After reading your post, yes it's the investors who provide most of the funding not giving a shit about anything except making the number go up. That's the "Hollywood" quality I'm talking about, because it produces homogeny. Everything ends up being the same, in the end, because some guy in a suit is saying that that's what's making us the most money cuz his marketing team studied it and they said that's the thing to do.
Like...I miss when they just let people write the darn stories they wanted to. Those were better stories, anyway. These old cigar chomping guys like "Whatever, put it out, maybe it'll sell, who knows, is this what they kids are into these days?" instead of people who are like "I have the answers, everyone else has opinions on what games are good, but I have the answers." They grew up with games so they think they know better and we end up with a lot of homogeny among games, particularly in the stories they tell. Such as with FF, where the romantic subplot has gotten more and more prominent as the series has gone on, or Star Trek, where the moustache twirling villain who gets blown up has permeated the films.
I don't like everything to be the same. If everything were the same, nothing would be worth watching or playing anymore.
Ok, I'd definitely frame this as an issue with exploitive capitalism, because that goes hand-in-hand with the way that psychologically predatory marketing tactics end up being the core of those "games" such that the distinguishing line between what's just outright utilizing tactics like gambling (utilizing a combination of delayed & inconsistent reward to fuel addictive dopamine hits), vs. what sort of things are actually fun to do that keep you playing a game are as obfuscated as possible.
This is why Mobile Gaming mechanisms are starting to make their way into the more mainstream games, because the Mobile industry has a smaller psychological barrier of entry for making impulsive purchase decisions (there's plenty of research for why companies push to buy things via their app rather than on a website specifically because of this). Mobile gaming being more cutthroat after years of evolutionary iteration from Farmville and whatnot, means that the RoI for those games is WAY higher than for things like the AAA console games and whatnot, which is also why the Mobile Games industry didn't get hit nearly as much when the games industry started getting abandoned by investors – because they were always operating bigger profits with fewer people doing Dev. It's also why China has been dominating that space, because they've always thrived in being able to have exponentially more manpower for equivalent cost.
One of the things that this creates is that is amplifies bad game design, because a complex and cumbersome experience takes up more cognitive load and busy work becomes a core part of the experience that's par for the course. There's a difference between grinding levels to make your team stronger or to level up materia in
Final Fantasy VII Vs. spending hours manually sorting through, leveling up, and overboosting weapons tied to gambling pulls in
Ever Crisis just to be able to engage with the constantly changing challenges that the game presents.
In
Final Fantasy VII, this part of the game design is because it's directly connected to the core gameplay experience and the challenges of the narrative that align to what the characters are facing in their journey through the story. This is why it resonates with what player feel and ties into their experience with the game itself because that's emotionally design to align the narrative experience to the gameplay. That's why people who play games do what they do, and it's ALSO why the people who MAKE games do what they do. That's what creates that mutual symbiotic relationship between the game creators & gamers, where we'll willingly spend countless hours lost in the stories and the experiences that they create.
In
Ever Crisis, this system exists because it means that players will spend more hours interacting with and normalizing the gambling part of the game into their workflow to the point that this predatory system feels more and more benign to engage with, thus increasing the probability that the user will become a source of revenue. The more hours you spend doing it, the more attached you become to that experience, and the more reliable that becomes in drawing in others to engage with that. Free-to-play users are the commodity that incentivize that which is why online rankings with that are a core part of the game design, and because EVERYTHING in late-stage capitalism is a part of the attention economy, the more hours that you have those users for, the more likely they are to be spending their money on you, rather than on something else. This is why INVESTORS fund games, and why the number of hours you spend on games like that will always vastly bloat itself to consume as much time as possible, and also why there are lots of idle games and games that play parts of themselves for you... because that's literally how investors make money and how they see the world.
While both systems "make games that are played by gamers" they're night-and-day different things that are monumentally difficult to discern from a consumer level, especially since those worlds got pushed closer and closer together the more successful the games industry became, but especially with the "gamification" of tasks being linked into psychological behaviour basically making that for a sales & marketing pipeline that was primed for exploitation by people who wanted to be terrible about it... and the people with the fewest morals about what they were willing to engage in were guaranteed to be the most profitable, and keep increasing the power and influence they held in the industry and thus attracting more and more of their ilk. It's less that power corrupts and more that the corrupt are drawn towards things that will give them power. It's also why some of the few bastions of resistance are in what types of things that the various platforms refuse to allow – why you can't watch ads for in-game currency in
Ever Crisis on Steam, but you CAN do that if you play
Ever Crisis on Android.
This isn't specific to games either.
This is basically just enshittification specific to games, but it's the same thing that's happening everywhere in tech. This is why everything became a subscription service, and the service itself just became continually worse even as the cost of maintaining it continually increased. It's why every social media is just an endless scroll feed, rather than something that you bookmark and check for meaningful updates. It's why news got reduced into a 24-hour cycle of clickbait headlines designed to amplify your existing biases while desperate for ad revenue rather than attempting to inform you about the world. That's the model of exploitive monetization that the core of the economy is predicated upon, and the Investors with all of the money will chase that no matter which "industry" it goes to. Even when it's not taking that form, the same thing is why bubble economies came up around vintage video games – they're not generated by the people who care about what those games are, what they represent, or in order to preserve them. They're just investments like people flipping homes for profit don't care about the people buying them to live in. It's just late-stage capitalism all the way to its core.
I wanted to reinforce that because while the cigar-chomping corruption of powerful executives is one classic Hollywood trope, it's just as much the sort of thing that was happening with places like Las Vegas and other "make-it-big" dreams, because that's the RoI model that it's preying upon. It's just that that sort of power slowly wormed its way into the core of the economy, because it amasses power & profit that allows it to operate with impunity above the law. It's why one of the few wins was everyone clowning so hard on the Crypto-bros that NFTs in games got absolutely annihilated just before AI slop games & Meme Coin pump-and-dump schemes really got their current momentum which could have made that infinitely worse and near-unstoppable.
It's why as games get more cinematic in their storytelling and start pushing into the realms of mixed media in the ways that Hideo Kojima is doing with
Death Stranding 2, I think it's important to differentiate that type of "Hollywoodization" as being its very own weird kettle of fish, since the realms of film & gaming have a LOT of weirdness between them despite their overlaps, where that term makes more sense to tackle that sort of thing VS. the death throes of late-stage capitalism that's worming its way through the things that we love & care about. I also mention this example specifically because one of the core things about Kojima's legacy is the way that he was treated at Konami which is very much the massively amplified version of late-stage capitalism that's present in places like Japan because of the Keiretsu (as well as Korea because of the Chaebols for the same reason). Those massive Shinra-like corporate entities hold IMMENSE power in a way that's what the US seems to be slipping towards and are pretty antithetical to what most would consider Hollywoodization.
It'd make more sense to think of them like the sort of Reality TV slop you'd get from big networks that just need viewership numbers to pull in ad revenue and then get locked onto whatever makes them profit regardless of what they're known for, which is why Konami doesn't really care about games, since that's not where their money comes from, and so regardless of how highly gamers felt about someone who meant a lot in their world – it doesn't even land on their radar at all, because they're playing the same system of exploiting a model for profit regardless of what the output is.
That's why when there are productions that nail those things DESPITE the state of the industry at the moment like
Baldur's Gate III or
Expedition 33, it's important to call them out and support them, because the industry being chewed up like this ruins it invisibly. There are TONS of talented people whose passion & knowledge gets lost because they got burned out, or just can't financially sustain themselves doing that, which means games we get are worse off as a result...
which makes it easier for shitty games made by people who don't care to look like the same quality as everything else that's being released. It's an intentional part of that cycle. It's monumentally frustrating, and is why I come back to that L4D2 vs B4B video as often as I do to remind myself what it looks like when the INSIDE of the industry is being hollowed out in a way that we can't see, but we feel in the end result... but only if we've known what something better looks like which is why it's important to keep older games around – which is exactly the opposite of all the efforts that we see happening now.
One of the things that I think is the most telling is if you watch Retro streams, and see what old games were ACTUALLY like, and then attempt to compare them to what modern retro-like games do, and all of the things that they DON'T do. Like when was the last time you saw a modern pixel graphic 2D platformer do something that's as simple as have a multi-layered background moving at different speeds so that it simulates parallax movement while you're walking? This sort of combination of creative vision & technological innovation was a CONSTANT in genuine retro games. These videos are some of my favourite recent deep dives into technological tricks that older console developers used to create some really incredible experiences:
This is why it's important to actually spend time looking back in detail, because what the surface-level experience of those things is for gamers vs. the ACTUAL difference between what got done to achieve them is the same reason why someone feeding prompts into an AI to output an image is fundamentally different from a real artist. There's an immense amount of effort that has to go into tiny details by people with colossal levels of expertise in order for something like that to work – and those are the corners that ALWAYS get cut when you're maximizing a model for profit. Something profitable has to be as superficially similar as possible to the point that it makes it unsustainable for people who are doing more, which means that eventually no one remembers what the genuine experience was actually like, and the market for the lowest effort replicas is the easiest to grasp.
This even comes down to things like
Uematsu using compressed sound samples for FFVII so that the music would continue to play while things were loading, rather than being stuck loading from the disc being throttled by available memory., or just... what someone like what Tim Follin was doing for games like fucking
Pictionary.
When you have people who are professionals in their respective spaces who look back at older games, you're able to find things like this because it was condensing absolutely INCREDIBLE talent together. That's literally ONLY possible when you have an industry that will actually support people WAY overspecializing in something that 99.9% of players will literally never be able to distinguish.
Things like this in the indie scene are getting harder & harder to find, because there's just a deluge of asset-scraping, cloning, and other bottom-of-the-barrel techniques
including outright theft that gets pumped into platforms that make it monumentally difficult to find those things, and damages the people doing it. It's just what the major plague crawling across the whole of the tech industry is at the moment.
Anyhow, if you'd like any more tl;dr on any of those particulars as they apply to the whole subject of "making games now worse" I'm sure I can dig deeper, but I think it's already well beyond a decent amount at the moment.
X 
