Sorry, I lost patience with the article and its premise about halfway through. Sure many AAA titles are cookie cutter and remakes now. I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games. If you only focus on AAA that's your mistake. That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games. Breath of the Wild of course sticks out here. We continue to see other phenomenal games like Outer Wilds or Disco Elysium that push what a game can be and how closer to true art the medium has come. I recently played some short, relaxing games like A Short Hike and Big Ocean, Wide Jacket that would have not been economically viable at all not that long ago. There are so many phenomenal indy games that nobody could possibly play them all and many of them have innovative concepts. I feel obligated to mention Babs Is You and Into the Breach. There are some studios that are not AAA but produce polished games like Supergiant with games like Hades and Pyre.

But yeah, some Call of Duty game and The Last of Us are getting a remake so it's all terrible now and innovation is gone.

I think it reflects maturity in the business that increasingly, video games compete with their past.

That used to be so much not the case that it was a surprise at first: the "gaming fad" died down until another generation of graphics came along and made things a little more complex, animated and detailed. Then it became the business model to bank on repeatedly surfing the technology curve, which eventually gave us AAA size productions. New platforms in different markets like portable systems and web games could reset the curve for a period, but this has been reduced to niche hardware ideas(headsets and hand-cranks). By now, everyone is saturated in games of some sort if they want to play them.

The consumptive packaging has also gradually broken down. While everyone still demands good, quality assets, playing the actual game isn't as highly treasured a thing since one can easily find a gameplay video and experience the surface assets that way. One is left with mostly stuff intrinsic to interactivity: well-crafted scenarios, the chaos of physics behaviors, the emotions of another human opponent or ally.

My father (1951) went through Tandy's Dancing Demon through text adventure games, Lode Runner, Prince of Persia, Doom and modern video games.

He went from black and white mummies movies through Rambo to Matrix.

I (1980) was raised with Lucas Arts games, and you know the rest.

The gap between my father and me is huge. He saw the entire entertaiment industry transforming, from technology and from content points of view.

I've seeing the same things since year ~2000. I am tired of nostalgia, seeing the same things over and over again... The same formula up to the point I can predict how most movies will end.

While I enjoy Ron Gilbert doing Monkey Island again, and retro games, I still expect something more. And it's not coming.

I surely can see there are more modern topics like inclusion and the kind in most American movies and games, but I don't think it's enough for a change in the industry like the ones my father saw.

And Modern tech like deepfakes will only enforce nostalgia... Entertaiment industry is stealing my middle-age.

From TFA: "...even just a week ago, Activision Blizzard announced a remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game barely a decade old..."

My understanding is that the new MW2 is a sequel to MW2019 which was itself less a remake and more a reboot. Still rather creatively bankrupt, but not a plain 'HD Remaster' of yore.

Minor critique aside, I find myself agreeing with the general thrust of this article. As time goes on I gravitate more and more to indie games and even self-published e-books rather than mass market publishers, as I find that they actually try new ideas and go somewhere fresh.

If we'll excuse some navel gazing:

I wonder, how much effect has what I'll call the "distillation of the meta" had on game design? By that, I mean the community driven effort in everything from Warcraft to Diablo/Paths of Eternity to yes Call of Duty or Tarkov, to find the utterly, mechanically superior approach and gravitate towards it? To the point that public test realm data or beta patches are immediately data mined and examined with a fine tooth comb.

Best-in-Slot lists, ideal ability rotations, skill guides, 'meta loadouts', and the like.

Sure, we've always had bulletin boards, strategy guides, and sites like GameFAQs. But as the popularity of gaming has grown, naturally so has the drive to play the game perfectly, or erk out any slight advantage possible.

I'm probably tiling at windmills, and much like film, the creative bankruptcy of late is entirely economically driven.

As negative as the modern state of gaming development is now, makes me wonder if learning from past renaissance times (e.g. the '90s, particularly 1998) will bring any wisdom.

For instance, it's a truism that AAA studios that are dominating the market, like big Hollywood studios, must trend towards increasingly reliably safe blockbuster titles to make back their immense budgets. And yet there are still plenty of indie studios today. Indie gaming is stronger than ever. And yet why the consolidation into fewer and less innovative/interesting forms?

Maybe it's because the death of AA studios means that there are fewer sub-blockbuster entities to create influence? Because there are way more games today so interest is diffused and gravitate naturally towards AAA attention sinks? Because on a technical level, gaming is so advanced that there is a push towards photorealistic simulation rather than the innovative abstraction that earlier period of gaming had? One's creativity is capped by the amount of effort and resources needs to go towards making sights and sounds of greater quality than Hollywood movies. Either way, maybe the medium and the industry is just at a stage where conventions calcify and it's harder to turn the ship.

What I'm tired of is articles like these that try to make out the video game development past as some artistic endeavor, when it was almost entirely geeks fucking around with things they found fun. There is far more "art" in games these days, which I think is cool. We have a lot more innovation and design exploration, it's just that the major categories have been explored heavily. Plus people that want innovation have developed very niche tastes which means to mean that niche you have like a few hundred people as a market.

Additionally, this "what happened to game design" is a refrain I've literally heard every year for 30+ years now. Here's the thing: if you have fun with a game, most of the time you want to keep playing that game. I just finished Mad Max (late to it!) and it was awesome, and I want to just keep playing it, but there is nothing else in there except finding the few % of places that I didn't completely explore before. But I'd kill to have a DLC for it or a Mad Max 2 that is just more of the same.

There is far, far more exploration and experimentation now than ever, and if you think otherwise, you are looking at the past through rose tinted glasses.

The author and a lot of other people in this thread seem wistful for the days where game design was a lot more weird and experimental and are pointing to the indie game scene but I have an alternate suggestion: try Roblox.

Roblox is (rightly considered) to be a gaming platform for young kids but its unique mix of:

- portable identities/avatars/friends

- easy to use dev tools

- platform distribution

- built in multi-player

Have made it a virtual riot of creativity and fun and odd mashups of things. Here's just a sampling of things I've seen my kids play.

- social potion making + adventuring (to get components for portions) + you drink the potion and are a giant

- social tower defense but it's also a platformer

- survival game / city builder where you build out a peninsula and islands in hexes but can also send out attacks on other players and sometimes you're attacked by sharks

- adoption game but with kidnapping as an emergent behavior

- 3D character brawler (ala Smash) but it's a circular island and it's centered around slapping. Each time you slap someone off your hand gets bigger until it's the size of your body and has lightning.

Sorry, can we back up a bit here? I'm stuck on the bit where there is a world where that linkedin post isn't a parody of the absolute worst trends in game designs in the last decade made 100x worse and we're apparently in it? How in the hell do you say that in earnest?

So the cost to produce an AAA game approaches those of bridges and skyscrapers. This pulls the lever towards conservatism and reuse.

On the other hand, we want novelty from culture. Something's gotta give.

So what about the cheaper end of the spectrum? Indie games? Single dev games? In my armchair theory, they drop the cost, lose the polish but gain freedom to innovate.

Did the economy kill that too? The alternative hypothesis is that the author is not looking hard enough.

A maybe related note: I think I saw a novel gimmick in a fixed shooter recently. An in-flight entertainment game had the player's ship only take damage from the top. The sides were immune and could "sweep" bullets to gain energy for power shots. (Or maybe this is an old trick and I'm an ignorant old fart?)

Why focus on AAA?

As in many domains, innovation is done through scrappy low-budget experiments and/or by newcomers that are willing to take risks to enter the industry.

Once new ideas get some market traction, they are considered safer bets to expand in scope and production value, or to remix with established ideas to add some spice.

This seems to me like a rather wise and healthy way to operate. And this cycle of innovation looks to be as productive as ever right now, with an especially high rate of experimentation from indies.

The article is worth reading, it introduces some criticisms of AAA game/product design that are interesting. I agree with many of them but never quite formulated them in such a way.

However, WoW example is exactly backwards:

> WoW nostalgia, monetarily leveraged through Activition Blizzard’s release of WoW Classic, feels (and is) a regressive moment for games (...)

WoW Classic didn't happen because of nostalgia. It happened because there has been a _huge_ community of people hosting the vanilla version (and the first expansion) of the game for quite a while now. It was simply acknowledging the fact that many players didn't like where the game went after its initial release plus one maybe two expansions.

WoW is a perfect example of a franchise that got butchered over the years. It lost what made it magical and didn't expand on the aspects that made it unique. It was a social game where you would find your grandma and your school buddy in the same virtual world, each playing in their own way.

People thought they wanted more shiny things, instant gratification, less dependence on other players and the social aspects of the game. So it turned into something generic and quite frankly ugly.

If you look at the history of the game, it already had all the things in place to make it the dull, money grabbing game that it is now. But at the same time it had elements, some accidental, some pushed by certain designers that barely made it, which were encouraging social interactions, small and large scale organizations and player driven stories.

I feel like AAA games _should_ look back and re-learn why their franchise even had success in the first place. Re-discover what made them _good_ and why players built a culture around them that wasn't just oriented around consumption.

While I don't fully agree with everything said in the article - the general idea behind it does ring true to some extent. I don't have to fully agree with it, to find it interesting and thought-provoking.

Over the years I personally did notice an ever-increasing amount of sequels, tie-ins, re-imaginings, re-releases and remakes. The indie boom brought some respite - with small, self-funded developers going against the grain and bringing some innovation and experimentation - while at the same time also launching a massive nostalgia wave. But that fresh wind didn't really break the general trend. For me, the article does add a new perspective to the topic, looking at it from some angles I personally haven't previously thought about. And I do like articles that make me think.

I'm not quite sure why so many responses in here are so strongly dismissive or even outright hostile to the article? As if people felt offended, and were trying to just brush it off...

The post by Nicolas Vereeke quoted in the blog post is a dystopian jab at games, right? Not a serious attempt att describing something either gamers OR publishers would want?

I don’t think the counter examples people are already posting here undermine the fact that these are some of the dominant forces in gaming. Every cultural medium behaves this way (if I wanted to bore everybody I would add “once it’s co-opted by capital”).

Ultimately all you can ask yourself is whether it’s still possible to have new and transformative experiences with games (or art or film or TV) and for the most part the answer is still yes. I was surprised the author pointed to what appears to be a pretty straight Robotron clone with vampires as an example of newness that was quickly absorbed into game design memetics. Perhaps that indicates that given a long enough timeframe things can be forgotten and rediscovered, instead of being constantly mined into oblivion.

In other news, music isn't as good as it used to be, says someone who only listens to music in the charts.

Author of this article is the dev behind Cantata, btw: https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata/

Chasing mass appeal AAA is a lost cause. For every Doom or StarCraft, there's 9 WoW expansions, 10 Battlefields, 11 FIFAs, and 12 Call of Duties.

After staying mad at the triple A industry more than a decade, I am finally content. The Boomer shooters scene is thriving. There are countless actually good platformers and puzzles. It's crazy, really.

"2 One thing I really don’t like about the general direction of “indie” games is that they seem more concerned with aesthetics. It’s often aesthetic progressivism mixed with design orthodoxy. A beautiful hand-drawn art style for a puzzle platformer less complicated than Mario."

Aha. If you say so, buddy. Something tells me even the smallest real world hypermarket or big supermarket has more junk for sale than what's on steam/itch.io + consoles combined.

Wouldn't a shortening of the "nostalgia period" indicate a higher degree of innovation rather than saturation?

New ideas come faster -> the "good-old-days" come earlier.

I am not claiming that this is the primary cause, just a thought.

Note that not all innovation is positive. There has also been rapid progress on predatory monetization and optimized engagement via addictive design. This may push people to be nostalgic earlier in the same way.

Movie industry suffers the same but in a way worse way.

At least indie devs have a way to make a living, but indie moviemakers have a much harder time finding funds and studios are increasingly less prone to experimentation. Either it's a sequel, or some data-driven decision pushes the same variant of the same action/horror movie.

Well the indie scene is effectively a mechanism silo, the AAA studios can then refer to these mechanisms and implement them along with many other mechanisms in a finished product.

I'm not interested in games for a while. gonna go find a new hobby electronics? touching grass maybe?

re: meta

Fighting games have this to the nth degree. Fighting games are split communities (really any game that is high skill ceiling) between those that have been playing seriously for years/decades and those who just play.

SF6 is coming out in 2023 and it will be "solved" within a month or two. Once top players get to a tournament and show strats, the entire meta evolves to the rest of the community.

Just like you cant get security through obscurity. A game can only fake depth when there isn't communication. The identification of top strategies is inevitable and rapid. But the experience of executing and being a top player is completely within the realm of design.

Devs want to fake depth, but players wont play fake games.

My 2c is that a focus on "meta" has had a profoundly bad effect on games. It's hard to see ways it could have gone differently with the introduction of the internet, but it's definitely a Bad thing. Another outcome of this is what I like to call "the professionalization of amateur play" — thousands of players watch top 0.1% players of their favorite game perform at an expert level and talk about things experts care about, and then amateur players parrot those things in their local communities (or reddit, etc.) as if they are truth or if they are actually applicable to their skill level. This also belies the fact that a meta can change organically without developer intervention, but once any pro player "cracks" the meta, players are too lazy to find counter strategies and will just wait for the next patch. It creates a negative feedback cycle that makes players less interested in engaging with a meta, while simultaneously forcing developers to develop a new meta.

>"distillation of the meta"

Also known as Powergaming, back in the day. Powergaming is probably unhealthy in the long run for large communities in games for many reasons, and with exceptions.

But unhealthy things can often be loads of fun in small doses!

> My understanding is that the new MW2 is a sequel to MW2019 which was itself less a remake and more a reboot

The author may have been confused, because MW2 remaster was actually made. It was released in 2020 and contained only campaign.

>For instance, it's a truism that AAA studios that are dominating the market, like big Hollywood studios, must trend towards increasingly reliably safe blockbuster titles to make back their immense budgets. And yet there are still plenty of indie studios today. Indie gaming is stronger than ever. And yet why the consolidation into fewer and less innovative/interesting forms?

I think the problem is the minimum cost of making games is too high. It's very difficult for a single person to make a movie, but there is a low cost alternative - writing books (and scripts). A book can translate pretty well into a movie, but there is no proper alternative for games. Maybe custom games in map editors of established games is the closest we can get, but even that tends to require a lot of skill using that specific map editor.

In Japan there are people who start out writing web novels. These are usually not the greatest quality (compared to published novels), but because anybody can just sit down and start writing there's a lot of them. Once in a while some of them become popular and end up getting adapted into manga, anime, even movies. This is (somewhat) happening or going to happen in the western world too. I don't think there's an equivalent path for that in games though.

The other problem is with players. Players expect most games to do too much. It's not like novels where you pick a novel read it once (for some hours) and never read it again. Players play some games for thousands and thousands of hours.