Do you ever wonder what happened to video games?
Before I can *start* to answer that question, I feel like I need to break that question down for you, because while it seems like a simple question its actually a pretty complex one depending on your point of view. If you've been playing games since the bygone days of CRT monitors and ball point mice, today's modern Games as a Service products hardly resemble the entertainment products you enjoyed in your youth. Meanwhile if your someone like me who grew up in the Xbox 360 era, that question might be more limited in scope as you can clearly see the lineage from Point A to B, your probably just wondering why exactly things took the path they did.
At the end of the day, the answer is both simple and complex: Money
OK. That's the simple version out of the way. The more complex answer is: Unchecked greed on a scale most people can't even understand.
Basically the crux of the problem is that video games exist in a weird spot where they are both art, and a product being sold to consumers. Regardless of if we are talking about video games, fine paintings, or the wider visual arts the profit motivator is rarely a good thing for the vision of the artist or artists involved in creating a work of art. You see, by its very nature, a product designed for profit is going to try to chase a wider and wider audience.
Have you ever noticed that RTS games are basically dead in the mainstream, with the genre being dominated by a handful of indie titles and the occasional certain-to-flop AAA title copying them? That's because RTS games are more or less hard confined to a niche of users who can A.) read a manual or play a tutorial (you'd be shocked the road block this is for modern gamers who expect every game to play identically to some vaguely similar game they've played with zero learning curve.) and B.) are possessed of a device that has a keyboard and mouse input. Which, with a handful of exceptions on the latest generation of consoles, means a PC. This is because RTS games are complex, which mandates a fairly lengthy learning curve compared to say, moving from one FPS to another, and owing to this complexity require an accurate, relatively robust input system that controllers simply can't replicate. So now at the end of this your confined to people that exist within 2 niches, and big money publishers simply won't support that. So either you end up with a indie game, which can have great gameplay and novel ideas but cannot hope to compete with the 8+ figure budgets modern AAA games have OR you end up with an AAA game that proclaims itself to be an RTS game but in attempting to access people outside those niches so greatly compromises the core tenants of the genre that it ends up being a terrible game with at most, the most superficial trappings of the genre.
This is just one example of the fairly technical types of problems you can run into with this chase to capture the widest possible gamut of consumers for a given project. Then we get into the cultural side of it, where games have started to try to appeal to the largest possible number of people. Even people, that if we are being honest, wouldn't normally play games.
So a long long time ago, in an America far far away: You were seen pretty much as a loser if you played video games. Even as games like DOOM and Mortal Kombat paved the way for more adult focused video games (not to mention numerous CD based FMV titles in the early to mid 1990s such as the infamous Night Trap on the SEGA CD) video games were largely viewed the same way as action figures or other children's toys. If you were an older teen or *gasp* an adult playing video games you were *the* example of failure. This misconception was so pervasive that US politicians like the late Joseph Leiberman (D-CT) spent a considerable amount of time trying to regulate games into being solely inoffensive, sanitized and family friendly even when not all games were targeted at a family friendly demographic. This of course reached a high point in the aftermath of the tragic Columbine school shooting after it was discovered one of the perpetrators played DOOM and had reportedly created a custom level resembling strongly the Columbine school building. That incident was followed a couple of years later by a young teenager shooting his fathers rifle into traffic, supposedly imitating the exploits of the player character in 2001's Grand Theft Auto III, possibly the prime example of a game not designed for a younger audience. Anyway's I'm getting a bit off track here...
All of this pretty much made gaming into a safe space for the "losers" of society where you could kick back and not worry yourself with the expect social etiquette of day to day life. If you couldn't be yourself in person, you could be it online. You want to vent a little bit, or maybe just be a jackass? You could do that. For the most part, everyone playing games (especially online) back in the day understood that nothing was that serious. But as time has moved on, and I think especially with the rise of social media where it has become more and more normalized for your online self and your real life self to be aligned, that stopped being the case. People that were more "normal" for a lack of better words started playing games as the stigma around gaming started to fade, but these people importantly were not part of the rag tag outcast culture that gaming was built upon. They took things seriously, and they complained. Some of them screamed and cried for government regulation from the likes of the late, not-so-great Senator Leiberman. Big game publishers heard these cries, as modern HD game consoles saw the cost of developing a game skyrocket into the stratosphere and thought "Oh no, we are losing a HUGE portion of potential buyers!" and tried to increasingly sanitize games to meet the expectations of the normal, non traditional gaming populace.
The problem is, an art product made for everyone is, in reality, a product made for absolutely no one. While some things have wide appeal, like say first person shooters having near universal appeal to the male psyche, which yearns for war and the glory of combat. Lots of things aren't. There are only so many Science Fiction fans out there, there are only some many people that want a stats heavy role-playing game like Baldur's Gate (1998, Black Isle Studios) or The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002, Bethesda Softworks). At some point you saturate the market, which is something big publishers stock holders can't accept. You also have the considerable problem of the fact that gaming and online spaces in general have become seen as a mandatorily safe space for various outside groups of non-gamers. People who already have numerous safe spaces where they dominate and set the rules. This also ignores the fact that gaming and the online realms in general was already *the* hard won safe space for the outcasts of society that just didn't fit in anywhere else, who had their own (admittedly quite offensive, rough, dog-eat-dog) culture that you were expected to assimilate into as a gamer. If you try to create a game that avoids offending or upsetting anyone, you will necessarily create something so bland, so lacking in its own identity as to be completely uninteresting to anyone.
and as if all this wasn't bad enough. I haven't even touched on the worst aspect of modern gaming. The thing that really was the point at which we lost the hobby. While games started trying to chase the technological, intellectual, and cultural lowest common denominator, publishers discovered: Games as a Service
You see, the way the games industry used to work, up until about a decade ago, was that developers would make a game, they would market that game and it would launch, and they would take that money and begin their next project, at which point the cycle would begin a new. But with the rise of increasingly always-online games consoles and digital sales platforms publishers thought to themselves: "What if we could have a constant stream of revenue from a product?" and games as a service were born. Now constantly paying for a game isn't a new concept, you can go back as early as the original Neverwinter Nights MMO (1991, SSI) to find subscription based games. The difference is these were highly novel experiences that were focused around the novelty and opportunities of a game being online, allowing you to interact with other human players. They were also very niche, and none saw widespread success until 2004's World of Warcraft, which was also followed by a glut of failed MMOs trying to cheaply emulate its formula with many of these shuttering within a year or couple of years of their launch. Even then, you had the basic understanding you were paying an agreed upon monthly fee to access all the content of a game. Games as a Service is the exact opposite, with many games even being free to play, with lots of hidden costs designed to constantly extract money from your wall.
This line of thinking has afflicted the gaming industry almost like a hard drug addiction. The high of the next hit is never enough, the next hit always has to be bigger. You've seen studios abandon reliable, solidly profitable franchises and strategies in favor of chasing that constant revenue stream or trying to become the next Fortnite. This has destroyed innovation and (combined with the committee style approach to game design the above mentioned non-gamers have forced on the industry) obliterated artistic uniqueness. Beloved franchises like Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and Battlefield have all largely stagnated into becoming highly iterative self-replications of themselves designed around optimizing the extraction of money from the players, often by using psychologically abusive tactics such as FOMO. This is such a large component of gaming that large game companies now often employee psychologists on staff to help them find the optimally addictive routines to put into their games. This is necessary because these simply aren't good games, and whatever mechanics they may have that are fun have been repeated so many times that Gamers are bored of them. The studios know that, left to their own devices and given a proper alternative, Gamers simply would choose not to play these games.
Much like a drug addiction, this pattern has also led many studios to essentially OD and put out HORRENDOUSLY expensive titles that end up flopping entirely or worse yet put out a long line of mediocre games that undermine their brand entirely. Concord (Sony, 2024) had a massive budget of $400 million USD and ended up performing so badly the game closed down permanently almost immediately netting the studio zero return. Marathon (Bungie, 2026), an extraction shooter chasing the long out of date trend started by Escape from Tarkov (2017, BSG) had a budget of $270 USD against an estimated revenue of just $48 million. Halo Infinite (2021, Microsoft) had the largest development budget ever at an estimated $500 million (half a billion dollars...) and returned only an estimated $85.7m to $117.8m dollars.
That isn't normal. That isn't sustainable. That is an industry over dosing hoping to chase down a legendary high like Grand Theft Auto V (2013, Rockstar Games) or Fortnite (2017, Epic Games) which generated lifetime profits of $10.7 billion and $30 billion dollars respectively. Companies are willing to foot the bill for failure after failure in hopes of some mythical grand return from a mega hit that's never likely to actually materialize. On that logic you could also argue that what we are seeing here is a gambling mentality on the stockmarket/shareholder scale. Meanwhile french game developer and publishing giant Ubisoft has pumped out a stream of half baked games reporting incredible operating losses year after year, including a $1.3 billion dollar loss in 2026, a year in which they published a much hated remaster of 2014's Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag which omitted all multiplayer content and added an array of micro transactions to a single-player game. Let that sink in right quick, one of the industries largest and longest lived game publishers, which has control of some of the most recognizable IP in all of gaming, is dying. In our addiction analogy, this is a longer, slower death than OD'ing on a huge budget game, more akin to the slow destruction of the entire body by the cumulative effects of many smaller doses.
So where does this leave us for a path forward?
I think its pretty obvious. Game studios need to stop chasing these ridiculous trends, and listen to what their customers want and focus on consistently delivering quality product. Its better to spend $300m and make a $200m profit and do this consistently than to light aflame $400+m over and over and over in hopes of some mega-profit that isn't guaranteed to ever happen. They need to stop looking at places like ResetEra or industry opinion groups for what Gamers want. This is 2026, you can go on Reddit, you can go on the Steam Forums, you can go to any number of places and get opinions straight from the source and they need to make games that align with that. Anyone that isn't on board with that needs to go. Part of this needs to be a systematic removal of non-gamers key positions in studios. Ask these story writers, these art directors, etc what their favorite games are. Ask them what being a Gamer means to them. Make sure they are dedicated to delivering the best games in line with what Gamers want. Gaming is the only industry that not only doesn't seem to care what their customers want, but seems to think its their place to tell them what that is.
Until they start to understand this again, we as Gamers have a few choices. The obvious answer is play Indie games but I outlined above why that isn't always a good 1:1 replacement. You can also play older games. There is currently 45 years of gaming history behind us, and with even a modestly powerful computer, smartphone or other gaming device you can access ALOT of it. If that's not your style, perhaps consider expanding some of your favorite games with mods. Some games have thousands or even tens of thousands of mods created by passionate Gamers like yourself, and can add anything from a new quest, to sharper textures, to a whole new content set to your favorite games.
or you could always go outside. EDITORS NOTE: Outside isn't real. Don't look out the window. Don't believe your eyes.
