Is gaming as we know it coming to an end?

Before I start my speculative rant, I just want to say that I’m no expert in any of this—this is just what I gather from reading news, and taking the temperature on the current console market (with PC hardware included) for the last couple of months. I try not to be all doom and gloom, but man, it’s hard not to! I think gaming, on both PC and consoles, the classical way, is coming to a brutal end, with a lot of suffering included.

It might not happen, with everything turning out just fine, like in the fairy tales of old. But if there is one thing life has taught me: happy endings are rare!

The home computer
Let’s start with the PC. It’s not a console, yet it’s all closely connected—much more nowadays, than it used to be in the past. My main issue with the PC is that it’s incredibly stagnant, with hardware that is increasingly costly to buy, with seemingly little performance gain in today’s broken AAA releases. And that’s not the worst part. It’s the push for fake frames to sustain monster resolutions, that nobody with a normal budget can even afford. 

Graphics have already peaked in my opinion, and the strife for making it hyper-realistic comes a little too close to movies for my take—as it seems to slowly transform the industry to it. If visual realism was the goal, it has essentially already been achieved, so what are we buying new GPUs for? To have the picture a little less smeary-looking by pushing higher resolutions to hide the countless filters to mask issues with the new style of rendering? I have never been so disconnected from PC hardware as I am currently. There is nothing being released that warrants these new expensive cards, and the fact that fake frames through AI is being promoted as something positive is just off-putting to me.

I just feel PC, and the industry in general, has been pushing in the wrong direction. The visuals, while important to convey a mood, are not everything. For example: physics, in-game AI (for opponents), exciting new mechanics and writing have been neglected for increased fidelity, when graphics can only take you so far in a game. It has become very stagnant, and I personally don’t see any reason to upgrade if this will continue to be the standard.

My final issue (trust me, I got more, but it will have to do for now) is that games on PC come with zero sense of ownership, unless you buy your games over at GOG. However, even then, I wouldn’t say ownership comes at a premium, seeing as it’s only digital, stored on some server, unless you go the full mile to burn discs and print manuals by yourself. 

These two issues, consoles also share with the PC. Currently, to a lesser degree concerning ownership, but the push for digital-only is not exclusive to PC, as we will see.

The Xbox
Microsoft’s gaming flagship brand, Xbox, has been, in my opinion, set out to self-termination after years of disastrous policies and neglect. Now, the Xbox brand (from Xbox One) has never been popular like the days of Xbox 360, but it still surprises me how badly this and the last generation has been treated in a pure business sense. The ever ending decline started with Microsoft announcing that their new console would be digital only back in 2013, which their competitor Sony, at the time, played brilliantly:

Since then, the brand never recovered. To be fair, though, Microsoft showed initiative to rectify things by buying up seemingly half the market of developers, spending billions in their attempt to lock users into their ecosystem. This encompassed PCs too, but the issue here: the devs they bought have mostly produced junk, with not enough exclusives being made—nothing to incentivize people going for the Xbox, instead of PC, PlayStation, or the Nintendo machines.

Locking in users could have been a noble goal on the PC (from a business sense)—maybe even worth ditching the Xbox console brand for, if they didn’t suddenly raise the price for their Game Pass service! While simultaneously, increasing the prices for their consoles after so many years, effectively killing both their idea of subscription-based gaming, and their Xbox console brand at the same time. Just wow.

The PlayStation
In terms of pure revenue, the PlayStation brand is doing well, but that seems entirely based on old brand recognition and loyalty, since, when it comes to exclusive system seller titles, Sony’s actions have been absolutely abysmal.

I recently posted about this on the site under the name The Mismanagement of PlayStation [Video]. In the article, I pointed to a video worth watching, where user ZackLillipad goes over Sony’s disastrous first-party title investment. Essentially ditching what made their library good from the PS3 and PS4 era—to exclusively focus on making “live-service games”, which hasn’t turned out great for Sony so far. What this means in the long term is hard to say, but the 9th generation for Sony and the PlayStation 5 has been lacking, to say the least—with the main library for the system resting on third-party titles. That’s not all, of course, as Sony has also been raising hardware prices, while making bank, instead of finishing off their main competitor: the Xbox. It’s also incredibly bizarre seeing five-year-old hardware increase in price, as almost all tech is outdated as soon as it hits the stores. Clown world, indeed, and being a potential customer for PlayStation 5, it stings in the eyes seeing them increase prices while making massive profits. Especially, when they blame outside factors, while it’s just classic corporate greed.

Sony is also contributing to the fade of physical games, as their default console comes without a disc-reader. While the other things might be excused as bad ideas, or dumb business sense—this can’t. It’s a deliberate push for a digital-only future, which undermines the idea of even having a console in the first place, making it just another locked-down PC without customization options. And in this case, without any fun exclusives to play, unless you love playing online games with strangers with an increasingly human and AI moderated atmosphere—say a wrong word, and you are out!

The Nintendo
The last Nintendo machine I played on was a borrowed Wii, so I’m not personally invested in Nintendo. However, Nintendo has always stood out to me as running their own game—not focused on tech, and performance, just making “great” family friendly games in their own franchises, like Mario and Metroid.

I guess nothing good can last forever, seeing as it appears Nintendo has been going full cyberpunk corporate mode by being incredibly stingy and pricey with what you get for your hard-earned money. Now, greed is not something unexpected for a corporation, especially when their business is going well. Yet, the lawsuit war is a different story altogether. Nintendo as of late, and apparently earlier too, has declared total war against emulators, forcing emulator sites to stop offering their franchise games. This could be viewed as fair, depending on how you interpret company ownership and copyright law—but should a corporation be able to profit indefinitely from something its original creator left behind long ago? Regardless of your stance, when there is no way to play the classics—unless you play Nintendo to emulate the games for you poorly, for twenty euros a pop for a 40-year-old game, I can’t help to feel a bit miffed myself.

But the worst of all must be the patent hoarding for game mechanics—making sure no other developer can use a specific gameplay for their game without breaking some ridiculous patent law on concepts: like the creature spawning/fighting mechanic from Pokémon they patented. What kind of precedence does this set for the future of all gaming? Imagine if someone patented the first-person viewpoint back in the day, it would have killed the progression of genres right there and then.

Naturally, this is not the end of this tale, as Nintendo, like the other companies, have been pushing for a digital future too, by selling codes instead of cartridges—presumably wanting to destroy the second-hand market. A market that ironically probably made Nintendo to what it is today, keeping the fire alive for games with an old-school theme when gameplay was everything. This goes double for emulation, but the current philosophy of Nintendo seems to be pinching pennies where it’s possible—damn, the consequences long-term!

Is this the end?
Is traditional gaming coming to an end? It’s impossible to say, since anything could happen—maybe one company will have an epiphany and turn everything around and become the greatest gaming corporation ever known to man. I seriously doubt this, though, as the current trajectory speaks for the opposite. If it’s not brand suicide, it’s extreme nickel and diming, to siphon as much money as possible, while providing very little in return where passion is an outlawed concept in game development.

Now, not everything is bad, as the indie scene flourishes with many great releases, but when it comes to AAA, the industry seems to be collapsing in on itself. In combination with all the above, it’s hard to see the classic way of gaming going forward. While newer GPUs might get made, and new consoles released—I don’t see the point of anyone investing in, say, a PlayStation 6, when this generation already has nothing real to show for it, except gaming stagnation, lined with terribly made remasters of a generation long gone.

Unless meaningful change is coming soon, I think we are all in for a gaming apocalypse, much worse than the one in the 80s. But perhaps being stuck with what we got isn’t so bad after all, and small-time indie developers will keep churning out interesting titles that don’t require the latest console or GPU to run. Yet, I think we must prepare our gaming souls for the fact that the cozy days of hype for cool tech and games are over—for the time being.

Thanks for reading.

– Thomas