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Older games are also meant to be beaten. I remember games that had reviews saying, “This game will take 40-60 hours to complete”, and that was it. You could replay it if you wanted, but it was just an experience.
The new idea is live service games. Games you can never really beat, you just grind at it forever. That or they have a bunch of add on things to make the game take a lot longer so you keep playing the same thing over and over again. I’m not saying they’re not fun, just that they lack a satisfying conclusion and variety.
I just got a new GPU, and they gave me a coupon for the game for free. My system should be able to run it great, but I’m not even sure how good it actually even is. All the reviews I see all look like paid reviews or early access folk, or people that claim to love it to justify their overpriced rigs.
I loved 1 and 2, and then the series went downhill for me. Now I guess I have 4 but might wait a while to play it because I know a ton of patches are coming. Besides, there are a ton of other great games on my backlog that I’d much rather play with my limited free time.
So, back to cartridges. Honestly I’d be totally fine with that- but the issue isn’t quite with my end. Some game is made, and is sold for $70. A disc costs under a dollar to produce. A cart is significantly more, and digital is just paying upkeep on a server. Digital has the highest profit margin, and carts the lowest. Discs are great for physical distribution.
That said, I would totally love collector editions in the form of a figurine with storage media built in.
Destiny. Played the heck out of 1, and 2 is just… Annoying. I still play, but I actively disuade people from picking it up.
It went from a mechanically fun game with garbage storytelling but amazing lore, to mechanically complex and hyper specialzed, still mostly garbage storytelling, and lore that is trying to constantly one up itself or nonexistent. The seasonal model was a mistake and it’s grindy for the sake of money. It really took a terrible turn down sitcom alley of having the seasonal content need stakes, but also not really change anything drastic. So it just feels like tasks for the sake of tasks… Which it is. A neverending treadmill where grinding has only very short lived rewards.
I worked at BlockBuster back when Netflix came out. It was legit a great contender, and an awesome service. BB had their own mail service, but it was just seen as a copycat. Also the franchise had a LOT of bad blood, and sometimes rightfully so. Depended on local management how much leeway you could have. The most lax stores that were lenient did the best.
The reason it worked was because physical media is protected by the first sale doctrine. So if you could buy a disc, it could be under one roof as rentable inventory.
Streaming and licenses is what fragmented everything and greed gave the appropriate incentive.
It also somewhat killed direct competition. When everything was physical on a shelf in front of you, all for the same price, you had direct comparison and competition. You could have any show or movie from any studio all side by side. That $2-5 could get you anything, across the board.
I saw this all coming from miles away. I don’t blame anyone, every step sounded like a great deal. I see a lot of the same things with Gamepass. It’s a great deal, and I don’t blame anyone for using it… But I don’t see it as being a long term net positive for the industry.
That makes sense. Microsoft didn’t enter the console market for gamers or gaming- they entered it to beat sony. The PS2 had a linux distro you could load on it to try to sell it as a computer to circumvent luxury import taxes. If it WAS a computer, it would compete with Microsoft Windows. They were worried that a console could just sell software instead of games and be a competitor, so they threw a ton of money trying to run Sony out of business.
Microsoft never really wanted to win gaming. The war was against an enemy that wasn’t really a threat. So not killing off a console wasn’t really a “loss”.