the death of gaming to me was when it became so big and made so much money that they started taking ideas from the PR department and investors rather than the developers and passionate people working on the video games.

“You add finances to art you get fart” This is the big brain content I’ve been looking for

Its so crazy to think that 15 years ago you would buy a game and that was the game. There were no day 1 patches or hotfixes. Companies actually had to put time and effort into releasing a good game because there wasnt a redo button.

5:10 Absolutely true. Look to Deep Rock Galactic as a great example. The devs have been completely open from beta to release with things and listening to the community that DRG has become a game that truly feels like it was made by people who want to play it too. They released season 1 and are going to release every season after with a completely free battle pass and lots of cosmetics that reward you for playing the game. They do have paid dlcs but they make sure that a lot of work goes into them so that it is actually worth getting. Most players use the dlc stuff because of how much care was put into making it worth the money. When Ghost Ship Games is asked how we can support them they respond with, "Buy the game, buy the dlcs if you want to, and spreas the game to other people." There us no other way to give them money and created such a healthy communuty and game.

"the future of gaming lies within the small developers" the truth has been spoken

what asmon says he likes about gaben: hes a billionaire what asmon actually likes about gaben: he wears the same shirt everyday

I was born in '89, so for me, gaming was great from about '97-'05 and remained mostly okay until about 2013.

I miss the days when you could go to the store and a game could catch your eye and actually make you want to play it

Video should be called "The Decline of Triple A Games", because there are soooo many awesome indie games

Back when a single purchase would include everything

The decline for me was after black ops 2. They sold skins for like 50 cents to a 1$. Every cod after that started raising the prices ever so slowly, until now we have 20$ packs with a key chain and a camo. Digital items for 20$. Other game companies followed suit too and now it’s just out of hand. Miss the old days

I think I started to realize the decline of gaming when Diablo 3 came out, that's when you felt even the mighty Blizzard had lost its edge. But it was definitely with the mobas and f2p models that made money-people realise how profitable the gaming industry was. Games used to be art. It used to be developers making their vision/dreams reality and sharing it with others through games. It used to be about having fun. Now its mainly a business, an industry. Games have lost it's soul. It's like watching your amazing hole in the wall burgershop make it big and turning into another chain like McDonalds. Instead of the burgers being made from scratch by some greasy but passionate dude, they now come in frozen and are just assembled by some 16 year old earning minimum wage. Its just sad. There are some breaths of fresh air, some beacons of hope here and there. But the majority of games you can just feel the greed oozing a mile away.

It's amazing how games are getting more innovative, bigger in scope, more beautiful, and yet less fun all at the same time.

"Where was the turning point" Oblivion armored horses

Blaming the "dumbos" or casuals for the decline of the gaming industry, just proves how "gamers" are completely blind. Casual players don't buy pre-orders or invest hundreds of dollars in cosmetic items. Casual players don't participate of dedicated communities like reddit, and defend their beloved games and devs, like it's some sort of cult. They won't buy DLCs or expansions or 5 different version of Skyrim or Street Fighter 4. You know who do invest way more time and money than they should on games? Hardcore players. Fanboys. People they are unaware they are addicted. People so obsessed with a single franchise, that they'll buy everything they released. They can't just play something else, or do something else entirely. Because they are addicted. It's always the same cycle: They'll create an unrealistic and unjustified Hype. They will buy pre-orders, special edition, season passes... If the game is good, it justifies their compulsion. If it's bad, they'll complain about it on Twitter and KZfaq, but will buy the next release or comeback once the issues are fixed.

There's so many REALLY good games out there. The problem is that they're all smaller indies. 'The mortuary assistant' for instance is crazy. But it's smaller creators that really care about the feedback of the players that make these games great.

Asmon in reference to oblivion: "Those were the days, you had no microtransactions, just games" Me: horse armor

the gaming industry was ruined for me when i noticed content being intentionally left out of games and refurbished as "DLC"

The turning point for me was when companies started to charge extra for stuff we expected to come as standard. I was used to buying PC games and then buying an expansion a year or so later. At some point this changed to you buy one of five diff versions of the game and you get diff content from each. Ubisoft was the worst for this and still likely is today. Shortly afterwards it was you pay more to be able to play multiplayer, or you pay for microtransactions to save time. This utterly destroys game design, pushing games towards less curated content and more mindless grinding. Outside of this there has been a pretty obvious change in quality of triple A games on release. You can basically expect most games to be buggy as hell on release even as game cost continues to rise. I first encountered this with a Ubisoft game, Watch Dogs, the thing basically wouldn't work because of their shitty launcher being offline, then when I finally got into the game it was so buggy graphically that I couldn't play it. Unfortunately, gamers are so obsessed with their hobby they reward bad behavior all the time. These days when I look at new games, I can feel the marketing department in the game design. I think that's why so many people have trended towards indie devs - its the only place you can pick up a cheaper game, spend some time in a world and then move on with your life. In the triple A world if you are not still playing the thing months later and buying cosmetics, mission packs, xp boosts etc the game is somehow a failure.

I agree with this videos main points 100%. I still try to enjoy gaming so I wait until a games properly tested and fixed before buying it. That's usually way after the games initial release. So I also save money. I figured this out so many years ago. I thought if everyone did this preorders and games broken on release would fade away, but they didn't.

5:16 Team cherry, a small team, that gives you Hollow knight, a masterpiece of an metroidvania, for just 15$. All DLC's are free, no microtransactions included. Just throwing that out there.

is these times we've got ghost of tsushima. With literally no microtransactions. God bless SP.

(49:20) I love how the chat's response to "pre-orders are bad" was "YO DUDE I PRE-ORDERED CYBERPUNK 2077 - THE HYPE IS REAL" And of course, living in current year... (or just living then at the time with a modicum of foresight and self control) the release state of Cyberpunk 2077 is a well documented thing.

I think part of this is our own nostalgia of the times back then and us being older and changing as well.

The decline of gaming was when games had the ability to EASILY patch... this meant gaming companies could easily ship shite and patch later...

The turning point for me is when companies started selling the awesome shit you'd get for completing a challenge for $20. Really takes away a big reason to play a game when all the cool stuff is locked behind a paywall... especially... ESPECIALLY... when you already have to buy the game full price. No. I don't want to play this shallow experience where the main source of progression is the FOMO store that conveniently has a huge button with shining lights to show where it is.

8:00 motion capturing is much more time saving then just normal animating keyframe for keyframe if u want lets say good looking animations (on things like Movement)

I love 7 days to die. There aren't that many voxel survival games out there, much less with zombies. It'd be amazing if the AI wasn't so janky and there was more to it, but there's nothing quite like it.

"Where was the turning point where you perceived the decline?" It's a somewhat retrospective answer, but the 2008 financial crisis. The same year the crash happened was also the year that the entire games industry eclipsed Hollywood in revenue as an industry. And of course investors were being pressured to preserve their ill gotten gains, so they diversified their holdings by investing in our industry. The same financial gurus who caused the crash (who have never finished a video game in their life) have now wormed their way into executive positions at many publishers, influcing decisions that are forced on developers about content, gameplay and monetisation. Which has led to the current quagmire the industry finds itself in. At least, that's my take.

I actually thought the decline started with the rise of EA. I learned in PSM magazine that EA's plan for making money was to make 10 games at a time expecting 9 of those games to fail and they'd make their money back on the 10th. They rush them out on an assembly line with limited budgets because it was profitable because people have to buy the game to find out it was trash. They'd not really lose much on the fails and sometimes it would make it big. They'd also buy up smaller companies like they they were going out of style. The number of great companies destroyed by them is in the hundreds. Unfortunately most of the big companies see the money they make and they started thinking I want in on that too and now here we are.

The decline started in 2009. DLC was out of control, mobile was taking over, live services started popping off. There wasn't much innovation at that point. It was the peak of war shooters and preorder bonuses at different stores for different rewards making everything into a mess. Ubisoft started to decline and in 2012 went down the Far Cry 3 rabbit hole and never came out of it with the copy and pasted formula. Not to mention the charts for different game versions like basic, deluxe, gold, etc.

The start of the decline is linked to wide availability of say ADSL or other "faster than dial up" connections in the home. This allowed companies to shovel out unfinished shite and fix it later. Before that you HAD to fix most of the bugs or you killed your game. In the days of cartridges there was no bug fixing after the fact so it had to be as good as it could be.

They all are digging too deep. The answer is right on the surface. As in any other industry, in gaming it works the very same way. At first people who make decisions are those who are good at creating the product. Then when the company development reaches a certain point people who make the decisions are those who are good at managing a company. Thus the quality of the product goes down.

Holy shit... look at the Activision documents. "If player purchased item, place first player item in a gameplay session for which the item is effective" They even have a Micro-transaction engine!

Holy shit man, I haven’t heard a soul utter the words “Command & Conquer” in like 15 years. I’m 22 and I used to play with my dad on our old ass laptop. Red Alert 2 was one of the best games to come out from C&C imo and if I’m not mistaken, it may have been my first video game ever. Outside of Generals doing pretty well. God what I’d give to find a pc nowadays with low enough specs and an original copy of Red Alert 2 to be able to play that game one more time. I wish C&C didn’t randomly stop existing when I hit my teen years.

indie games r the only things keeping the industry from crashing again

Shoutout to fromsoftware for still making pure masterpiece made by passion and respect. true art. Can't wait for elden ring"

Surprised no one talks about standard edition, special edition and legendary/masters edition game sales. They might as well say pay $59.99 for 80% of the game, $79.99 for 90% and an amazing $99.99 for 100% of the game. It’s literally a paywall before you get the game that forces you to pay more or loss some content forever.

I agree that the future of gaming lies with smaller developers, but I wonder what happens when they become successful. They’ll inevitably become larger, right? They’ll become more ambitious, which isn’t inherently a problem. It’s that ambition though that leads to partners, shareholders, and a lot of other causal factors that lead a game developer to implode. We, as consumers, also play a part in perpetuating this cycle. Dunkey’s part two of the game critics video highlights why. I just wonder how we can fix this. We are just trapped in a cycle

The big turning point for me was around 2015, with Black Ops 3. When I personally noticed when loot boxes were the big thing.

Half Life Alyx was the opposite of a gimmick, it absolutely set the bar for VR gaming, and is one of the best games this year.

Beautiful graphics and animation work is always welcome, but it should be the cherry on top, not the driving force of the game. A really compelling story and good game design can usually make up for lackluster visuals, but the reverse is not true.

I always love when Asmongold reacts to Actman's videos

The ability to reserve games prior to release for rewards. Specifically, when it became possible to patch games post launch. This started the trend of pushing out unfinished titles. People get hyped and pubs/devs take advantage of this.

I find it interesting that when I recently watched an interview of a developer at ATLUS (jp not friggin' SEGA). I was happy when the dev said he liked working for ATLUS because they do not try to cater to everyone and that allows the team to keep sticking to their vision more stubbornly.

copypasta - The Perfect game. 17:41 "I would only make games if I knew that my games had the capacity to ruin somebody's life because if I didn't think that I could ruin somebody's life with my game it's not good enough to be worthy of that privilege. Like I would want to have my game be so good that people would forsake and ruin their own lives in order to play it. Like that's how you can tell if a game is good by the way if a game is good you'll see CNN and ABC News specials about concerned parents with their children ruining their lives playing the game. You saw that with world of warcraft and you saw that with fortnite. What's gonna be the next game? You'll find out at 8 p.m. on Fox News. The game that makes people ruin their life.. think about it.. that is the biggest advertisement you can possibly have for a video game: 𝐈𝐭'𝐬 𝐬𝐨 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐫𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐢𝐭 ."

I like motion capture animation and good graphics makes it looks amazing and helps pull me into the world they are building.

i have to disagree with asmon on the gow thing of the graphics and motion capture. to me it adds so much to the game's story telling and narrative. if you can see the emotion on a digital characters face then that makes it a win for me. now I will agree that graphics do not determine if a game is good or not, but if you can nail it, to me, it adds a lot of value to the game. it does need to be said that if only graphics are good it doesn't mean shit, but the voice acting as well as the realistic representation together that adds to the game tldr: I think that graphics and cinematics add a lot to a game if done correctly

45:30 sad thing is Star Wars battlefront 2 was making so much money even after ea left the game to rot. The game built back a loyal player base and became top 5 most selling game during some months on both pc and Xbox. Ea had a gold mine of a game that was still making tons of money but cancelled it because it wasn’t making as much money as fifa or madden with their pay to play packs

That one person who said it all started when “free games became the norm” is actually right, can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.

I honestly completely disagree with the concept of "video games dying" if anything it's getting more popular by the minute.

39:16 this part is my only problem with the video - they talk admiringly about the fact that the life of developers used to get “devoured” for the sake of making a game by deadline. it’s not good when peoples’ personal lives get crushed for their jobs. The best solution is a midpoint between the old way of crushing GameDevs and the new way of coasting on patches and fixes and remasters

Where is Asmon's reaction to "why dark souls 1 is a masterpiece"!!!!!

the turning point was around 2010-2012 when gaming became mainstream and suddenly pretending to be a "nerd" was socially acceptable, you know what i mean, we are a small percentage compared to the average geek consoomer, and these companies are all about raising stock prices and appealing to the broad audience

Maybe it's nostalgia, but the old games were so fresh. I remember playing SimCity until my wrists hurt, it was that fun. Flight sims, RTS, first person shooters, RPGs with great stories (eg Fallout), they were all great

I think motion-capture tech streamlines the process of animating character models for gameplay and cinematics where if not for motion-capture devs couldn't include the same amount of cinematics in the same given time frame.

19:45 fun fact, gabe has been specificly focusing on projects relating to this and has come out saying that we are a lot closer than people think to this. He also says it will be an apocalyptic level event for any media company once it is completed and anyone who isnt working on it will be soon.

“16x the detail” shit like that is just a waste. The detail we have now is good. A fun and functioning game is all that really matters.

I saw an esports vr video and asmon's impression of playing vr was accurate

"It's capitalism" "No it's people wanting to make more capital"

8:08 pretty wrong take there, if it didnt have mo-cop they would complain how un-natural the animation and movement was lol.

People still paying over and over and over to just play more WoW in 2020... "complacency" by definition. PS: Game company bigbosses do nothing but watch the asian markets all day(namely China) and they see how mobile games are a bigger market than NA's population. They see this sht and dream about the day when they too will roll in fields of cash from thei mobile, card, moba, battle royal garbage. This delusional representation of the games industry leads them to present sht like 'Artifact' with a stage, fancy music, a live crowd and everything. Or that Diablo mobile 'dont you have phones' bullsht. They dont get what gamers want. But it doesnt matter. Its easier to convince a market that they want what you have than it is to actually craft a quality product. The job of a businessmen/salesmen is not to make a good product, its to sell the one in stock.

Just stating a fact: The Actman is a Legend!

7:58 I'm constantly having this discussion with a buddy who is obsessed with graphics. Impressive CGI is worthless without good storyline, characters, music, and especially, gameplay, so it doesn't really excite me until I see rest of the game. On the other hand, certain games are vastly improved by it. The God of War games, and others, are made to be "cinematic". And games like FIFA, and many others, benefit greatly from motion-captured realism. Red Dead Redemption 2, though, I think (ironically) is one of the very few modern triple-A games that "redeems" the use of (ultra) big budget (and GTA, though personally didn't enjoy the characters and story of GTAV much). Ie. Rockstar in general, though expensive games, is one of the few that still delivers your money's worth. Otherwise, there are a small handful of big-name developers who still have the right stuff. But agree 100%. The future lies with indie developers.

The the decline of gaming happened when high speed internet connection was available and they didn't have to release a game fully done they could just keep putting patches in and updates

As long as there will be "ideal customers" who purchase FIFA/NBA every fckng year - the corps will keep going current way.

The death of BioWare was the canary in the cage for me. Beginning of the decline, around 2011.

Microtransations in mobile games - they created proof of concept that its a way to go for games to have overwelmingly bigger revenue stream

8:30 When he talks about motion capture, sure there might be not much added in the case of player enjoyment. But animators and the game development at large save an insane amount of hours from doing motion capture instead animation everything manually.

"WHEN DID BOBBY KOTICK GET HIS OWN YUGIOH CARD" OMG IM DEAD XD

This is just real life. They want video games to be real life. Going for a hike? Get the hiking boots dlc for an easier experience, and don't forget to stay hydrated with the 3 dollar bottle of water dlc. I miss when I was a kid and those things were just unlocked after playing enough.

When it comes to graphics I want them to be as good as possible while still achieving over 120 FPS. Frame rate is most important to me. If a game is photorealistic but I only get 30 fps I’ll enjoy that far less than a good looking game at 144 FPS.

When a game come out, I usually wait atleast one year before buying it, so I can wait for the bugs to be fixed, read evaluations and perhaps get it cheaper - kind of weird how it is this days.

i love how his chat starts exploding about Asmon's opinion of the high def cinematics, when i can't help but agree with him for my own reason. I don't need a scene thaat looks better than the game itself i'm playing lol let ME play the story, not watch a movie.

"Those were the days where there was no political agenda in games" Meanwhile, BioShock is blatant criticism of anarcho capitalism

When he said complacency what he meant to say was hubris.... sheer fecking hubris.

The turning point was bethesda's horse armor dlc. That was the start of the snowball of shit that is triple AAA greed.

I guess the decline begun when mobile games start to sell "time" and "probability" in their store boxes. After that, some company start to do the same on pc and console games.

I think it was when "customer-centric" and "agile" entered. Now every game evolves into the same, by catering to the majority, and what the "consumer wants", and games became these endless flows of small packages of the same mechanics, altering the core of the game. instead of having some integrity, releasing a piece of content, letting it stand, and stand by it. The constant small "agile" deliveries drain every level of integrity and uniqueness out of games, and they all become skin rolls of the same mechanics.

Late 90s and early to mid naughties are one of the best periods for gaming - Morrowind, KOTOR I and KOTOR II, Bioshocks, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, WC3, WoW... Dude, I even learned my English from KOTOR, especially the Revenge of the Sith, which had such a well-spoken English language with complex grammar. Miss those games, miss the humour of those times, when people weren't clamouring publicly about being offended. Upd.: forgot to add Bloodlines - the masterpiece, that was so bad on release that you couldn't actually complete the game without proper patches. Upd2: Gothic I and Gothic II.

I felt the decline in mainstream gaming when mobile gaming began to take off - the consoles and PC studio's were trying to keep up with the micro-transactions or just get on that wagon to grab some cash. Chinese studio's that re-skin and release 20+ games a year just keep putting fuel on the fire, at consumers of the gaming industry only we together can put the brakes on this disaster and reclaim our own heritage.

The decline of gaming for me was when Brink came out. I remember peak parkore craze. My 15 year old brain couldn't handle the idea of cod with parkore WOAH cant wait. I remember being so excited and it was just a heap of rushed garbage. This was when I started noticing games just being rushed and a cash grab. So 2011

I feel like 2016 and above is when it started getting diluted, I remember 2015 being a BIG year for gaming people will disagree with me of coarse but I remember 2015 being an amazing year at least for gamers that's not to say everything prior to 2015 isn't to be looked at as gaming being in its prime but I feel like we can still consider 2015 as the twilight hours of the golden age

I think that the moment everything changed was when mobile games started earning more money than the pc/console market combined.

McCool is right, Cata was the first time I told myself "well I guess I dont need to keep playing world of warcraft" feels bad man

8:08 Something people never see or understand about game development is the developer's perspective. Animating 3d models and getting fluid animation that doesn't look absolutely awful is incredibly difficult, especially when you're working with real life humanoid models. Motion capturing isn't just about making a better product, it's also about not giving us developers carpal tunnel after hundreds of hours of trying to perfect an animation.

For me the decline happened somewhere in the later half of the PS3 life cycle, so about 2012-2013. Valve stopped making games, my favorite platformers from the PS2 era were dead (including R&C which was supposed to stop having sequels made), my two favorite arcade racers were either dead (Motorstorm) or just produced shit (NfS), Little Big Planet started dying, etc.

VR won't catch mainstream acceptance until it's a holodeck. At which point video games will be a sport because actually doing what your character does would be extremely athletic.

Seriously I'm so glad he found Act Man! I love seeing my favorite streamer, watching and giving opinions from watching one of my all time favorite content creators on KZfaq.

I feel like the decline started when MMOs began to adopt microtransactions and free-to-play moved into prominence. When that happened everyone and their brother wanted a taste of that microtransaction digital gold. At that point it became more and more pervasive in other games.

I completed my first-time 3-day playthrough of half-life (the original) 2 days ago. It had some certain rough edges and unrefinements, but it was still far better than anything produced by major studios in the past 10 years.

Just FYI on the halo stuff. Halo 4 was not the first with abilities/loadouts, reach was. Which was the majority of the negative feedback against reach. Halo 2 map pack was not day 1 DLC. It was July 2005, halo 2 was release Nov 2004. It was $20 but later made free so that everyone could enjoy it online.

The turning point. Its the same with comics, movies and table top games. Once the nomies thought it was cool to appropriate geek culture. That is where it changed.

18:31 i remember hearing when I was a little kid that Everquest was so addicting that people would quite their jobs to play it all day. All that made me want to to was try it cause I thought wow that must be an amazing game lol

For me, the turning point was when NBA 2K My career mode switched from Skill Points to Virtual Currency. The writing was on the wall that it too would become an MMO, Live Service game.

I think the popularity of Elden Ring might be the kick in the ass we all needed to stop buying into these preditory business strategies. I bought 5 copies of Elden Ring (1 for me and 4 as gifts to friends). Vote with your wallet. Stop buying preorders and stop buying loot crates. Lets start holding Publishers accountable and get refunds for these games that don't meet the most basic of expectations.

8:00 I think he is kinda wrong about this. Due to the fact that a game is made good by the game play. But the experience surrounding it is what makes it exceptional. The game play of god of war was good but it was the immersion that made it exceptional. And that immersion was done through the characters feeling real. Making you feel like you were playing a real character. At least thats what I think. A game e.g. league, can be perceived as good or bad but it is not what I would call immersive. Whereas if you play the old ratchet and clanks you feel like you are experiencing a friendship between ratchet and clank with the bickering and everything. The game play was okay but the characters created the immersion.

Its hard to give an exact date of when the decline of gaming began. Assuming you agree that there is one, I believe that it is just the nature of corporate growth. With any public business, having a profit/economic downturn is typically something that is not accepted by the board and upper management. Generally speaking, I think this decline began once continued growth was the mandate, which usually correlates with companies going public. This pressure to grow the business and its revenues can usually cause management and decision makers (in this case game developers) to opt in to the least risky and most profitable models. Even though this is rational, and not done in spite of gamers, it just so happens that gamers interests and the best interests of a profit driven firm do not always see eye to eye. T'is the nature of "selling out".

for me, I noticed the change, when EQ2 was hyping EQ Next. They sold packages for the founders packs where we got pre release access to "Landmark" where we got to playtest in beta for Next in this "Landmark" game and possibly contribute to things that might actually make it into the actual next iteration of Everquest, which was supposed to be "Next". However, They sold it. Daybreak games bought it and scrapped the entire project Everquest Next. We were all left with "landmark" only, which was NOT what we wanted, our hopes for EQ Next were dashed, our hearts were broken and we got our first glimpse of what paid early access could turn out to be.

Although a much older industry, something similar has happened to the music industry. In the 1970s, musicians owned the record labels and hence could judge what was worth investing in and took risks with what we know now as the legends and icons of music. They weren't soulless executives relying on agencies and coked-up A&R men to tell them what was a hit. These were the days of actual bands comprising members who knew each other since school, practised in each others' parents' homes, lumped stuff in and out of vans for crappy gigs, but continued until they had a following. Now, we have manufactured bands designed by marketing departments based on customer surveys. None of the band know each other; they just attended an audition. They can't play, can barely sing, but they look right. Minor irritations, like original material and musical performance, are taken care of by teams of songwriters, engineers and producers. It's a musical sausage factory. Is it any wonder that such music leaves one empty?