The Future is Going to Suck

[jalaneme]

To be honest, there's always loopholes in the system. Don't want everyone to know what you are doing 24/7? Then don't update your Facebook wall. Personally, I never update my Facebook wall or Twitter account because I personally don't believe that updating everyone about my every action and thought throughout the day is wise or worth reading in any sense. That doesn't stop me from socialising with my friends by posting on their walls and the occasional commenting on their statuses however.

Don't want gaming to be socially intrusive? Then don't integrate Facebook with your gaming consoles. 3 years ago, I foolishly integrated my PS3 with Facebook and that fucker was constantly updating my wall with trophies I have unlocked and games I purchased on PSN. So I stopped the integration and my gaming patterns or happenings isn't posted on my Facebook wall.

Guess what - NOTHING is posted on my Facebook wall. I enjoy full privacy of my daily affairs that way.

I've heard about online bullying too, and it's truly unfortunate, but this can be minimized if people: treated friend invites from unknown people more seriously and with greater scrutiny, ignored "friends" who were posting cruel remarks on their walls, don't run around insulting and hurting everyone's feelings (The door swings both ways) and take everything they get from people online at face value. Feeling insulted from some random stranger on the Internet over a game or comment is beyond silly to me.

Thing is, no one is shoving social networks down our throats, and there are workarounds. GBATemp for instance, does not force us to use Facebook log in. So lighten up, I too hate how everything is going "social" these days. But that doesn't mean I should sit in a corner and suck my thumb

i had this problem too on my ps3 and some of my friends didn't like it so i had to turn it off, lol, you may think you have a choice not to get involved, but in my case just today i got a email from a facebook app requesting details and asking me to confirm, i never gave said app and permission to email me requesting my personal information but in this case they did, there are numerous cases like this on facebook where your information is stored, it's even in facebooks terms and conditions that they can access personal information without your consent.

games will not be complete What do you even mean? you just have to look at todays games and see for your self, that is what i mean, without all the DLC to make the game complete you are missing out on content.
games will require online passes to access servers which will not be accessible in 15 years time. Name some console games that require online passes to play Singleplayer. batman arkham city, Kingdoms of Amalur, RAGE just to name a few games that are single player and require online passes.
games that require to be online won't have servers running in 15 years, EA is a good example of that by shutting down servers after 2 years even when people are paying for the online passes. Server emulation. Not that much of an issue. Moreover, again, this is mostly for Multiplayer. some single player games require online use like autologs in need for speed, games that have leaderboards and sync high score data with your friends lists, ninja gaiden 2 sigma requires you to log in to play in single player (on ps3 version, not sure of xbox 360 version is the same) if you log out while playing single player it exits to the title screen without saving your progress, scary but true.
some games require patches to fully work, they will not be available in 15 years to download from their servers, therefore games like skyrim is completely unplayable in it's vanilla state without patches. Do you expect all the consoles with said patches to magically disappear? They can be "removed" from a pre-patched game and implanted into another if needs be. still some game patches cannot be archived and will be lost when the servers go down, on cfw patches can be installed by a pkg but some patches don't work on 3.55 so issues arises.

with these problems the games would be a waste of time to play as they will be so broken and incomplete, the reason people still emulate old games from 20 years ago is because those games back then were complete, no patches, no dlc, no online or passes, just load and play, emulating current gen games in 15 years won't be as easy as it has in the past.
20 years ago you still had distribution of patches, just via game magazines and only for computers. By the way, don't tell me you've never seen a broken retro game. yes i do know there are some retro games that had game breaking glitches that made the game unplayable, but game developers back then had to make sure the game worked fine, these days they can release the game half finished and patch the game later, such things didn't exists back then, once the game cartridge was packaged and ready there was no way to correct any bugs or glitches.

you are entitled to your own opinions as well as i am entitled to mine, Not taking that right away from you, just showing you a different way to look at things.
but you are seriously kidding yourself and trying to justify game developers robbing you blind straight out, It's a business. it's daylight robbery.
yes "DLC" existed back in the day on pc, but they were full expansion packs that even had their own software disc and own packaging, now "DLC" are a 100kb download that is on the disc already locked out intentionally to make you pay more money,...which cuts down the download times significantly. The same DLC could be on a server, it's just more convinient to put it on the disc. I personally dislike this practice but I can see how it makes "sense". Moreover, that kind of DLC's usually contain what? Bonus costumes? Big whoop. Pretty much only Capcom does it, it's not common practice. i can't argue with your own opinion, by all means keep supporting devs that do such things

you got your moneys worth back then How is any of this a satisfaction guarantee? There were still crappy mission packs back in "the day". still, the fact remains that they weren't a rip off like it is today.

what i am trying to say is there is a difference between pure green $_$ greed and quality content that is worth your money. Of course, I agree, but there are good and bad aspects in everything, really. imo of course.

 

[Sterling]

I completely support DLC. I don't support DLC that should have been in the game. Many times the whole reason why there is such types of DLC is because the publisher pushes a game because of their desire for profit. Sometimes though, there is planned DLC. This is where a separate team within the core developers write and develop DLC before the release of the game. These could be put into the game, but their content dictate they would be better as a separate package, but not deserving of a whole other game.

 

[Just Another Gamer]

The concept of DLC is fine as long as its free and not needing to be paid for otherwise it seems like a real rip off cause its usually just a small addition to the game and nothing special that needs to cost anything.

 

[Tsuteto]

No, I see where DLC should be paid for. The thing is though, not every single piece of DLC should be paid for. There's portions where it's like, "Yeah, okay, that's a healthy contribution to the game" or "yay bonus stuff that I really don't need to enjoy the game but want any way", fine, put a pricetag. But then there's like, "Inclusion into the story that makes better sense of the plot" where it's something that should be a gift. But, hey, marketing works, people will pretty much pay for that stuff anyway, so why not be money-grubbers and get everything that you can.

The future of gaming is only bleak because people either settle for the same thing over and over (and yet for some reason complain about remakes and how they need to stop as they're pulling out $100 bills to pay for said remake), or because they expect everything to be utterly perfect in one game. The reason for games being amazing "back in the day" was because things weren't defined FOR the people by graphics, with some aspect of interaction to make the "story" move. No, back then, the player defined the finer details themselves, while being immersed in a heavy storyline or worthwhile gameplay that was truly entertaining to the imagination. Let's face it: as each generation moves into the next, people are less and less imaginative and thrive on those who are imagining things to provide the next "big thing" to keep them occupied until the next "big thing." Society, itself, is more to blame, IMO, since they're moving like mindless cattle in this funnel of shelling out cash for monthly payments and such for the best experience.

Late night, rant doesn't make much sense in and of itself. Kick on your thoughts and think about it and perhaps it might make a little more sense. Nonetheless, it's only my two cents on the subject at hand, and I know by no means has much weight to a good number of people possibly.

 

[Rockhoundhigh]

1. Sony just needs to be careful, to do better than they are with the Vita for sure.
2.Used games have never been an issue for me, I'd gladly pay 5 more bucks to support a company that makes a great game then give all the profit to a bunch of assholes like Gamestop.
3. That's what Nintendo is for it seems, Zelda multiplayer isn't exactly practical. There's nothing really wrong with multiplayer though.
4. Free-to-play is a weird concept, when used to make the game playable it's absolute garbage though.
5. If they're gonna charge for online then the service better be reasonably priced, comprehensive, and NOT loaded with ads like Xbox Live.
6. This is actually kind of the PC sectors fault, they exponentially increase the power of hardware in so little time that making a game that utilizes it continually gets more expensive to make.
7. Fuck touchscreen gaming, for Angry Birds, sure; for anything I take seriously no; those controls will never adhere to many game genres at least properly.
8. CoD is not a bad game, but holy crap, frantic fanboyism combined with the intelligence of 5 year olds who shouldn't even be playing this game are really ruining diversity in the industry.
9. It's like natural selection but in the game industry, I guess this is the parallel to what happened with CoD in the West, in the EAst all they ever seem to play are dating-sims and rpgs, I really hope Japanese developers don't die out though.
10. I don't social network, so this is garbage to put it mildly.
11. Not more gimmicky casual market appealing bullcrap, even if this stuff is utilized in an innovative way it' snot like anyone's gonna buy anything other than fitness/dance games.

I am looking towards the future in anticipation, but I don't like how inaccessible it's becoming to make a unique well-made game; when the industry was smaller it wasn't an issue, I just hope the industry never completely stagnates.

 

[Taleweaver]

Note: didn't read all the responses

Seems to me the noted issues are true (or at least a well-founded argument). However, I disagree with the conclusion. I'd say the games industry as a whole is going to change. There are real threats out there, as profits are dwindling. The mentioned points are all attempts to tackle that just to keep making profits*. Some of those will prove successful, others will be rejected by the public (read: it won't bring in enough money to make it worth it).
It's possible some people will quit their gaming hobby alltogether if they dislike the changes too much, but I doubt the industry as a whole will collapse. At best, the whole "THE NEXT GEN NEEDS TO HAVE BETTER SPECSSSSSSSS" race collapses and the focus of new games shifts more to other aspects. Perhaps Indy games even grow up to be the standard in gaming (seriously: what makes "indy" developpers diferent from mainstream ones if not for the amount of cash they pump into their games?).


*this isn't an attack, by the way: all companies try to make a profit. If a game can't make that basic premise, it'll reflect on the following games the company will make

 

[Pleng]

i personally think that emulating 360/ps3 games would be a difficult thing to do for a few simple reasons:

games will not be complete
games will require online passes to access servers which will not be accessible in 15 years time.
games that require to be online won't have servers running in 15 years, EA is a good example of that by shutting down servers after 2 years even when people are paying for the online passes.
some games require patches to fully work, they will not be available in 15 years to download from their servers, therefore games like skyrim is completely unplayable in it's vanilla state without patches.

with these problems the games would be a waste of time to play as they will be so broken and incomplete, the reason people still emulate old games from 20 years ago is because those games back then were complete, no patches, no dlc, no online or passes, just load and play, emulating current gen games in 15 years won't be as easy as it has in the past.

While you make some valid points, there's an even bigger obstacle in emulating the current gen: Processing power is not really increasing. Increase in computer speeds is coming from having multiple cores so more tasks can be performed in parallel. This doesn't really work out well with the way emulators are coded. Sure, you could conceivably have one core used to handle the processor emulation, one to handle the gfx emulation etc and then one or 2 cores used to try and sync the whole lot up; but if one core isn't even powerful enough to emulate the CPU alone you come across a big stumbling block.

Maybe some day a clever emu dev will find a way of efficiently splitting the emulation of one CPU across multiple cores; but until that happens it's going to be very difficult indeed.

 

[Rasas]

Only a rare few of iOS and Android apps print money.

snip
Have you considered that this is simply because most of the games on App Stores are horrible? And I don't mean just "bad", I mean "sh*t and broken"?

Ya, the terrible and broken games are a problem for the statistics just look at X-Box indie like 2500 games and only 50 are good. Half of them are to buggy or terrible to warrant a purchase. The numbers are bad because of them but if you just look if and do the math of all ps3/360 games and see where they land. I say it will be a little bit better but still terrible. There will usually be some gems and the rest aren't as good.

yes "DLC" existed back in the day on pc, but they were full expansion packs that even had their own software disc and own packaging, now "DLC" are a 100kb download that is on the disc already locked out intentionally to make you pay more money,...which cuts down the download times significantly. The same DLC could be on a server, it's just more convinient to put it on the disc. I personally dislike this practice but I can see how it makes "sense". Moreover, that kind of DLC's usually contain what? Bonus costumes? Big whoop. Pretty much only Capcom does it, it's not common practice. i can't argue with your own opinion, by all means keep supporting devs that do such things

You can always make a fake facebook account
Capcom isn't the only one but they get the most publicity doing it. Same with their cannot delete save data on Mercs yet others have the same thing on 3ds. They seem to take the most damage even though some companies do worse or about the same.

Gaming is evolving or changing for better or worse. Some gamers will just buy it anyway. Your going to just have to wait to the point it collapses and some people survive or someone new puts it back together,

 

[ShadowSoldier]

I agree with the multiplayer argument. I hate that so many games are doing it now and put the single player to the side. It's ridiculous and totally ruins the games replay value. I play a game to learn the story, live the story, and for the characters. Not mindless killing of some person I'll never meet in life.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

I agree with the multiplayer argument. I hate that so many games are doing it now and put the single player to the side. It's ridiculous and totally ruins the games replay value. I play a game to learn the story, live the story, and for the characters. Not mindless killing of some person I'll never meet in life.

In all honesty a lot of games that have introduced multiplayer into a single player franchise haven't compromised a lot. Assassin's Creed added it and Brotherhood and Revelations had the most features and side stuff for single player than any of the other ones. Red Dead Redemption really helped pushed a more open world multiplayer game and still had up to 40 hours of single player content. Mass Effect 3 had a good multiplayer section but it still offered an expansive, story-driven single player experience that's better than the others (ending aside if you disliked it but generally everyone enjoyed the game up until the last 5 minutes). I can't think of any franchises that introduced multiplayer and had their single player seriously take a hit because of it (I'm sure there's a few and I'd like people to list them but generally multiplayer just seems like a great addition rather than a terrible compromise).

Plus with tech nowadays, multiplayer is a natural evolution. Now you can play it online at any time, so why not take advantage of this?

 

[alphamule]

And people wonder why I'm fading from gaming. I've listed more-or-less the same reasons for quitting mainstream gaming years ago. So apparently, I'm years ahead of the people who are just now realizing this.

I've got my DS (Dead System) and PSP (Pirated Software Player) to play old-school emulated games from my past that were actually fun, as opposed to just being big elaborate productions with little to no substance (or fun), as most games seem to be nowadays.

Matter of taste. I like the older games but then again, they're mostly what I've played. Looking at the 3DS and 360 kind of makes me jealous, but I need to play them to really form much of an opinion (on them). That being said, the trend in gaming seems to be more fluff, less core. With 2D games, you could get away with a lot of gameplay features without all the consequences that you'll get in a 3D game with a similar level of gameplay. There's actually some mathematics behind that theory - it's harder to find all possible linear paths in 3 or higher dimensions, for example.

Finally, it's not failing. Try again.

The Vita actually is bombing hard. Even the Wii is doing better than it.

|System |  This Week  |  Last Week  |		YTD  |			LTD  |
------------------------------------------------------------------
|  WII  |	 15,789  |	  9,200  |	206,117  |	12,369,338  |
|  PSV  |	 10,583  |	 12,299  |	250,773  |	 690,758  |

To be fair, wait about 2 years. If it hasn't taken off after 2 years, it never will. Or at least not as it was originally intended.

retro gaming is the future for new and old gamers, people will relive old classics and remember the good old days where you brought a game and it was 100% COMPLETE not this BS we get now, i am simply done with current gen, the only hope i have is nintendo (i started gaming with nintendo and i guess i will finish with them) i hope they don't let me down with the Wii U.

why do you think people keep on emulating old games on new consoles? because they are classics and timeless, they never get old, as soon as the gaming industry start to realise this the better but imo it will be way too late for that, the damage has already been done, game developers/publishers try to rectify that with HD remakes (and lock out backwards compatibility so they don't loose money) but that is not the way to go about it.

edit: i will leave you with a few videos to recap this whole topic in one.

Techically, they do get old. You can only play the same game so many times before you get bored with it. What doesn't get old is the library of games for people who've never played them and the gameplay they can enjoy. They'll still be the same game 3000 years from now. It'll be like people watching movies from the 30's or reading books from the middle ages. They'll show obvious dating, but a good movie will still be a good movie. Once the systems currently being sold are 30 years old, come back and look at your perspective. Quite a few people will like retro games simply because of taste, while others will hate them for the same reason. Also, someone's definition of retro will have to include the genre and decade and system, which is a bit like how movies work. You can like Steamboat Willy, and hate Costello.

BTW: Without new gameplay and graphics, I somehow doubt Nintendo could get away as much as they do, with selling Super Mario Bros remakes.

Talking about releasing patches and charging for the full game again, I think we should look at the example of Warcraft II. The expansion pack (green disc) was new gameplay with hardly any patches at all. You got a few new heroes but the gameplay was identical and all the bug fixes were backported to the non-'x' (eXpansion set) so you got them either way. The real advantage was single-player campaign levels. When BNE (BattleNet edition) came out, you were mainly paying for online play and totally rewriting the game's engine for Windows. It was worth it to most players. You got a single-step install that worked on 98 and XP a lot better, and it cost $20 for the full thing, instead of like with the older game making you buy 2 $60 discs on release date. Notice something - they didn't try to charge full price for essentially a redeveloped game with 99% the same content and they didn't charge you monthly fees to use your own Internet connection to other players. The matchmaking service only needed to consume their bandwidth on finding a player. IRC servers needed more bandwidth to do their job, giving the number of users.

A lot of the problems with PC CPU's not getting any faster at emulating game system CPUs is related to the fact that from a hardware perspective, using JUST a (serial/multicore in other words, instruction queue) CPU has become a lot like older computers that didn't have an instruction decoder. Current CPU's (heck, every one since AMD64 at least) are actually designed in ways that break efficient instruction-set emulation. FPGA's are expensive but they're one possible solution to emulation since you can highly optimize the logic, if the prices drop enough like they did on GPU's. $200 can get you a pretty powerful streaming processor (GPU). Also, the limitations caused by a lack of local storage will be lessoned as CUDA and such mature. Right now, it doesn't make economic sense to have tons of cache in them when it's cheaper (for the given performance) for the applications they're designed for, to just double the number of cores and keep the same amount of RAM per core. This has the unfortunate side-effect of limiting their power on some applications.

 

[triassic911]

If this is all indeed true, at least I have PC gaming to fall back on. This post feels like the worse is yet to come. :/

 

[chains_of_androm]

I think the market is definitely geared towards the casual gamer now, so companies will develop thos time killing games more than in-depth, but I still see quite a demand from the hardcore gamers so hopefully it won't be too bad. Look on the brightside though, you now have more time to focus on studying...

 

[alphamule]

Answer to hardcore gamers: You'll have to make your own content or get used to buying lots and lots of expansion packs (or a subscription to a pack channel with commissions). I mean heck, it worked on Quake and Unreal. Of course, those were usually just really, really good one-offs of single levels or small (3-6 levels) packs.

Also, this. 2042 looks pretty much like 1942. At least it's not as bad as 2077. In related news, instead of flying cars, we have flying robots and nuclear fusion seems *as always in my lifetime* to be just a few years off. Sadly, flux capacitors are not in stock and are on backorder for the foreseeable future.

 

[zuron7]

I fear that gaming on consoles will soon die with products such as ONLIVE releasing.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

I fear that gaming on consoles will soon die with products such as ONLIVE releasing.

Doubtful, OnLive does well enough but it's not nearly as big as a Xbox 360/PS3/Wii/etc.

It'll take years before OnLive can get a grasp. Not everyone has unlimited internet connections and such.

 

[Deltaechoe]

I fear that gaming on consoles will soon die with products such as ONLIVE releasing.

Doubtful, OnLive does well enough but it's not nearly as big as a Xbox 360/PS3/Wii/etc.

It'll take years before OnLive can get a grasp. Not everyone has unlimited internet connections and such.

Agreed, until unfettered internet access becomes more affordable, mainstream cloud gaming is going to be a pipedream. The problem is while the providers love things like this (for the nickle and diming to death) the consumers are ultimately going to lose. This isn't due to cloud services but instead completely the fault of the service providers.

 

[machomuu]

Single Player's not going to die, just because Elder Scrolls is going online and CoD's Single Player has sucked since after 4 (which, coincidentally, is when the series started to dip into milk as well) doesn't mean Single Player's going to die.