It's been too long since I made an actual article either praising or criticizing trends in this industry, which now has more profit and sales than the movie and music industries combined. Let's summarize current video game controversies with a few paragraphs:
Microtransactions, DLC's and Season passes. Before these business models existed, you could either unlock additional content through specific conditions, or wait until an expansion pack would get released.
Nowadays, everyone's upcoming products from large publishers have all kinds of pre-order actions and promise on constant developments even after releases, such as bugs and balance patches. While the latter is a good thing, the former has gone completely out of hand.
Even as extreme as offering downloadable content on the very first day a new video game gets released, the fairness of simply incorporating such content into the packages themselves for free has vanished, and even worse, people sometimes now uncover hidden DLC content within games which are designed to basically unlock at a later time.
Since all of this plus microtransactions, season passes and special editions such as collector's or definitive or remastered or HD costs money, it all has become even more of an expensive hobby to venture into.
Although older video games sometimes get re-released for a new audience or generation, there is no mistake that everyone has become way more greedy at making additional profits from even the simplest things such as buying a skin, a gun or a level for a few currency.
Worst of all is that consumers simply accept and swallow it all up, to the point that if these business models are absent, they would flip out and say that such products lack content or replayability. Considering all of this has only made me more cautious than before with what's truly worth purchasing extra for, especially when discounts happen as early as a few months later, these are pretty much the dark times of throwing away money, for the most part.
Feminism, social justice warrior, GamerGate and the gamer identity. Much has already been discussed and said about this whole crazy controversy, I just want to share my thoughts on the whole developing matter.
To really summarize this issue would be to talk about what it means to be a video game, and what it means to be a gamer. To me, they embody an enhanced medium where control and consequences are constantly present.
If a video game has a successful formula, such as killing off tons of enemy soldiers in a FPS, or platforming around to save the damsel in distress, showcasing stereotypes must then only be a tool for enhancing those experiences.
What I mean is that attractive men and woman are always more desirable to see than others. Exceptions always exist, but the whole identity of this leisure activity is simply developing further, as many new gamers seem to have risen up, and some of them are on a political crusade.
If feminists and SJW's want more female, transsexual, gay and bisexual presence in video games, honestly, they should create their own projects in order to see if their desires and demands can find an audience.
But as it stands, they already are influencing the industry, because it seems that game journalism and them are apparently together in bed, allowing for corruption and cronyism to form in examples such as ratings and reviews. That's a difficult topic to dwell into for the time being, so I might save that for the next time.
Dragon Age: Inquisition has the presence they desire and demand, and there are others, but who knows how video gaming will shape up in the upcoming years? Something else that needs a reconstruction are the genres, but that is also a future topic to reserve.
I'm all open for experiences for all kinds of audiences, I just hope that established franchises won't get affected too much with these demands and desires. There's always room for creating new IP's, so instead of criticizing poorly most of the time, creating your own content would be my answer for this issue.
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