Why is near-future cyberpunk so underrepresented in video games?

Why is near-future cyberpunk so underrepresented in video games?

Most futuristic game settings take place centuries or even millennia ahead in some far-reaching intergalactic colonial period with alien civilizations, or else following a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust on Earth with the remaining population rebuilding human civilization from the ashes.

Why not more games like Deus Ex or MGS, in which the current social order still exists but is rapidly shifting toward greater oppression as a result of new technology (the internet, cybernetics, robotics, nanotech, and artificial intelligence)?

>Why is near-future cyberpunk so underrepresented in video games?
You clearly were born in early 2000s.
Cyperpunk was fucking EVERYWHERE in 80s and 90s.

I'm personally having more trouble listing games that WOULD be set to centuries ahead of our time, than ones that would be roughly (current year), but in the eyes of the retro-scifi geeks.

You can always play Watch Dogs.

because we live it, albeit a more boring version.

To be honest the new advanced warfare games and shit like that qualify for what you're talking about. Deus Ex just did it best.

I should clarify, then.

I was mainly referring to games released in the past decade or so.

Yeah we had Syndicate and Beneath a Steel Sky and Blade Runner in the 90s, but even then they were few and far between, and they were mostly point-and-click or FMV adventures. What happened in the past 15 years?

Cyberpunk aesthetic is best in an era of a misunderstanding of what the internet would be in the 80's and early 90's. It was a fad brought on by neuromancer, and Deus Ex was the last of a bygone era.

Modern cyberpunk stuff is just too futuristic and clean whites

Because the setting is very hard to pull off and developers (publishers) would rather play it safe and stick to generic overutilized settings like (medieval)fantasy, modern time and so on.

>I was mainly referring to games released in the past decade or so.
>What happened in the past 15 years?
We caught up with the old scifi-film and game years, and none of the predictions came true. No flying cars, no cyborgs and sentient androids, no civilization on moon and stars, no alien contacts.

Instead, our technology started developing "inwards", focusing on information networks and wireless, trendy consumer objects. We created an all new "layer" on reality that people still in late 1980s couldn't quite imagine, and even in 1990s many still underestimated. It's actually quite shocking / funny to go watch a bit older scifi now, and realize how bizarrely out of place phone booths, tapes as a storage medium, CRT monitors and even diskettes look like this day and age.

With this new hindsight and modern IRL trends in mind, the current near-future scifi settings mirror much more closely to our current society. Even the old 1984 prediction, while seemingly very true nowadays, is starting to be obsolete; why practice surveillance and ruling on masses with iron fists and fear, when you can make them want to be part of subtle and hidden spying botnets with their new, daily activities with their networked gadgets? The new Dystopia is clinically clean, filled with fashionable designs that sit right at home in your local Apple store, with colorful and hyping ads filling the information outlets.

It's why past settings like westerns and world war 2 always hang on around - because it happened.

Future settings always fluctuate

True.
It's also why "retro-scifi", as in games set in past but using some James Bond -tier gadgets and tech for its time, is kinda becoming a new trend in story telling. It's easy to go with the "it could have happened!", when the information moved much slower and storing it was way bigger of a hassle.

Hits too close to home

Neither Deus Ex nor MGS had flying cars or androids (just primitive or manned mechs), but we are within reach of having cyborgs or nanotech-enhanced humans. I already said that space exploration and contact with alien civilizations are beyond the scope of near-future cyberpunk.

The proliferation and pervasiveness of computer information networks, through smaller and more portable devices, is part and parcel of classic cyberpunk. And classic cyberpunk was also defined by ubiquitous corporate consumerism (and its subversion).

Nothing has changed.

>Nothing has changed.

A lots changed

>Why is near-future cyberpunk so underrepresented in video games?
because we already embraced cyberpunk and it feels alright honestly

>Nothing has changed.
Everything has changed.
Especially the target audience and platforms of the video games.

>It's actually quite shocking / funny to go watch a bit older scifi now, and realize how bizarrely out of place phone booths, tapes as a storage medium, CRT monitors and even diskettes look like this day and age.
I was re-watching Prison Break the other day and was shocked when one of the characters said to a district attorney they knew by name "wear a blue jacket with a red tie so we can recognize you"

nowadays a facebook search would suffice

>The new Dystopia is clinically clean, filled with fashionable designs that sit right at home in your local Apple store, with colorful and hyping ads filling the information outlets.
even that was predicted in Brave New World and in an updated and much more scary version in The Circle by Dave Eggers

All that has really changed since the 90s is the fashion and the music (Ministry and Test Dept lol), and the fact that many of those devices have converged into the smartphone. And we still have cash.

>"it's the year 200X"
>Soviet Union still exists
>oldschool desk phones
>computers with tapes on them
>computers PRINT out their information on paper strings
>"But wait, we got giant robots and telephones with cameras & TV screens on them!"
The funny thing is, I still recall not being bothered by any of that a mere decade or so ago.

What gaem?

...

What games are far futuristic? Not many off the top of my head, usually like you said OP or maybe a couple hundred years.

>Brave New World
It still boggles my mind that, when people think about fictional dystopias, 1984 is the first thing that comes up, while the far more accurate BWN barely gets any mention.

you what

Number one

That's terror

Funny coincidence, I just recently saved this pic.

Because it's not mainstream popular.

You used to see it more because most of the developers were P&P nerds who not only played but wrote those fucking games, and were into all this shit, so since they didn't have to sell all that much to be successful anyway, they made what they wanted to see.

Now they're "professionals" having to cater to the "mainstream".

you have to wait for cyberpunk 2077 to come out and be popular op

other publishers will probably start making more cyberpunk games then, also there might be a blade runner game coming out with the new movie or something, we'll see but i definitely think cyberpunk is having a big comeback in the next couple years