, The Witcher written by Andrzej Sapkowski. A team that — even when their first title came out to relatively positive reviews and financial success — still heard the voices of their fans. CDPR released a major patch that not only fixed bugs, but made tangible improvements, as well as packing in some physical goodies in the re-release. This was a small team of 50-60 people according to Marcin Iwinski’s Noclip making-of documentary, a team that wished to capture the feeling that the novels gave them, but in interactive form. Appropriately, the second game brought on many that felt that same passion of players who experienced the first game. The Witcher 3, in my opinion, is when you can start to see the cracks. I want to preface this by admitting that The Witcher 3 is my single favorite video game of all time. So, of course this is informing everything I say about this developer, but hey, that’s why it’s called an opinion piece. From a corporate standpoint, this is when you first start hearing the quiet rumblings of crunch within the development team. To put that crunch into perspective, the team had gone from 50-60 people working on the first game, to now around 250 in-house employees, with 1,500 people globally. So, with such a massive increase in bodies on the floor, why then was there a need to start cracking out the whips to get this thing over the finish line employing crunch practices? Well, obviously, they were making a much larger, much more ambitious game, but that doesn’t paint the entire picture. Imagine going from a room full of people working toward a vision that every individual shares and wants to bring to life, to then go to thousands of people worldwide with varying ideas, some with no passion for the project and just there to collect a paycheck. Now obviously The Witcher 3 released to wide acclaim as an achievement and RPG masterpiece, but if you ask anyone who was there in 2007 that played the first game from the initial drop they’ll tell you — there’s just something about that first game that the third was never able to capture. There was something niche that made it feel far more personal, far more hand crafted. Then The Witcher 3 sold like hotcakes — over 50 million copies worldwide as of 2019 — and the powers that be saw that they had the winning formula.
And there it is dear reader: the “formula.” This, in my opinion, is the biggest enemy of creativity in the gaming landscape, while also being the biggest priority of the shareholders, CEOs, and the suits who were able to take hold of the young industry of gaming. They have since employed such tactics as recruiting focus groups to make sure they are constantly refining the formula to appeal to the largest possible audience. The current saga of CDPR brings us full circle to the ethical circus that was Cyberpunk 2077, from which they are just now recovering, but will ever be a black mark on their former sterling, consumer-centric reputation.They are of course just one example of an entire industry that is moving in the same direction.
Pokémon is the largest media franchise in the world. Yet, we received hastily slapped together titles in Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet — with broken animations, poor performance, and bugs abound — just to make sure they could cash in on the idea of an open world. As someone who cut his teeth on Pokémon Red and Blue, and had fantasized about the idea of a fully 3D, explorable world that I could see and catch Pokémon to my heart's content, I felt betrayed. That isn’t to say there’s nothing to love about the Pokémon games; I have many friends and loved ones who adore them. However, from the perspective of a critic who wants to see the industry back in the hands of the artists and the auteurs, there is absolutely no defending a $90 billion media franchise that released something that looks like it was made from stock assets in a 10-year-old program. They know that they can put the least amount of effort in a product, and it will get the maximum amount of profit because it has the Pokemon logo and “formula”. In my 30 years of gaming, I’ve seen the industry go from from game development consisting of artists putting all of their effort and passion into bringing a vision of creativity to life, to primarily being CEOs and shareholders putting all of their time and effort into figuring out the lowest amount of effort that will result in the highest amount of profit. I’ve seen Bethesda go from creating worlds out of passion for the genre, to selling us the same game over and over again for 12 years now. Rockstar went from finding new ways to innovate on the open world crime experience, to sinking everything into a games-as-a-service, money printing machine.
But what is an auteur? Why can’t they thrive in the current big budget industry? We certainly still have them in developers like Hideo Kojima, Ken Levine, or Tim Schafer. These are people who have, in one form or another, become a brand unto themselves. You know when you are playing a Hideo Kojima game; you can just feel his fingerprints on anything he’s developed, whether it’s Metal Gear Solid, Death Stranding, or even wildly different genres. An auteur is someone who pours something of themselves into the product they’re creating making them indelible from their work. They certainly exist today, but are generally developers who have proven themselves in an industry before it became mainstream and over-monetized, in a time before companies that focus tested and refined money printing equations, then squeezed any and all risk out of said equation. Now, your Phil Spencers of the world will write a blank check to someone like Hideo Kojima to come develop something because he knows that, to adapt and repurpose a popular film quote: “If Kojima builds it, they will come.” The Kojimas, the Levines, the Shaffers: they’re not risks anymore, they’re a sure thing. And the industry loves nothing more than a tried and true developer that comes pre-packaged with their own ravenous fanbase. The current landscape of AAA development won’t let new auteurs thrive because, at the end of the day, they represent risk. AAA titles need to be something that has had its edges sanded off. By being polished and passed around by everyone putting it under a microscope, making sure that everything is just so, they ensure individuality has absolutely no place in that equation, and, sadly, individuality is the boat that auteurs sail on.
This leads me to the age of the independent, or “indie,” developer. Over the last few decades, we have seen a thriving community of developers that have sought crowdfunding or personal wealth as a replacement for joining major AAA or even AA developers to chase trends. These people are making their passion projects. Even with the added risk of not developing for a paycheck from a suit — sitting so far above the chain from the developers that he can’t see what’s going on down there — they are making the games they want to make, and we as consumers are seeing a return to creativity over profit. The dream of a total industry crash is impossible at this point; it’s just too big and profitable to fail short of a total cataclysmic event, in which case we are going to have far bigger problems. However, a reality where the current independent scene further and further separates itself to the point of total secession from the industry in large, may not be something out of the realm of reality. Currently, even independent developers still have to be beholden to platform owners — such as Valve, Nintendo, and Sony — to make sure that their products are distributed to a large enough audience to justify their continued work. But what if we saw independent development go further than software? What if we saw another push into the hardware space? Of course, we have seen these attempts before. We’ve seen monumental failures of consoles like the Zeebo or the Ouya, but this doesn’t mean that there is no possibility of success in this space. Most of the attempts we have seen thus far have been glorified android machines, without a specific vision or focus. But, if we had enough developers dedicated to bringing quality products to an exclusive device, that could certainly be a different story. What if there was a system, platform, or even a PC marketplace that was the only place that I could play independent developers’ upcoming titles, the likes of Hades, Stardew Valley, Sea of Stars, Valheim, Darkest Dungeon? As far as I am concerned, these developers have proven themselves and their integrity enough to justify my support for any platform that they would choose to distribute their products on. I would know the product I was getting was something from a small team of individuals who made their vision a reality, not the result of a risk-free investment opportunity meant to maximize the highest dollar from the lowest common denominator.
To be clear, these thoughts are more than frustrations with an industry obsessed with profit margins; there are other reasons outside of the issues of money and ethics. Similar to the first video game crash, but on a much larger scale, we are also experiencing major oversaturation. Getting a new game used to feel special, not only in the sense that we were young and didn’t have the income, with video games being something that only came along on special occasions, for gifts and holidays, but more than that. The market was slower; we didn’t always see 15 major AAA titles come out every time we blinked. I remember the first time in middle school I was introduced to emulation: I got a disc full of GameBoy, SNES, NES, and a whole host of other ROMs. I remember thinking this was a dream come true, and that every day I’d have a new game to play. But I found overtime that it stopped making each game I played feel special, and I feel like we’re running into that now. Games like Tears of the Kingdom or Starfield are excellent achievements in gaming, but when you get a game like that every month, they’re here, then gone in the blink of an eye.
For me, this has all been an excuse to express my thoughts on why I feel there has been something missing from an industry that has been important to me my entire life. I don’t have a call to action, but if I did, it would be this: look at your preferred store front, whether that be Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, or Steam. Hit that indie filter and see what you can find. We are far enough into the independent movement that you are guaranteed to find some quality product for any genre you could possibly be looking for. Support auteurs again, consume content from teams of people, not development meat grinders, and let's see if we can’t find that spark again, from a time when our favorite hobby was a niche pastime that hadn’t been absorbed by the very industry that steamrolled over that very spark.
1:https://www.statista.com/topics/868/video-games/#topicOverview