Is it just me, or did the quality of an average video game go down significantly in the past ~10 years?

Is it just me, or did the quality of an average video game go down significantly in the past ~10 years?

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>Is it just me
Nope, it's all of Sup Forums today.

No.

Not really. It's the quality of the highest percentiles that has gone down significantly. The rest pretty much stayed the same, I'd even argue low bugdet and mid-range games have increased in quality compared to what they were 10 years ago.

Most people agree that the steady decline started in 2007.

kill yourself frogfucker

the quality of games is very high atm, but that doesn't make them good.

one of my favorite ps1 games was parasite eve. i tried to replay it but it was kind of terrible. some of the mechanics were off putting, and the random battles really annoyed me more than anything. but i did enjoy the story somewhat even though it was a little clunky and cliche. graphics don't even compare to today but what really made the game great was that you the player used your imagination more to fill in the gaps and inconsistencies within the bad graphics and bad controls and drives you to have your own personal experience. not many modern games allow that layer of imagination

2007 was the year

Games cost too much to make anymore so innovation goes out the window. Casual consumers want only photorealistic games so gameplay suffers. Basiclly last generation was the worst since pre nes

What makes everyone settle definitively on 2007? What happened that year to mark it as the start of the decline?

> random battles are off putting
Yea your opionion isnt shit or anything. There still hasnt been anhthing gameplay wise thats even close to pe1

I miss video games

The Wii brought casuals and their money attracted a bunch of jews

Yes
They don't try anymore and claim that it's all due to cost.
Problem is that solo efforts are able to put out decent if short titles in half the time with shoe string budgets.

Its when it slowly went from

>Look at user and his nerdy games
to
>OMG i love video games me and chad play them all the time xD

i said "random battles really annoyed me more than anything" don't get it twisted. it didnt stop me from playing or enjoying it

No, it's not just you who's under this mistaken impression.

The 7th gen was DOA because everyone was trying to push HD television.
Wii kept the entire industry afloat and brought it into the mainstream allowing the absolute trash show of the HD twin 7thgen consoles the time to grow on the public.
Now, without a Wii, the 8th gen is noticably struggling and losing ground every single year.

Their coming out with new systems that are just .5% stronger then their last systems in the middle of what would be seen as a generation!
Why? Cause nintendo's console is scheduled to release and they are trying to create a NEW quasi generation.

It's fucking over.

it went from making games with love to milking the ever loving shit out of gamers with almost no content in them
iphone released in nov 07 and the wii released a year prior for a point of reference

yes, 10 years ago we had a lot of games with medium budget; so they could be develop and tested on due time.

Today we only have no budget indies and casual pandering AAA games.

No.

Video games finally became more than just a "children's past time" or niche hobby, it could be considered art, video games had higher budgets than film even having annual equivalent to action films (CoD, Battlefield, etc.) and some companies even go out of there ways to hire bands to do the soundtrack, hire actors for motion capture, and so forth. Games have become more about being flashy and delivering the bare essentials in terms of gameplay and content, Nicole and diming those who want more through DLC. It's become more about getting the most out of the consumer while fucking them over at the same time. Now, people are buying less into video game consoles and catching up to greedy companies trying to exploit them, but thats not to say people still don't fall for some shit.

10 years ago I was 18. I was depressed back then too, but at least I had hope it could get better, and hadn't ruined my life yet.

>Nicole and diming
Wow.

auto correct

The production quality has gone way up. The investment of heart and soul has gone way down
Also is it just me thread openings should be instabanned along with now that the dust has settled and e celeb threads

PS2, Xbox and Gamecube was the last generation where dev teams were small enough to be involved and passionate.

When you're one of the 8 team members whose job is to make sure that the light glistens JUUSSSSSSSTTT right off of the Medal of Honour: Modern Warfighter's goggles it's kind of hard to put in 110%. Especially when the whole project was commissioned by a guy who's never played a video game and will be torn to pieces in Q&A by teenagers.

All the good developers left are basement dwelling Euros and Slavs. Actual 'studio' production sucks the life out of video games to nourish the shit beards of the hipsters designing them.

I think you're all being hyperbolic as fuck. The past decade hasn't been the best in gaming, but it hasn't been nothing but a decline either. There have been numerous amazing titles in the past ten years, many of which couldn't even have been made at this level of detail in any other time, like Red Dead Redemption or the Souls games.

ya'll just dumb. video games have reached a point where they are better than going to the movies and almost real life.

Video games have always been better than real life. There is no double-jump in real life.

>PS2, Xbox and Gamecube was the last generation where dev teams were small enough to be involved and passionate.
But still big enough to make something more substantial than the average indie game.

There were also just more developers in general, and they weren't all owned by the same three or four publishers.

Agreed, if anything ,that biggest low point was 2004, and games continued to suck until around 08 or so. Around that time people actually considered stuff like HL2, Okami and Portal to be the pinnacle of what gaming could do. Later people discovered actually good games like La Mulana were made during this period.

Does Sup Forums actually believe video games were an obscure hobby in fucking 2007 or this just an epic meme?

AA games ceased to exist. It became nothing but indie and AAA, with indie being mostly artsy shit and AAA being lowest-common-denominator Hollywood blockbuster shit.

Consoles were no longer purely gaming machines. Now they wanted to be all-purpose multimedia devices.

DLC became rampant.

We now had to install games on consoles and download updates for them, whereas plug-and-play simplicity had historically been one of the main advantages of consoles.

SJWs entered the gaming world in earnest, to tell us what terrible people we were for liking games the way they had always been and to demand games now be designed to appeal to their sensibilities.

Pretty much everything that's currently wrong with the industry began in the seventh generation.

>AA games ceased to exist. It became nothing but indie and AAA
That's really not true. You still have professionally produced medium budget titles. Just think of games like Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, The Talos Principle, the Overlord games or something like the Trials series.

They're far more rare than they used to be.

Many people mean, that in earlier days vidyas were better, but they don't consider that a) there where less games on the market and b) because of less games good games got a better spotlight.

Today, hundreds of new games go live each months. There a shitty ones, good ones and a lot of mediocre shit in between. But the overall quality got better and so you a load of meh, which raised your "when is it a good game"-bar.

Finally, your age. After so many years of gaming, less and less titles will surprise you. The most games I played the last years went shitty after the first two or three hours, especially indies, which copied the same gameplay as every other game out there, or the Xth sequel to an AAA title, but were considered "good".

No, videogames are better than ever, you're just stuck in your own little bubble of not playing them and only being aware of negativity since you browse Sup Forums

it's a meme spouted by underage b&
videogames stopped being a nerdy niche thing when the Atari 2600 was released

Took the words right out of mouth. It's every hipster on this website.

The DS release a year or two before the Iphone as a further point of reference.

what are good games, i want to be not miserable again

That's nonsense too.

aaa games have gotten worse. don't let anyone tell you otherwise

I just recently played Alien: Isolation. That was pretty good.

Yes, but I think it's because the number of video games being released over the same period of time drastically increased.

I thought that one looked okay but never got around to it.

nope
the Atari brought the arcade experience into the livingroom at an affordable price while assuring a SAFE place to play games at a time when the boomers were raising children

It's worth a playthrough. Excellent atmosphere, very true to its source material, kinda shit save system.

That's something to keep in mind then. I like the Alien movies.

General guide to buying gud games:
>Never pre-order or buy into early access
>Read reviews, if a lot of comment criticise the same thing, it's unlikely to be coincidence
>Just like irl, if it seems too good to be true it most likely is. Games the promise you a bunch of great feature deserve the most scepticism.
>Watch actual gameplay videos.
I do these things for most video and avoid a lot of trash. The same people who carry on about games being worse these past few years are generally the same idiot who pre-order the "collectors gold ultimate edition". If a majority of gamers became smarter consumers devs would be more likely to produce quality games and actually do QA/QC. That probably won't happen though.

Yeah, thanks, I know what home consoles are, but that doesn't change the fact that video games were still a *niche hobby* at that time, maybe less so in Japan, but certainly in the US and even more so in the EU regions. It took Western countries another decade before they *really* tried to attract audiences beyond children and "nerds".

I think better advice is to just buy every game and see it if you like it or not, because you might find something that you wouldn't know you liked otherwise.

There were tons of games on the market back then, because making non-indie games was easier and less expensive, and they weren't all trying to sell hundreds of millions of copies. Those hundreds of games you're talking about going live every month now are mostly very small indie games being sold on Steam that probably would have been free Flash games before.

by 1982, the Atari had sole 10 million units
In 1982, the U.S. population was approximately 280 million people
Which means that approximately 1 in 28 people played on Ataris
considering more than one person generally lives in a household, I would conservatively estimate that 1 in 20 households had an Atari
that's not "niche"
Also, arcades were HUGE in Japan throughout the '70s and '80s, and it took a little while longer for consoles to gain traction there since people lived closer to population centers and had no need for an arcade experience at home

Video games have never been a niche hobby for anyone born in the last 30 years
Even "normies" played FIFA, PES etc during their younger years. It's still video gaming, it's just not the same things the rest of us played

>It took Western countries another decade before they *really* tried to attract audiences beyond children and "nerds".
the biggest market for arcades were adults

>_>
...not sure if troll...

Is there a correlation between being fucking dumb and posting frogs?

you are fucking retarded

These are really rare though.

I think it's combination of three things.

First, what he said With AA games, devs can have small teams with small budget and they could make very interesting, experimental games or innovative games or just polished niche games that didn't have to earn much. While we still get some of them that are considered good (Yakuza series, Dark Souls series, for example), and the Kickstarter thing gave me hope for a while (Divinity, Wasteland, other kind of niche games that were pretty decent), we get really low amount of them. Why is directly tied to the next two points.

The next point is - graphics. Graphics have to be good nowadays, either the publisher demands it or the public. And while 10 years ago we could quickly slap together low poly stuff, now you gotta have a special guy to just take care of texturing the nose hair. Or to be more realistic, you now have specialists in every way of production, from lighting artist to particle artist to material artist to hair artist to whatever artists. It is too expensive to make a small niche game. Look at Rockstar, for example. They released games every year. Do you really think we'll get another Warriors game where they have to invest tons of time into it? Do you think they would gamble on Manhhunt? No, they could back then due to the lower costs and smaller teams.

And the third point - the consumers. Where a few years ago most normies didn't want to touch games, and games were pretty much made for hardcore market or people just could make what they wanted due to points 1 and 2, now we can't have that anymore. Games must be catered to everyone and have simple enough mechanics. A game can not focus anymore on being one thing and doing that good. Every game must be the copy of successful game with open world, crafting, whatever is popular right now.

Which leads me to another problem, actually. Games tried to stand out back in the day, be different. That's how they wanted to be noticed. Now, the plan is to be the same as the top selling game with all the features of other top selling games. Then we will surely have the best selling game right?

>frogs
that's the grinch

>Graphics have to be good nowadays
Undertale says hi
every pixelart roguelite says hi

I know the goddamn numbers, I know the goddamn history, and I also know that gaming was still a niche hobby, not only at that precise time, but for many more years to come. You're jumping to incorrect conclusions based on those figures. What made video games a niche thing back then wasn't a lack of sales, but a lack of spread across demographics. The target demographic (and the actual primary consumers) were children and teenagers. It wasn't like with actual mainstream media at the time, like movies, music and books, where you had different types of each appealing to different demos across a broad spectrum, no, you had a very specific target demo that was, fortunately enough, one of the strongest market forces with a lot of indirect spending power at the time (well, children are arguably *always* one of the strongest market forces, but you get my point).

To illustrate my position, when Pokemon became a cultural phenomenon in the mid to late nineties, they, too, were a niche hobby despite millions of copies of games sold (almost as many copies as the original Atari had sold units, by the way) and billions of dollars spent on cards and merchandise. They still remained a niche hobby, because their cultural reach was tied and restricted to specific demographics, and it's the same with video games in the 80's.

putting money into marketing pays off more than putting money into gameplay

>General guide to buying gud games:
Hey dipshit nice trips and I appreciate your sentiment but the correct guide is as follows

>pirate the game and play it
>if you like it buy it

IT'S THAT EASY

Most mobile games say hi.

Those games sort of prove the point, don't they? A big part of the problem is that we used to have games that were somewhere in between Undertale and Call of Duty in terms of graphics/production values/budget. Every game that comes out now is one extreme or the other.

>10 years ago I was 18.
Fuck.
Fuuuuck!
What the fuck am I doing with my life?

No they're not. The games in between are making big bucks as we're typing this.

On mobile devices.

This is literally the height of gaming and we didn't have anything even close to it 10 years ago.

QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM, NEGRO.

Lol thanks mate.

>Eh that is another way but I morally have issues with pirating, I'm one of those fuckwits.

>gaming was still a niche hobby, not only at that precise time, but for many more years to come.
when the NES was released in 1983 (1985 in North America), that literally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that video games were anything but mainstream

>Pokemon is niche
can you hear yourself right now?
also you're moving the goalposts from considering an entire hobby to considering a SIGNIFICANT subset of enthusiasts of said hobby

>i keep telling people the average quality goes down every year but they keep saying no it doesn't
those retards will never learn

A simple question to ask is how many truly genre defining video games have come out. Hasn't much past 2007/08.

You got kids trying to redefine genres it's so bad. Like people saying Overwatch is an arena shooter.

Console games are just simple money makers know.. Not much in the way of actual good video games.

>Overwatch is an arena shooter
anyone that says this needs to stop breathing entirely

games cost a lot to make and they rarely sell as expected.

it's a matter of moolah.

>it's a matter of moolah
FINALLY SOMEONE WITH A BRAIN

Good games still get made.

Y'all too cynical.

Publishers and developers learned that people care more about the idea of what they're doing than what they're actually doing.

>when the NES was released in 1983 (1985 in North America), that literally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that video games were anything but mainstream
No, they still remained tied to a specific demographic.

Maybe we just have very different ideas of what constitutes a "mainstream hobby". A billion dollar industry that rests *almost entirely* on one specific demographic segment is merely a *successful industry*, but not culturally mainstream. Mainstream means broad appeal, means appeal across demographics, and the fucking NES was not appealing at all to most adults.

>Pokemon is niche
>can you hear yourself right now?
No, but I could hear myself say that Pokemon *WERE* a niche thing during the time period I described. I chose Pokemon deliberately because of how different their situation is today, because this is analogous to the changes in cultural spread of video games. With entire generations having grown up with Pokemon, and now even the stereotypical businessmen and the elderly playing Pokemon Go, it can be safely claimed that Pokemon is indeed a mainstream hobby. Same is true for video games.

>also you're moving the goalposts from considering an entire hobby to considering a SIGNIFICANT subset of enthusiasts of said hobby
No, I didn't do this in any way. I used Pokemon as an illustrative example, nothing more, nothing less.

Literally only this

The market on aa titles didn't shrink, it just didn't grow. Stuff like tony hawk, movie tie in, sports, and ww ll shooters where AAA and nerdshit had already left the spotlight by the psx

Every other market for games grew while the demand for nerd shit was still low intill a few years ago with batham and the avangers kicking off shit

The shit you like is just beried and can no longer keep up with the graphics of AAA games so it seems like AAA are no longer pandering to you when in reality they never where

No, you just grew up

they have gotten worse. maybe not in technical ways like crashes and bugs, but as far as gameplay and having anything of substance

The average video game is much better than it was 10 years ago (as long as you're excluding mobile trash were the majority of shovelware moved to), but there are much less exceptional games released. Probably because game budgets are so big no one is willing to take a risk on something new and unique.

>Finally, your age. After so many years of gaming, less and less titles will surprise you
This is a massive factor. The more you consume something, it gets increasingly harder to be impressed by it. When we were younger we could enjoy games without having that much critical thinking about them, but now every release gets compared against dozens of games we have played before.

I'm still not saying that some genres weren't better before, as there certainly are old games that are better than newer ones of same genre, but still.

Here's a better way if you don't live in some thirdworld country with data caps.

>torrent game
>if you drop the game don't buy it
>if you finish it buy it

It's harder to make medium/genre defining stuff when the medium gets older and bigger, it's the same reason why nothing can ever get as big as Beatles and Citizen Kane were at their time regarding their respectice medium.

You're right, at least for the premium games.

Quality is hard. That's why modern games overall are trash.

Games can't even maintain close to the same level of greatness of the past entries. See IPs like the Battlefield series. They can't even match the music to BF2.
youtube.com/watch?v=S0aXAm0jqd0

>that TELL ME ABOUT button
Not to say that Fallout made great use of it, but you really wouldn't see anything like this in a modern mainstream game.

Seriously, adding basic text adventure dialogue features to modern games would be such a huge advancement in so may ways.

the dialogue box is also missing, items being icons in your inventory instead of fucking word lists, being able to view an item and get a description of it. little details like that were what made the game so great.

>You just ate your fucking toe!

Well, when you try to reach a wider audience that's kinda normal.

...

Internet culture (and as a subset of that, video game culture) has been appropriated, repackaged and branded for the normie masses. What was once a hobby for social outcasts is now the opiate of the masses. All we have left is our self-referential irony culture and meta-memes

Here's some examples of our culture being appropriated
>"Image macros" (ew, nerd) rebranded as "memes" and attached to social media "share" buttons. Advice dog has gone from non-sequitur humour to a picture of various people with "man does thing" as the caption
>Emoticons, once a bastion of the outcasts on the border of society have been rebranded as "Emojis". Cute and cool by association with trend-setting Japanese culture, emojis are now ingrained in normie culture. You can buy emoji merchandise unironically.
>"There's no emoticon for what I'm feeling" - The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, the archetypal fat bbs nerd of the early 2000s. The humour is derived from belittling and mocking the kind of fat shut-in who uses "emoticons" as a form of expression. Branded as an "emoji" however, and consumers eat it up like pigs at a trough, missing the irony of a decade's worth of normie culture making pariahs of emote using internet users.

This is an autistic rant, but it's been on my mind for a few days and needed a relevant thread to vent on.

See also, pic related.

gaming died when warcraft 3 died

Production values got higher but level and gameplay design has become more simplified

The Westerners are too concerned with competition. This stifles them, to stay laconic. The West is exemplified by the eternal kraut, destroying himself by trying too damn hard to be good at what he is doing until it all comes crumbling down.

The westerner cares about the grafix, the ""story"", and most importantly a cinematic experience being made "good" by "imagination".

There are few good gameplay designers in the west. No good character action game the likes of NG, Bayonetta, or DMC have ever come out of the west. Most are garbage and at best you'll get an old school shooter like Wolfenstein.

The Japanese have their background in arcade games, high skill and high difficulty vidya meant to gobble quarters, and this design philosphy of high skill ceiling single player challenges transferred into the home console industry.