It sometimes seems like the game industry bigwigs are gearing up to fight the last war, like we always complain about the Pentagon. They see the heyday of obsessive devotion to a single game space (EverQuest, WoW, MTG, that sort of thing), and the immense amount of time and money people put into those things, and they get all giddy. They forget that one, those days were the result of circumstances that no longer really apply, and two, that’s not the way the broad mass of gamers does things now.
Back then, games could monopolize your time because there were fewer options, and many of the most addictive pushed you, really required you, to form communities and become engaged on a continuous basis with a group of people. The games themselves were built in an era where there were few if any other options for intense social experiences in game structures, and when treadmills of grinding were still new (and because they were intimately linked to social behavior, more palatable). Finally, the people who were into gaming, even into the 2000s, were still largely representative of the earliest “geek and nerd” culture, with some exceptions.
When gaming exploded along with the Internet, the Web, smart phones, and social media, everything changed. Digital distribution meant people had instant access to an increasingly large population of games. The spread of connectivity and devices meant the demographic ballooned to include a huge variety of people, many of whom approached games very differently than did the OG gamers. This expanded universe of gamers did indeed start to put a hell of a lot of time and money into games, but that time and money was and is spread across a lot of options and platforms. Where in the earlier years the search was for a gaming home, a place to stay and put down roots, the contemporary trend is to center the gaming experience around you, the gamer, and bring all sorts of games to you.
I mean, I’m just speculating and noodling around here, but it seems these games as service models anticipate a gaming audience that wants to embed itself in one experience repeated ad nauseum. In some ways, that works; a game like Path of Exile, which is almost all systems, can keep people playing indefinitely, but even then it’s not an exclusive activity for most fans, and it’s also free. It also requires extensive revamping every few months to keep things fresh, and to entice people to buy the optional cosmetics. Just as vitally, each season or league starts from scratch so the grind is fresh.
But games like Ubi’s offerings I don’t think can pull that off, for example. In something like a Ghost Recon or an Assassin’s Creed game, once you hit a certain point there is nearly nothing to achieve other than, well, achievements, and I can’t believe those are popular enough among enough people to generate any real buy-in sans real rewards. Adding more quests or missions can be useful, but ultimately the absence of new systems or mechanics erodes their appeal. And if these games try to introduce higher level caps and better gear progressions, you end up shafting anyone who doesn’t keep up with the creep–and usually, the games are not interesting enough to make that many people want to do that, given the options out there that are more rewarding.
So maybe the bean counters have the magic sauce. I could be totally wrong, that’s certainly something I’m no stranger to. And you have to think the people running multi-billion dollar companies know something about what they are doing. But man, when I look around, I don’t see people jonesing to play one game, only one game, all the time. I see people liking things like Game Pass or Ubi+ where you can sample a bunch of stuff, come back to things when you feel like it, and ignore stuff you don’t want. I see people eagerly awaiting new games, sometimes games they’ll play once and never again, sometimes games they will come back to time and again. I just don’t see that players want, necessarily, to be locked into a FOMO-driven Groundhog Day gaming experience.
Of course, being weak-willed meatsacks, if the initial offerings are attractive enough, we’ll probably bite and become mindless drones anyhow.
