The Video Game Critic

I think what the Critic is saying is that digital distribution is a two-edged sword. It's allowed a lot of small but very talented developers to get their products out there (Super Meat Boy, Fez, Braid, Sine Mora, and all that good stuff). It has also opened the floodgates for all kinds of crap--a tragedy of the commons, if you will. I think this becomes a problem as it starts to shift the whole perception of videogames as cheap, disposable, and mostly terrible. Sound familiar? It's what happened to the Atari 2600 because there was no quality control and Atari just wanted to make a lot of money as quickly as possible. I think mobile devices are like the Atari 2600 of this decade: in all fairness, there are some good games out there (workable ports of indie classics like Bastion and ports of adventure games like The Last Express and The Walking Dead), but the few gems are hidden in the endless muck of flappy bird-likes and shameful money-making schemes like the new Dungeon Keeper, Final Fantasy: All the Bravest, or Theatrhythm.

[QUOTE=Segatarious] How big of a problem is it for console gaming that you have a generation plus of kids who game exclusively or almost exclusively on tablets or phones, or ipods? They do not mind crappy free to play games that require internet connection, in fact they love them, and frankly do not know any different and do not expect anything different. [/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=ZetaX]The "gaming generational gap" might be more of a "media generational gap"... The notion and desire of ownership of the physical has diminished. [/QUOTE]

Its both media and content, and its been happening since there were young people and old people.  Those young people with their noisy horseless carriages, or barbaric rock and roll music in those jukeboxes, or sinful pinball games or violent video arcades, or baggy pants misogynistic hip hop or whatever.   And yes, if you are a 'get off my grass' video gamer, well, no one dances like Carmen Miranda no more, and new products are going to go for the youth market and money.

Do kids recognize quality?  My kids came back from a party that had a huge projection screen where they could play lifesized Kinect Party, and loved it.  Good quality entertainment.  Yet how long until that game is old hat? How much did that set up run?  Xbox360 plus Kinect plus the projection screen (and the room in a big house, although its also used to run other Xbox360 games on a huge scale, like Forza).    They also love playing tablet/phone games because they can do it on the go, all the time, and they get something new and different often.  Don't knock new and different - it was the lifeblood of the arcades, and kids love new and different. 

So yeah, its a problem for any old media when a new media comes along.  As consoles helped displace the arcades, so mobile games will help to displace consoles -- or there will come a new synthesis between the two like the Ouya prophecies (even if its not there yet, so don't bother ripping on the Ouya, because that isn't the point).  If there comes a media where both cheap, superficial and plentiful can co-exist with expensive, complex and deep, then both can survive. Maybe a future handheld plugging into a base unit Nintendo/Google/Apple/Samsung of the future, with all games being playable by every version (no hardware exclusive, like your Sony DVD can play in a Samsung DVD player).  Then the install base will be massive, and a good but expensive game will still make money, and cheap games will make less money (but on a percentage basis, maybe just as much). 

For video game culture, we've had console wars, like Genesis vs SNES, and we've had one media wars where things like video games out compete pinball, or home consoles out compete the arcades.  However, other things have had format wars, like VHS vs Beta in video tape when video rental stores had to stock both types and therefore choice was limited.  

Maybe console hardware exclusives are like VHS and Beta trying to co-exist.  Why not unify formats (or at least have one be the vast majority, like Windows over Mac in the 90s).   Lots of companies can make televisions, and they all can play the same television channel inputs.   Plenty of innovation and competition in hardware, and in the software analog for tv (the programs).  There can be cheap shows (reality tv), expensive shows (scripted fantasy or period pieces) and all sorts inbetween.  Why? Because the install base is massive.  This is why Windows was huge, because there were boatloads of software for it - both cheap time wasters and superficial shovelware, and high quality expensive massively complex products.  This is the model Android OS is following now - one OS, many form factors. 

Maybe that is how things should be, and maybe its the kids showing us the way.  Maybe the generation gap changing how we game is the best thing that could happen to us.  Why buy a 360 and not be able to play Nintendo games? Why buy a Nintendo product and not be able to play Bioshock or Last of Us?  Why not buy one product with a unified OS that plays them all.  

[QUOTE=scotland17]

Its both media and content, and its been happening since there were young people and old people.  Those young people with their noisy horseless carriages, or barbaric rock and roll music in those jukeboxes, or sinful pinball games or violent video arcades, or baggy pants misogynistic hip hop or whatever.   And yes, if you are a 'get off my grass' video gamer, well, no one dances like Carmen Miranda no more, and new products are going to go for the youth market and money.

[/QUOTE]

I think that a relativist viewpoint, though usually adequate to explain many cultural trends, can occasionally misunderstand the reality of the situation. Take comic books: everyone now agrees that 90's comics were, by and large, terrible. Previous and subsequent generations were objectively better. What about computing? Is anyone arguing for a return to the late 70s' way of doing things? While revolutionary at the time, there really wasn't a lot of useful stuff you could get done with an Atari 800 or an Apple ][. They were only really good for a couple things: games and making recipe lists. Computers from the late 90s to present are still largely usable for productive work (you can still use a 1998 iBook G3 to run Microsoft Office and browse the web, for example). Videogames were objectively better from 1985-1995 than they were from 1975-1985. Then games got a bit worse from 1995-2005. See where I'm going with this? The Zeitgeist can often influence an entire generation of media for better or worse. Monetary motivations aren't really the culprit though--just a lack of real creativity or motivation to be creative. I can go start an online iOS development course tomorrow and, within a few months I could make my own Avian Cartoon Action Game and score a supplementary income--based on what? How well I can imitate and market someone else's ideas.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that some things do get worse from time to time.

I actually thought Kinect Sports was a passable game. Pretty solid party fun--I'm unsure how that fits in with our discussion of mobile games and the freemium model.

No, most people do not agree that all 90s comics were terrible, that's an awfully extreme generalization, also I don't think games got worse from 1995-2005, I think they got better. Those are personal opinions, not facts.

[QUOTE=Vexer]I don't think games got worse from 1995-2005, I think they got better. Those are personal opinions, not facts.[/QUOTE]
That period saw a pretty awful increase in licensed, quick buck titles. That affected the earlier consoles to an extent, but show me the glut of awful licensed movie games for the 2600 or the Genesis.

Games got worse, although that's still not saying much because 90% of any library is awful.

I don't get why the opinions and playing habits of children matter enough to warrant a thread. Kids have awful taste in everything.

I wasn't suggesting that modern games and platforms aren't capable of much more than the old ones. The whole purchase paradigm has changed. People bought physical 78s, 33 1/3s, and 45s and played them on dedicated record players. Same with 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs. Then came MP3s, and the whole notion of buying physical copies was pushed into a niche category, while access to the music spread to multiple locations and devices. This also seems to have minimized the perceived worth of the music. I see the same thing happening to to videogames.

[QUOTE=Vexer]No, most people do not agree that all 90s comics were terrible, that's an awfully extreme generalization.[/QUOTE]

Comics and video games are of course very different, but there is at least parallel of sorts. In the early 80s, making games for the Atari 2600 was so profitable it just invited abuse, greed, overproduction, and poor judgement. Third parties came in with products of varied quality to confuse things to get a piece of the pie. Comics in the early 90s had a similar moment, when publishers made choices to exploit the market, also with a boom in independent publishers, and when the bubble burst, the crash was also massive.

The commonality is that when the opportunity to make more money in the short term came up, the big businesses both times went for the easy money. The newcomers came in confusing the market, often with bargain rate prices. Yet its not the littles that cause crashes; comics has and still has many independents, and 2600 fans would have kept buying if the Atari titles had remained top notch.

The question is whether this holds true currently for video games when the little guys have a model of not cheaper, but dirt cheap. The soda you drink while playing costs more. If the big guys hold true to quality, will they fail as refusing to evolve, or will it save them?

PacGuy:

-Batman Forever
-Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
-Terminator 2
-Beavis and Butthead
-Cliffhanger
-Stargate
-Judge Dredd
-Back to the Future III
-Ren and Stimpy

There are several others, but the genesis was every bit the dumping ground for rushed, licensed junk.