Decline of Video games

Angel

Angel

New member
I don't know, everyone seems to be as of late going on about how gaming was better in the retro days. I've spent some though and to me I suspect it may be because the arcades DIED. I mean before they did, the most money was earnt by this method. To create an arcade worthy game was a lot harder then to create a home console. I mean not on do you have to put thought into the game inself, but you've got to make it easy access but challenging and visinally a work of art. While there are still games in the arcade, blowed if I can afford £1 or £2 per go (whatever a "go" is in game terms, normally 3 lives) and a £1 or £2 for extra.

I mean it USED to be 10p per "go" (This is all in UK currenacey BTW), I'd spend a small fortune on the arcades and come out happy several hours later.

I guess there was more of a demand for quality games in those days, I recall having to work really hard so you can trash all the guys attempting to best you at an arcade game. Now, unless you go on-line its just you... And your mates, if you have a circle of mates to rely on. And they want to play your collection of aweful games like Sonic Riders; Zero Gravity. :-/
 
I've gotta say, I think arcades are making a bit of a come-back, with the one near me adopting some old school games and having Guitar Hero as its main attraction.

And, I don't believe it was that an arcade game was held to a higher standard, but that going to an arcade was a form of socializing. Remember, you could go to an arcade with your friends, have yourself a slice of pizza and a few drinks. It was something to do on a Friday night for under ten bucks. Now your arcade is at your house, what with PSN and XBL. People can socialize with each other by use of their headsets and such. I don't think games have been in much of a decline, but their format has changed, and maybe not enough people want that to happen.
 
I think that's why I spend more time on XBL Arcade games than actual dedicated Xbox games, as the former exist to maintain what drew me to video games in the first place. I won't go as far as to state that retro games are unquestionably better, though, as while they are for me, it depends on who you are. I'd say that more likely, for the people who grew up in the days of 16-bit, 8-bit or earlier, our tastes in gaming didn't quite evolve with gaming itself. I personally refused to use analog controls until Sonic Adventure forced me to use them. If you grew up with the 32-bit era or later, you were just getting into games as you watched the development of 3D graphics and more technical play mechanics, so you likely adapted much easier, or "evolved" along with the games.

At any rate, I'm not so sure what the fall of the arcade had to do with it, other than coinciding with that evolution. More powerful machines were probably what killed our era of gaming more than anything else, and it's only been recently that developers have realized a new game doesn't have to push the bejesus out of a processor to be great. Then again, maybe we can blame the lack of first-party powerhouse developers. Sega used to churn out awesome game after awesome game to the point that any franchise they had was basically disposable, so it didn't matter what crap EA or whoever else put out.
 
The PS1 started the decline, imo. It was selling well, so everyone and their moms uncles boyfriends cousins roommate was putting out a game. Sorta like the Wii today. Companies rather put games out with any care for quality in hopes to turn a profit. Its sad. And painfully bad.

Gone were the games that focused on gameplay. Now, it was all about graphics. :/
 
Any arcade games I see over here are ridiculously expensive. 50 cents to play Pac-Man; that's insane. I think what killed arcades was not solely the home consoles but a combination of the home consoles and very high arcade prices. Back in '99 I remember arcade games hitting $2-$5 to play. The 25 cent arcade games became non-existent and were all raised to 50 cents. Popping $8 into an arcade machine and you might as well just buy the game used. It became a waste of money to go to the arcades. The arcades killed themselves if you ask me.
 
I remember my first BF and I had a go at a game for £1 back in... 2000 I think it was... Cost him £1 and we got 1 life. He asked me if I wanted another go I told him to be quite Frank that was a waste of his money. Heck, it wasn't even as "fun" as we thought it was. :-/
 
I don't believe that video games are in any kind of decline. Of course everyone has their own opinion of what is quality, but for me, I've seen less quality titles released when arcades were booming, and more quality titles per year being released on systems today. I do believe it's all economics though. Most of the hardware had to be developed for each technological advancement in an arcade game. Also there was only so much storage space on EEPROM's. True that games like Killer Instinct used Hard Drives, and Street Fighter 3 were using CDROM drives in their cabinets; but with the development of PS and Saturn, there was no need to keep developing individual hardware, letting studios create more content and better quality.

Quality of games these days really rely on budget and time constraint. Without the arcades, there's more time to work on quality, and have a slightly higher budget as they do not have to be developed for arcade release first. Aside from the few studios out there that seemed to have downloaded a copy of blender, and read the object-oriented programming for dummies books , there's still quite a few great titles being released each year. More-so than I've seen in the arcades in their prime. I often look back and say "wow, MK2 looked damn good in the arcades", but only because SNES and Genesis didn't have the capability to produce the same quality. Since technology evolves at such a high rate, it just gets harder to say something like "video games are in decline" or "MK vs DC would've been better if released in the arcades first". Though I do miss the socializing and the opportunity to show off in front of an audience. Maybe we are all just too critical of games these days because we were spoiled by the arcades as kids and teenagers.

I'm in school for Game Art, most of these ideas are from one of my books in a development class. :)
 
I've said for years that video games are NOT in decline. Some years were great, some weren't. The same can be said for other entertainment mediums, like film. I have a great many modern games (A.K.A. post 2000) that I adore as much or more than older titles. My list of all time favorite games ATM is MKII, Diablo II, Ocarina of Time, Oblivion, and Resident Evil 4. 2/5 of those are newer titles. I think the nostalgia factor blurs a lot of people's judgment. For instance, I've gone back to try some older titles from the PS1 and SNES era in the past few years, and I find quite a few of the so-called classics to be TERRIBLE in a great many ways. That's not to say I haven't found games I adore as well.

But let's look at this another way. Instead of talking about the volume of memorable games coming out today, but rather the proportion of good to bad. So many of the atrocious games from the NES, SNES/Genesis, N64/PSX eras have been swept under the rug. Movie tie-ins were still awful, a lot of bad ideas got the green light, and generally only a small portion of games from those eras are still considered good today. The same can be said of now. The reasons are a tad different, there's less of a barrier to entry in the market for one. But in terms of how many good vs. bad games are being released there's not a whole lot of difference.
 
I must admit, Even I pull a constant "huh" at the idea of a decline in video games. If there is one, I've expressed my opinion on what happened. But what IS in decline is experimentation. To try to do something that may, honestly, not work but if it does will be memorial. I constantly see games doing the same old, same old. Its as if, theres now a fear factor amongst the companies that it isn't. :-/

And when a company does try a little experiment, I see gamers on games forums calling it "cheap" or "tacky" or "lame". Unless there is, of course, a strong aura of support for the little experiment already in place before the gamers get an opinion of it themselves, then its the opposite when they DO get their hands on it.
 
Absolutely Angel. I tried to touch on that in my post as well. A lot of bad ideas and experiments flooded the old-school market and while some of them worked, a lot of them didn't. Nowadays though the very OPPOSITE idea is what's caused the market to be flooded with bad games. Repetitiveness, tried-and-true methods, and funding concerns herd developers into a tunnel with no way out.
 
Definitely not in a decline. We will always have those classics, but personally i haven't had as much fun as i am now with older games. I love getting on XBL (when i had live) to play CoD4 and gears. And since i've lost XBL i've been renting games Fallout 3 being one of them and i was blown away. Ofcourse, i have my favorite classics like Goldeneye, Super Mario 64, but i love the interaction i can have in this new era of gaming.
 
I don't think that games are declining either.
It's just that thanks to the Wii, the gaming audiences have been devided more than ever.
The Wii turned many non-gamers into gamers and therefore, gaming magazines, websites and tv shows have been shifting their attention between titles like Wii Fit, or any "gimmick" Wiimote title (No offense to Wii fans) and that what is considered as the "established" scene. (GTA, God of War, Gears of War etc.)

Because of this, it sometimes feels as if the established gaming audience is pushed back
But seeing as the gaming industry made more money in 2008 than the film industry, I say gaming is bigger than ever.

On another note, I do miss arcade gaming. Thankfully I've got a Neo-Geo AES console to play titles like The King of Fighters and Art of Fighting at home.
But playing these games on an arcade cabinet in a smoke-infested dark place had it's charm.
 
I bought a megadrive (gensis) recently. I must confess I preferred the days of being a "pixel perfect" gamer where every jump had to be perfect simply because beating those accursed games felt like an achievement. X-Box achievements? Their horse **** in comparison to the evil that was having to pull off those "pixel perfect" jumps. >_<'

There are some classics that will never be replacable... Tetris is one, I've got it for my DSi. I'm not about to go overboard with retro gaming and seek out the stupid games like... Pacman (my megdrive had Mrs Pacman anyway when I bought it though, but it also came with golf... >_<' ). Not those games are better off left in a dusk covered cabinet and I wish people would stop bringing them up again and again. Tetris is fun, but not all games need resturecting every 5 secs.

Edit:
Note: £10 =

-2 Megadrives (Sega Genesis) (one set of cables though)

-5 controllers (one arcade controller)

-Games: Sunset riders, Mrs. Pacman, Shinobi 3, Mortal Kombat, a golfing game, American football game (yuck!), Sonic the Hedgehog

-1 Playstation controller (don't ask why that was in there)

That was pretty sweat.
 
Maybe people just aren't into games enough anymore to know about the many great titles that are out there right now. I love retro games but I find myself playing just as much, if not, more, games than I did back then.


It also isn't necessarily about the graphics. Prototype had some PS2 looking graphics but the general gameplay was fun.
 
I think games are in a decline in some fields, and improving in another. The first few Megaman games used to be great games when I started playing video games, and it was difficult with the "Pixel Perfect" jumps Angel had mentioned. Though when I played Megaman X8, the gameplay was just to easy, everything was fluent, (which isn't completely a bad thing) but it took away some of the challenge. I even had my cousin try playing X8 and he blew through it in no time, but when he tried the original games he kept getting tuck at the jumps and bosses.

I think it's good that they're trying to make the gameplay more fluent for the actual gamer, I mean I'd love to see some games redone in the higher resolution graphics we have today, though if the game is known for it's gameplay they should leave the gameplay where it is. I just think they've made games to easy in recent years with how much they can manipulate the characters, while in older titles, they had little to work with and it was hard to play because you only had a select few things you could do with the character.
 
I like to look at Muramasa which came out Friday for the Wii. It's damn tough, as was Odin Sphere before it, but I enjoyed it very very much. Still playing it and I'm not tired of it even after some 16 hours. It's got all the depth of any "old-school" beat-'em-up like Streets of Rage etc., probably more. But I saw some people complaining on another forum about how it's "all style and no substance" insinuating it has poor gameplay but tries to make up for it with beautiful hand-drawn graphics (which it has in scores).

The kind of person making those comments is profoundly contradictory. It seems to me that those same people complaining about the depth are the ones saying games are too easy nowadays, or else they were somehow "better" before. But then you look at this game for what it is, a difficult game just like people have asked for with everything that made side scrolling beat-'em-ups great back in the day. And to me that shows how people will always find something to complain about regardless.

If you give people the old-school games with insane difficulty and next to no plot or content, then people will complain. If you give them beautiful (or kickass) graphics with broad artistic storylines and developed characters and those SAME people will complain that you've forgotten what makes gaming what it is, that is to say, gameplay.

HYPOCRITES the lot of them!
 
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