What has Bethesda done now?

[Crni Vuk]

When it comes to gaming we are ironically experiencing one of the best and worst age at the same time ... on one hand it was never as easy to get and support some really good games and concepts out there. Like as how I mentioned gog. But you can also get a lot of indie-games and what not. That's the really awesome part. And there are still some really good studios out there which throw out high quality games with interesting ideas.

The other side is this almost predatory behaviour many large companies adopted. They downright shit on their consumers and fans and they even ask for more ... it's incredible the amount of punishment some take from EA and others. DRM, gambling mechanics, pre-order-scams and all that shit around it, yes I call it scams because that's how shitty it is. In some cases you're paying the full price for a bugged game because someone thought it would be awesome to let people pay for being bugtesters.

I am so glad that I decided to really only go with the positive side of gaming. I am very carefully choosing my games now, I don't buy them on a whim, unless they are extremely cheap. I am just to old to deal with all this bullshit that's just frustrating me.

 

[Risewild]

I think the problem is that many gamers today don't realize how bad big companies treat them.

I hate falling in the stereotypes, but no big company would be able to get away with what they do today in the gaming world if this was the 80's or 90's.
Consumers wouldn't fall for it and would give a huge backlash that would badly hurt the company.

These days people are very passive and the number of fanboys (I also hate this word) that shill real criticism is staggering.
I call it the "sport's club syndrome", where people will blindly defend against any criticism aimed at their sport's club, like the criticism is aimed at them. I used to call it "sport's club syndrome" because it was usually visible in sports fans, but now it happens with most brands, if someone likes those brands, they are at risk of developing this. It's very strange seeing this happening with companies/brands.

 

[Crni Vuk]

I guess gaming simply matured. Video games have been more like a niche. Compared to today and other forms of entertainment like Music or Movies.

 

[Risewild]

Yeah, gaming matured and gamers became more immature or something.

Although I think one of the big factors for this, is that people now live more comfortably and have enough money that they can buy games before release, season passes, bundle of several games all at once, etc. That they don't care if a company is scummy or not.

I remember back when I was a kid, I would have to manage my lunch money (sometimes even skip lunch altogether) in a way I could save some so I could afford a game if I saved for more than an year. If the game was sucky or the company was trying to ripoff the consumer, I would immediately see it and would remember it, I wouldn't buy games from them anymore, because it was hard to get the money for games in the first place.

If people have to go to some extent to be able to afford games, they would be more critical of companies, but like I said, people live more comfortably these days, so they don't see a reason to be critical of gaming companies.


Games are the new circus, and people will always want their circus, no matter what.

 

[SquidWard]

Games have a much wider appeal now. As they simplify their gameplay and make accessing them initially more and more affordable the worse it will get. How many random people who hardly play games do you think you could into Skyrim vs. something like Morrowind? I'd say a lot more people are willing to play Skyrim.

It's simple and easy to understand. It lets you do everything you want in one playthrough that you want. It appeals to a wider audience because they don't need to invest time into the game to feel satisfied. You can give them some legendary loot and they're happy with it. They don't need a good quest, they need to see their level up and their daedric bow that does 10% more damage to Draugr.

They are still more niche than music and movies for sure but they're drifting further away from that. Mobile gaming counting as traditional gaming has also broken down that barrier quite a bit. Assuming if Google Stadia and other similar services become become a success it would help make games even less of a niche since you could hop in and out without the investment of a console.

 

[CerberusGate]

While there is some schadenfreude from seeing Bethesda being the butt of jokes, I get the distinct feeling that when TES 6 comes out in a semi-stable state, gamers will go back to boot-licking Bethesda.

I'd say another part of the problem lies with how simplified games that these triple-A companies spit out are being played by impressionable young people and people who are not big into gaming but are big into the spectacle games have. So to them, those games are the peaks of their experience and thus, they seek out similar kinds of stuff but few realize the genuine gems that do exist but are not as simple to get into. Plus the latter group of people tend to seek out games that appeal to their real life interests, hence why too many of my acquaintances always buy and play FIFA.

 

[Mr Fish]

How many random people who hardly play games do you think you could into Skyrim vs. something like Morrowind? I'd say a lot more people are willing to play Skyrim.

Well, to be fair you should have picked something halfway decent instead of Morrowind.

 

[Risewild]

This is pretty bad:

 

[Crni Vuk]

No. What's pretty bad is that it took him Fallout 4 to realize what shills are working on Fallout and what crap they are selling to him. If it takes that to realize Bethesda only cares about money ... then I don't know what. That it took a game like F3 and F76 to realize this is the sad part. And there are still people that will buy their next game like it's hot cake.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Crni, there will always be average gamers who will buy questionable and poorly designed games because they A) have not experienced enough yet to develop an understanding and taste that a lot of mass market games are not as good as they initially perceived them to be. or B) simply don't want to be critical because it requires effort or they must put their own role as a consumer of this low quality material into question - that they are responsible for these types of games being commercially viable.
And every generation more numbers are added to this group of gamers as developers and publishers make gaming more mainstream in order to make returns on the enormous budgets they have to spend on developing games.
Or hoping to create the next cheapo game that becomes a trend among the average gamers so they can make loads from microtransactions by selling digital cosmetic stuff.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Yeah, gaming matured and gamers became more immature or something.
(...)

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Crni, there will always be average gamers who will buy questionable and poorly designed games

I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding here.

When I say "matured" I am not thinking in terms of mental maturity but simply in growing bigger. Of course we had our fare share of shit games, scams and all that in the past. What has changed is the scope however. Gaming has become a multi-billion dollar industry. It's reaching hundred millions of people trough pc games, consoles, social networks and mobile platforms on their smart phone. When you look at it, many of the practises that you see today would have been simply impossible back in the 1990s simply because the companies haven't been large enough to finance it nor did they had the knowledge and expertise present. What did a company like Interplay or Blizzard knew about Marketing really when they made Fallout 1 and Diablo 1? But now? The amount of money that was required to actually make a game in the 90s is now spend 10 times as much just in marketing and market research alone. This leads to different practises, expectations and issues. That's what I mean when I say the industry "matured". Just think about it. A game developer was considered "large" when they sold 100.000 copies in the mid 1990s - that's how often approximately Fallout 1 sold and it was seen as a financial success for Interplay. So much that it became their trade mark and flagship. But today? You have to get at the very least 1 million copies out there. This is what Diablo 2 actually sold over it's whole life time! To make a profit a company like EA or Bethesda has to sell 3 million with their flag ships.


*Edit
In a video I've been watching someone just right now mentioned that Goldman Sachs informed investors in 2016 about upcoming titles from Blizzard. Imagine that. And that is the "maturity" I am talking about here. When you have an industry that grew to such sizes the priority inside that industry simply change.

I see a lot of things today happening in Gaming which I would have thought completely impossible during the 1990s. Not all of them are negative of course. I am just saying.

 

[Risewild]

Time to dust off this thread just to mention something someone over at the Codex posted:

Bethesda once again is a gift that keeps on giving:

Yesterday ALL Beth game servers (Elderscrolls and other stuff nobody plays) were down for a whole 9 (NINE) hours, after Bethesda "succesfully" implemented 2 factor auth. You cannot make this shit up.