I tend to stay far away from the realm of synthetic men and whatever an "endymion" is. I went down a hole on those types of creators for a bit out of curiosity and felt like I was flashbacking to...
Exemplary
I tend to stay far away from the realm of synthetic men and whatever an "endymion" is. I went down a hole on those types of creators for a bit out of curiosity and felt like I was flashbacking to shit from middle school, when it wasn't thinly veiled culture war nonsense and/or outright depression.
Their brand of "discourse" to me is like listening to folks beg a dealer for more personalized drugs. They're not interested in design or craft, know practically nothing of production/creativity, and can only barely articulate what they actually want to see because half of the criticism is cover for "make me the target audience". The videos, more often than not, are just them reading articles you can find yourself on any major gaming site - there's zero depth of thought to it. They never show up in communities where folks make things, and will even go as far as to say mods and such are bad because they "aren't the original vision", as if the thing they endlessly complain about is sacrosanct (fuckin what).
Imo, the state of the industry is basically irrelevant. It is so big and has existed long enough that anything you could want is probably out there in some form or other. How you engage, what you engage with, is far more important than whatever trends places like EA, Ubisoft, etc are pursuing. If you take the step of doing mods, or making your own, you can just have everything you want and discuss the merits of ideas with folks of like mind and similar preference.
Right now, for example, Morrowind, a game from 23 years ago is being expanded with Tamriel Rebuilt. Diablo 2 can be overhauled to suit just about any weird little preference you have (I have lots of weird preferences, trust me bro). You can take a game like STALKER and turn it into a survivalist military sim. Even with a current game, like Monster Hunter, you can change up how it plays and make it work on hardware it was never meant to support. You can go to a forum and grab every single game for every single system you ever wanted, and stuff like romhacks, texture packs, etc. Did you like Final Fantasy Tactics? Check out FF Hacktics, or play Tactics Ogre: One Vision. Like pokemon? There's more romhacks than there are original titles, designed by all manner of player to cater to practically any version of taste.
In my opinion, part of resisting the algorithmic internet is engaging with intent, and it just so happens to be that with gaming you can accomplish a two-fer. You can engage with intent, restructure your time in a more satisfying way and, just like the games themselves, be consistently rewarded for your effort with cool shit you can keep forever if you've got a few storage drives. Depending on the game, you can make a version just for you/your kids and have a unique experience together. We do not have to let the Doomslop Industrial Complex eat up the hobby, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
This is a really comprehensive piece that touches on a lot of the positives and negatives in the gaming industry and game journalism, both real and perceived. However, at the end, it seems to come...
This is a really comprehensive piece that touches on a lot of the positives and negatives in the gaming industry and game journalism, both real and perceived.
However, at the end, it seems to come around to what I actually agree is the biggest problem - the algorithm and the death of discourse in service to ragebait. It's a conclusion that I feel should resonate with a lot of us here on Tildes.
I remember in like the early 2000s (I'd only watched it like a decade later though) there was a flash animation series named "The Decline of Video Gaming" which was a pretty neat (at the time)...
I remember in like the early 2000s (I'd only watched it like a decade later though) there was a flash animation series named "The Decline of Video Gaming" which was a pretty neat (at the time) satire of the industry "declining" and everything getting worse. I wouldn't watch it today because I am sure there are funny gamer words in it. Anyways, the industry had some of its best years afterwards, including the guys who made those flash animations which later on went to make Snipperclips!
Anyways, all that to say people have always liked to complain and exaggerate. But in the past couple of years it's gotten uniquely bad. Negativity, cynicism, and ragebait is the norm. It was always the norm in some places-- but now it's just like all social media became /v/. It's tiring.
I haven't watched it so I don't know if that's what they meant, but to be fair I do think that around year 2004 - 2009 or so, from the point of view of a PC gamer with specific tastes, the...
I haven't watched it so I don't know if that's what they meant, but to be fair I do think that around year 2004 - 2009 or so, from the point of view of a PC gamer with specific tastes, the situation was kind of bad. I think it was one of the big shifts from nerds as a target group towards a more mainstream gaming population, which naturally makes the nerds (me) unhappy. And as a result, some of the more "gamey" games like arcade shooters pretty much disappeared for years. I remember when Hard Reset came out in 2011 it received a lot of praise because although it wasn't actually that amazing, it was a new game in a genre that was practically dead at the time.
Also gaming at the end of the 90s until about 2001 was just absurdly strong. In the time period criticized above you had some timeless hits like HL2 or Orange Box, but at the end of 90s you had several comparable hits like that coming out every year from different companies. Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Diablo 1 & 2, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, various isometric realtime strategies, Might & Magic 6 and 7, Thief, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, just unbelievable concentration of hits. After that the industry imo absolutely was worse until about 2010.
As someone who loved all those old games I get what you're saying but 2004 is one of the most lauded years for critically acclaimed games. 2007 was also strong albeit on the more mainstream side...
As someone who loved all those old games I get what you're saying but 2004 is one of the most lauded years for critically acclaimed games. 2007 was also strong albeit on the more mainstream side of things.
Well, the industry (the one people work and make money in) is definitely ebbing. So many layoffs, so much mismanagement that can't be hidden in polish (devs don't get that time either), so much...
Well, the industry (the one people work and make money in) is definitely ebbing. So many layoffs, so much mismanagement that can't be hidden in polish (devs don't get that time either), so much talent drain. Layoffs aren't new, but not retaining talent for decades now is (not) bearing it's fruit in hard times.
It's the internet, though. So of course this all gets condensed down to "the industry is dying". It's not a lie, but it implies that we can't revive. I do think the market will bounce back, eventually. I want to hope it will take a year, it might take 5 years in reality. But I believe it will bounce back.
Games themselves dying, though? Entirely subjective. Games became so diverse thst there are inevitably bubbles that are having a golden age and bubbles popping. All at once.
(after finishing the video) It was an interesting video. I do appreciate that the early part acknoledged that games do in fact live in a society, and perceptions will affect even your fantasy escapes when times get bad. That definitely influeces the entire mood.
They did mention a bit of the industry, but it seems to have pivoted off quickly and shifted to the indie market instead. Indies can succeed but they won't really save the industry. I think that argument of
"when it's not profitable anymore, they will move on"
is one that I am the most ambivalent about. The author is right in that nothing is forever, and especially so with "hot trends". But I think there's one big issue on the horizon: the rise of slop. Slop is made to be extremely cheap, and addictive to consume. Corporate's dream scenario. So we may not necessarily "move on" this time, the same way a smoker doesn't just "move on" from smoking without intervention. And slop will take a while to die because it's already so cheaply made. Add in the rise of AI and we might be in for a 40 day storm.
The journalism bit is interesting as well. The landscape has changed, but the methods of clickbait have more or less stayed the same. I'm not sure how or if we can really fix this, though. Anger has always been a strong motivator in history, we haven't done a good job over centuries in being able to "walk away". We need to change the entire idea on how we monetize the internet if we want to fix this. The incentives are broken.
I enjoyed the video. I have a less forgiving view of what I see as whining grifters making premature eulogies for the industry as a whole based on the output of a handful of companies capable and...
I enjoyed the video.
I have a less forgiving view of what I see as whining grifters making premature eulogies for the industry as a whole based on the output of a handful of companies capable and willing to throw hundreds of millions at game projects. As the author gets at, I think this is the result of social media rewarding "hot takes" more than anything else. People who suggest things that are not obvious are more interesting, even if the reason they're not obvious is that they're bullshit.
AAA budgets as of late have reached unprecedented heights and you can't compare $10m AAA games of the past with $100m AAA games of the present as though that massive increase in cost doesn't naturally come with a massive additional concern for return of investment. "Moderately appealing to a massive audience" may then be a better goal than "highly appealing to a somewhat smaller audience". The good news is that you can just ignore that segment altogether if the current trends and monetization efforts at the top are not to your liking: the long tail of video games has never been richer and more accessible in my experience, and I've never felt more catered to as a player. You just can't both have the cake and eat it.
Yeah, I really don't get the doomerism stuff. Maybe this only apply to AAA games? Because I can't think of another time where my weird little niche interests are being serviced by small, indie...
Yeah, I really don't get the doomerism stuff. Maybe this only apply to AAA games? Because I can't think of another time where my weird little niche interests are being serviced by small, indie producers. Like Dredge got made by what, like 3 or 4 people? At the same time big hits, like Breath of the Wild, are blowing my freaking mind. So I just don't really get the argument.
Admittedly this comes from a pretty casual/infrequent gamer, but I love where we are at as far as the games being produced - though I am not a fan of how AAA are produced: supplemented with low wages and long hours, driven more and more to DLC and loot boxes, and for the lowest common denominator. But I can easily just opt out of that system. Maybe the only real complaint I can't get around is not actually owning, physically, the games I purchase - but again with the majority of them being around $5 (and for freaking awesome games) it's still hard to complain.
I do think it's more of a AAA-game and people who follow them thing. I'd consider myself a "hardcore gamer" (hate that term. Maybe we say, Enthusiast instead?), but really the only AAA game I've...
I do think it's more of a AAA-game and people who follow them thing.
I'd consider myself a "hardcore gamer" (hate that term. Maybe we say, Enthusiast instead?), but really the only AAA game I've played this year has been Kingdom Come 2 and even that I kind of consider it AAA-adjacent and more of a niche title than something like Doom: The Dark Ages. I'm follow podcasts that do often talk about the newest AAA stuff, but mixed in there is tons of indie, smaller and outright weird games, which all end-up being the vast majority of the conversation on said podcasts.
So I just don't follow a lot of this stuff. Mostly what I see on the places I frequent (this forum and a smaller, dedicated PC forum) are general enthusiasm for whatever anyone is playing at a given time, AAA or not. Not sure what I'm getting at here, but I suppose the idea is just to disconnect. There's no need to follow the hype train and follow the "discourse." Honestly, I do generally agree that AAA games aren't worth the time, because they're largely just not doing anything terribly interesting, but I recognize that a large audience does like them and that runs the gamut from Enthusiast Gamers like myself to people who pick-up one, maybe two games a year for their console, enjoy them and don't think much more about games beyond that.
If you're in the industry, it's pretty bad all around. AAA has laid off as much as 20% of the workforce over 3 years, indies are struggling and shutting down, new startups are struggling to land...
If you're in the industry, it's pretty bad all around. AAA has laid off as much as 20% of the workforce over 3 years, indies are struggling and shutting down, new startups are struggling to land publishers and funding (unless you can shill "AI"). It's only a "good time" if you are a Balatro, who can release a game on no budget and have it blow up during this power vacuum. Or if you were already nearing the shipping date of a larger game.
For games, it will vary. Gamers diversified over the decades, so everyone's experience will differ. The typical conversation is around the AAA market, and yea: it's rough right now there. But not for everyone:
if you play a "forever game" like Fortnite or Roblox, you may not notice a thing. Those large services will keep trucking, even among a layoff. GTA6 will probably join this fold too, assuming there's no disaster launch.
the indie game market will mostly feel the same to existing gamers. Indies are suffering, but there's also thousands of games still releasing. Unless you're fixated on the Silksong of the world, you won't necessarily notice a dip in releases. Becsuse you couldn't keep up with all of them to begin with.
mobile gaming, meanwhile, is arguably better than ever. Be it casual Faire which fits more of the forever game, or big AAA-eaque releases trying to challenge Genshin Impact, Asia seems to really be trucking though this period to great aplomb (probably helps that you can't just layoff half your workforce so they invest in their talent).
People can forget games have so many aspect to them now. Especially when conversation tends to focus on one part of the elephant.
I tend to stay far away from the realm of synthetic men and whatever an "endymion" is. I went down a hole on those types of creators for a bit out of curiosity and felt like I was flashbacking to shit from middle school, when it wasn't thinly veiled culture war nonsense and/or outright depression.
Their brand of "discourse" to me is like listening to folks beg a dealer for more personalized drugs. They're not interested in design or craft, know practically nothing of production/creativity, and can only barely articulate what they actually want to see because half of the criticism is cover for "make me the target audience". The videos, more often than not, are just them reading articles you can find yourself on any major gaming site - there's zero depth of thought to it. They never show up in communities where folks make things, and will even go as far as to say mods and such are bad because they "aren't the original vision", as if the thing they endlessly complain about is sacrosanct (fuckin what).
Imo, the state of the industry is basically irrelevant. It is so big and has existed long enough that anything you could want is probably out there in some form or other. How you engage, what you engage with, is far more important than whatever trends places like EA, Ubisoft, etc are pursuing. If you take the step of doing mods, or making your own, you can just have everything you want and discuss the merits of ideas with folks of like mind and similar preference.
Right now, for example, Morrowind, a game from 23 years ago is being expanded with Tamriel Rebuilt. Diablo 2 can be overhauled to suit just about any weird little preference you have (I have lots of weird preferences, trust me bro). You can take a game like STALKER and turn it into a survivalist military sim. Even with a current game, like Monster Hunter, you can change up how it plays and make it work on hardware it was never meant to support. You can go to a forum and grab every single game for every single system you ever wanted, and stuff like romhacks, texture packs, etc. Did you like Final Fantasy Tactics? Check out FF Hacktics, or play Tactics Ogre: One Vision. Like pokemon? There's more romhacks than there are original titles, designed by all manner of player to cater to practically any version of taste.
In my opinion, part of resisting the algorithmic internet is engaging with intent, and it just so happens to be that with gaming you can accomplish a two-fer. You can engage with intent, restructure your time in a more satisfying way and, just like the games themselves, be consistently rewarded for your effort with cool shit you can keep forever if you've got a few storage drives. Depending on the game, you can make a version just for you/your kids and have a unique experience together. We do not have to let the Doomslop Industrial Complex eat up the hobby, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
This is a really comprehensive piece that touches on a lot of the positives and negatives in the gaming industry and game journalism, both real and perceived.
However, at the end, it seems to come around to what I actually agree is the biggest problem - the algorithm and the death of discourse in service to ragebait. It's a conclusion that I feel should resonate with a lot of us here on Tildes.
I remember in like the early 2000s (I'd only watched it like a decade later though) there was a flash animation series named "The Decline of Video Gaming" which was a pretty neat (at the time) satire of the industry "declining" and everything getting worse. I wouldn't watch it today because I am sure there are funny gamer words in it. Anyways, the industry had some of its best years afterwards, including the guys who made those flash animations which later on went to make Snipperclips!
Anyways, all that to say people have always liked to complain and exaggerate. But in the past couple of years it's gotten uniquely bad. Negativity, cynicism, and ragebait is the norm. It was always the norm in some places-- but now it's just like all social media became /v/. It's tiring.
I haven't watched it so I don't know if that's what they meant, but to be fair I do think that around year 2004 - 2009 or so, from the point of view of a PC gamer with specific tastes, the situation was kind of bad. I think it was one of the big shifts from nerds as a target group towards a more mainstream gaming population, which naturally makes the nerds (me) unhappy. And as a result, some of the more "gamey" games like arcade shooters pretty much disappeared for years. I remember when Hard Reset came out in 2011 it received a lot of praise because although it wasn't actually that amazing, it was a new game in a genre that was practically dead at the time.
Also gaming at the end of the 90s until about 2001 was just absurdly strong. In the time period criticized above you had some timeless hits like HL2 or Orange Box, but at the end of 90s you had several comparable hits like that coming out every year from different companies. Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Diablo 1 & 2, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, various isometric realtime strategies, Might & Magic 6 and 7, Thief, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, just unbelievable concentration of hits. After that the industry imo absolutely was worse until about 2010.
As someone who loved all those old games I get what you're saying but 2004 is one of the most lauded years for critically acclaimed games. 2007 was also strong albeit on the more mainstream side of things.
Well, the industry (the one people work and make money in) is definitely ebbing. So many layoffs, so much mismanagement that can't be hidden in polish (devs don't get that time either), so much talent drain. Layoffs aren't new, but not retaining talent for decades now is (not) bearing it's fruit in hard times.
It's the internet, though. So of course this all gets condensed down to "the industry is dying". It's not a lie, but it implies that we can't revive. I do think the market will bounce back, eventually. I want to hope it will take a year, it might take 5 years in reality. But I believe it will bounce back.
Games themselves dying, though? Entirely subjective. Games became so diverse thst there are inevitably bubbles that are having a golden age and bubbles popping. All at once.
(after finishing the video) It was an interesting video. I do appreciate that the early part acknoledged that games do in fact live in a society, and perceptions will affect even your fantasy escapes when times get bad. That definitely influeces the entire mood.
They did mention a bit of the industry, but it seems to have pivoted off quickly and shifted to the indie market instead. Indies can succeed but they won't really save the industry. I think that argument of
"when it's not profitable anymore, they will move on"
is one that I am the most ambivalent about. The author is right in that nothing is forever, and especially so with "hot trends". But I think there's one big issue on the horizon: the rise of slop. Slop is made to be extremely cheap, and addictive to consume. Corporate's dream scenario. So we may not necessarily "move on" this time, the same way a smoker doesn't just "move on" from smoking without intervention. And slop will take a while to die because it's already so cheaply made. Add in the rise of AI and we might be in for a 40 day storm.
The journalism bit is interesting as well. The landscape has changed, but the methods of clickbait have more or less stayed the same. I'm not sure how or if we can really fix this, though. Anger has always been a strong motivator in history, we haven't done a good job over centuries in being able to "walk away". We need to change the entire idea on how we monetize the internet if we want to fix this. The incentives are broken.
I enjoyed the video.
I have a less forgiving view of what I see as whining grifters making premature eulogies for the industry as a whole based on the output of a handful of companies capable and willing to throw hundreds of millions at game projects. As the author gets at, I think this is the result of social media rewarding "hot takes" more than anything else. People who suggest things that are not obvious are more interesting, even if the reason they're not obvious is that they're bullshit.
AAA budgets as of late have reached unprecedented heights and you can't compare $10m AAA games of the past with $100m AAA games of the present as though that massive increase in cost doesn't naturally come with a massive additional concern for return of investment. "Moderately appealing to a massive audience" may then be a better goal than "highly appealing to a somewhat smaller audience". The good news is that you can just ignore that segment altogether if the current trends and monetization efforts at the top are not to your liking: the long tail of video games has never been richer and more accessible in my experience, and I've never felt more catered to as a player. You just can't both have the cake and eat it.
Yeah, I really don't get the doomerism stuff. Maybe this only apply to AAA games? Because I can't think of another time where my weird little niche interests are being serviced by small, indie producers. Like Dredge got made by what, like 3 or 4 people? At the same time big hits, like Breath of the Wild, are blowing my freaking mind. So I just don't really get the argument.
Admittedly this comes from a pretty casual/infrequent gamer, but I love where we are at as far as the games being produced - though I am not a fan of how AAA are produced: supplemented with low wages and long hours, driven more and more to DLC and loot boxes, and for the lowest common denominator. But I can easily just opt out of that system. Maybe the only real complaint I can't get around is not actually owning, physically, the games I purchase - but again with the majority of them being around $5 (and for freaking awesome games) it's still hard to complain.
I do think it's more of a AAA-game and people who follow them thing.
I'd consider myself a "hardcore gamer" (hate that term. Maybe we say, Enthusiast instead?), but really the only AAA game I've played this year has been Kingdom Come 2 and even that I kind of consider it AAA-adjacent and more of a niche title than something like Doom: The Dark Ages. I'm follow podcasts that do often talk about the newest AAA stuff, but mixed in there is tons of indie, smaller and outright weird games, which all end-up being the vast majority of the conversation on said podcasts.
So I just don't follow a lot of this stuff. Mostly what I see on the places I frequent (this forum and a smaller, dedicated PC forum) are general enthusiasm for whatever anyone is playing at a given time, AAA or not. Not sure what I'm getting at here, but I suppose the idea is just to disconnect. There's no need to follow the hype train and follow the "discourse." Honestly, I do generally agree that AAA games aren't worth the time, because they're largely just not doing anything terribly interesting, but I recognize that a large audience does like them and that runs the gamut from Enthusiast Gamers like myself to people who pick-up one, maybe two games a year for their console, enjoy them and don't think much more about games beyond that.
If you're in the industry, it's pretty bad all around. AAA has laid off as much as 20% of the workforce over 3 years, indies are struggling and shutting down, new startups are struggling to land publishers and funding (unless you can shill "AI"). It's only a "good time" if you are a Balatro, who can release a game on no budget and have it blow up during this power vacuum. Or if you were already nearing the shipping date of a larger game.
The only "upside" is that if you're not laid off by now, you'll be harder to lay off in general. This article describing it as "two labor markets" helps describe this phenomenon: https://www.axios.com/2025/07/06/unemployment-job-market-education-health-care
For games, it will vary. Gamers diversified over the decades, so everyone's experience will differ. The typical conversation is around the AAA market, and yea: it's rough right now there. But not for everyone:
if you play a "forever game" like Fortnite or Roblox, you may not notice a thing. Those large services will keep trucking, even among a layoff. GTA6 will probably join this fold too, assuming there's no disaster launch.
the indie game market will mostly feel the same to existing gamers. Indies are suffering, but there's also thousands of games still releasing. Unless you're fixated on the Silksong of the world, you won't necessarily notice a dip in releases. Becsuse you couldn't keep up with all of them to begin with.
mobile gaming, meanwhile, is arguably better than ever. Be it casual Faire which fits more of the forever game, or big AAA-eaque releases trying to challenge Genshin Impact, Asia seems to really be trucking though this period to great aplomb (probably helps that you can't just layoff half your workforce so they invest in their talent).
People can forget games have so many aspect to them now. Especially when conversation tends to focus on one part of the elephant.