We just got done with a pretty great week for gaming as a whole! Each of the recent showcases were pretty amazing and I feel like there was at least one thing for every kind of gamer between each of the announcements. While I don’t feel like any single showcase was a show stopper or anything, as a whole however I really can’t complain! From Wolverine to Persona to Fire Emblem and everything in between. It was a great week to be a gamer. And if you want to hear more about those games and announcements, tune into our podcast! But for this post I want to take a step back and look at the current state of things for gaming, especially console gaming.

I don’t think anyone will deny that this has been a really weird generation for gaming. It’s currently the longest generation and not for good reasons I’d say.

When I say ‘this’ console generation I’m talking about the generation that started with the PS5 and the Xbox Series X and S. Which both sort of stumbled out right in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Yup, right from the start we are getting into why this generation has been so odd.

Gaming as a whole saw a boom with the pandemic. With so many people stuck inside with too much time on their hands, a lot of people turned to gaming to help get them through this. As such, despite all this going on right at the tail end of the PS4 and Xbox One era, there was a big spike in gaming sales and play time in general. People finally had time to work through their backlog, people bought games to have something to do, and plenty of non gaming people even started playing games! Not only were games a great way to pass the time but to socialize as well. Whether with real people online or characters in a game. There’s a reason Animal Crossing in particular was bought in mass when it released during this time! I bring this up because it does impact the next generation of gaming, or rather our current generation now. This massive spike in sales really got the higher ups and investors excited, especially since most probably didn’t realize why this was happening as this spike clearly wasn’t sustainable. Regardless, the next generation was pushing forward! And quickly ran into some problems.

Why I said before that our current generation stumbled from the get go was the fact that it was more than a little difficult to even get one of the new consoles. This was mainly due to two reasons, console shortages and scalpers. Keeping the new consoles stocked, especially the PS5, was a massive struggle. Even a year after the console launched people were still having trouble getting their hands on one. And while this was partly Sony having trouble meeting demand, it’s impossible to deny how big of a role scalpers played in this.

Scalpers aren’t anything new for gaming. We saw it plenty with the original Switch and especially the NES and SNES Classic editions. But this was on a whole different level. With the use of bots and other automated methods, scalpers were able to amass literally rooms filled with PS5s! The pandemic didn’t help either as simply shipping consoles to stores to be bought in person wasn’t exactly an option and wouldn’t be for a couple of years. This had pretty big ramifications for the generation as a whole as not nearly as many people had those new consoles as Microsoft and Sony were expecting.

Seeing how few people had the new consoles, developers realized that exclusives for said new consoles weren’t going to sell nearly as well as they hoped. So, said exclusives had to be non exclusives. Games like God of War Ragnarok suddenly got a PS4 version for instance to help keep those sales high, especially since the PS4 was so wildly successful. This made for a few problems. For one, these games couldn’t take full advantage of the PS5 hardware as the developers had to account for a lower end PS4 edition. Not only that, this also made it harder to get people interested in picking up a PS5 when they actually started becoming available again. After all, why did I need to drop $500 on a new console when my current console can still play all these games? And while they certainly run much better and look much better on the PS5, that’s still a big price tag for a console that so far has games I can already play. Speaking of exclusives though, that brings us to the other big issue with this generation.

This generation has been plagued by a lack of exclusives. Well, for everyone that isn’t Nintendo. While Xbox had a ton of issues getting exclusives out during the previous generation, PlayStation joined them this generation. The output of first party games has been getting slower and slower with each year. Though exclusives in general was a concept I honestly thought we might lose this generation.

Modern AAA game development is long and expensive. The cost to develop a game has ballooned an insane amount thanks to graphics especially. This cost is a bigger problem than you might think. For instance, this puts so much pressure on a game to succeed. It’s not uncommon nowadays to hear about a game selling over 2 million copies and still being considered a failure due to the cost required to develop it. This in turn has led to a lot of trend chasing and playing it safe when it comes to what kind of games to make. Making sequels to a successful game has always been a thing. Just look at all of the Call of Duty games for instance. If a game is successful, it only makes sense to make a follow up. You’re basically guaranteed a decent amount of people will pick it up due to the first game being good and on name recognition. However, it hasn’t stopped there this generation, and toward the end of the last generation if we’re being honest. We see a lot of AAA games falling into the same genre over and over again. PlayStation in particular is often criticized for just making story driven open world games. Granted I will say that games like Spider-Man 2 and Ghost of Yotei, despite being in the same genre of open world, are still very different, however I’d also say they are both very safe games. And sequels! You really don’t see many AAA games, especially from first party studios, getting more creative anymore. And while it probably isn’t the sole reason, I have to imagine the cost of making these games plays a major factor. Having a flop or game that under performs now means you are literally losing millions, sometimes hundred million!

That being said, you know what is less safe, just as costly, and not at all creative or original? Chasing trends!

PlayStation is far more at fault here than Xbox, but trend chasing has become a pretty big and pretty common thing in the industry as a whole. Especially with live service games. For PlayStation, this drive was mostly spurred on by the success of Helldivers 2. Given how the original Helldivers never really got that big, PlayStation clearly wasn’t expecting the sequel to be a smash hit but it was. So much so they didn’t have enough server space for all the players wanting to play at launch. Not a terrible problem to have in the long run, but still! The big thing to note here is that Helldivers is a live service game, meaning it can go on forever as long as new content continues to come. This is much easier than developing a whole new game and is why live service games can be so lucrative. Helldivers 2‘s success as a live service seems to be what convinced PlayStation to go all in on live service games!

PlayStation was originally going to make 12 live service games! Having various studios they own produce them. This is the definition of trend chasing as PlayStation was so eager to capture the success of Helldivers 2 over and over again with the idea that this would basically help them print money. And given how few live services PlayStation currently has, you can probably guess how this went.

Concord was a game originally meant to rival games like Overwatch and Valorant by being a team based hero shooter. And saying the game flopped is an understatement. Concord performed so horribly at launch that PlayStation pulled the plug on it just a week after it launched, giving full refunds to whoever purchased the game. Something that has never been seen in gaming history as far as I’m aware. Even a game like Foamstars, which was another PlayStation produced live service game, got at least a year of content and still has its servers up. With all that in mind, it’s no surprise PlayStation got scared of making anymore live service games. As such, most of those remaining 12 live service games were quickly canceled, leaving the studios that had been working on them with nothing to show for what they had been doing for years at this point. Something that only contributed to the exclusives drought we are still in! And worse led to the closure of some studios like Bluepoint Games. However, maybe this drought wouldn’t actually be a problem. Another big change this generation came from Xbox and their willingness to put out some of their exclusives on PlayStation…

In a pretty big shock, Xbox began putting out some of their exclusive series on PlayStation! Games like Halo, Gears of War, and Forza! However, while this was a shock at first, the writing was very much on the wall. Xbox had been buying up studios left and right and they weren’t shy about dropping a good chunk of change to do it! Especially when it came to acquiring Activision Blizzard by spending over $69 billion on them alone. This of course meant that they needed to start earning that money back, something that was going to be rough given how few people own an Xbox nowadays. So they had to start branching out, which meant giving some of their exclusives a chance on other consoles. At the time, this honestly felt like the end of exclusives as we knew them. For better and for worse.

Now I’m not going to sit here and try to deny that I wasn’t excited at the idea that I’d never need to worry about which console I owned when a game got announced. With Xbox so willing to share now, I just needed to own my PS5 and I’d be set! However this would mean that there was even less of a reason for people to buy an Xbox over a PS5. Which was bad not just for Xbox but for us the consumers!

It’s no secret that competition is always good for the consumer in any industry. So my biggest fear was that with Xbox basically giving up on their console that PlayStation would have no reason to really try. And while it hasn’t been long enough for us to see if this would have become a reality, I will say that these past couple of years that it has felt like PlayStation has been kind of coasting on. This isn’t to say that the quality of their exclusives have dropped but rather a drive to put out exclusives. If PlayStation was worried people would stop buying PS5s I feel like we would have seen a change by now to try and increase their game output. Right now we’re lucky if their first party studios put out just three exclusives in a year. Originally I was thinking that perhaps with exclusives no longer being a thing that hardware itself would be the new competitive battle ground. And it might have been if it wasn’t for the cost of making hardware sky rocketing.

Like I said before, this is now the longest console generation. And one of the main reasons for that is the cost of producing a new console. With the boom in AI, companies have been buying up parts for data centers on mass, causing said parts to rapidly increase in price. This is something that originally only seemed to affect PC gamers who were trying to upgrade or make a new PC, but it quickly spread to console gaming as well.

Normally consoles drop in price as the generation goes on. The parts to make those aging consoles become cheaper as newer, better parts come to replace them. Instead the opposite has happened this generation. Console prices have only gone up since launch and not by a small amount either. The PS5 jumped up $100 and if you wanted the already expensive PS5 Pro, that would be an extra $150! This isn’t even something I can entirely blame on corporate greed. With the price in parts increasing this is clearly done just so they can make some kind of profit. As such, to avoid a $1000 price tag, the PS6 has seemingly been pushed back by more than a few years despite never being formally announced. This all means that being competitive with new hardware wasn’t exactly a thing. No one was going to want to pay so much for either a new PlayStation or Xbox. Meaning we are now stuck with these consoles for a long time. But that doesn’t mean we’re out of exclusives.

Just last week, the newly appointed Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, announced they would be going back to producing console exclusives! Namely with Gears of War E-Day and Clockwork Revolution. And this is something I can honestly get behind.

While it was nice not to have to worry about what console a game would be available on, I’d much rather have there be some kind of competition between PlayStation and Xbox. It’s something we clearly need. Granted a lack of competition isn’t the main cause of all of our problems this generation but companies are at their best when they have a reason to try. Just look at the Xbox 360 which came from Microsoft trying their hardest to win that generation after a pretty decent start with the original Xbox. And look at the PS4 which came from Sony wanting to win back their dominance over gaming that they had challenged the last generation. Giving both these companies a reason to try is nothing but a positive for consumers. Even if it means we might not be able to play every game on every console.

Originally, I was going to wrap things up here. Leaving this post with some positivity as Xbox has finally started to show that it wants to start trying again rather than rolling over like it had been doing for this generation so far. I was going to praise Asha Sharma for actually taking Xbox in the right direction after seeing what needs to be done. However, as I was writing this post, things quickly changed…

Microsoft, specifically the CEO and higher ups, have made it known they are tired of Xbox not making the money they feel it should be. Seeing the gaming division and Xbox brand as just wasting money seemingly despite all of the positive buzz Asha has been building, and despite the fact that she’s barely been CEO of Xbox. So they have already begun gutting Xbox and its studios.

This all came with the news that they would be closing down Ninja Theory despite the fact that just last week they had announced the next game in their Hellblade series. A series that wasn’t always the biggest hit with sales but was loved by critics and had a decent following. The new game was suppose to be coming out next year meaning it was most likely close to being done making this choice all the more baffling! However, it’s not just Ninja Theory either, many other studios under Xbox are also on the chopping block and are currently negotiating with the higher ups to stay in business.

And just like that, the spark of hope Xbox had was gone. And if we’re being honest, the spark of hope the industry had as a whole is gone! I’m not trying to say that we’re heading for a industry crash but this isn’t looking good. To me, this is the biggest sign that the industry needs to move away from these massive budgets and long development times. It’s becoming less and less realistic for any game to make a profit unless it is a mega hit. Something I’m sure developers understand but the investors and higher ups don’t. Ever since that huge spike they saw in sales across the board during the pandemic investors and higher ups have started to think that there is no ceiling when it comes to sales. They never took the time to understand why that spike happened in the first place and why it doesn’t make sense to expect that to keep going up, especially with the world economy the way it currently is. The price to make a game isn’t the only thing increasing. Hardware, online services, and even the games themselves are getting more and more expensive. If this keeps up, gaming is going to be a rich man’s hobby. There will be no such thing as a casual gamer. And those development costs will never be able to be made back. And the ones that will suffer are sadly the developers and the studios that make the games, not the greedy people at the top who don’t understand why this happened in the first place…

Something needs to change. A lot of people, myself included, feel we should go back to how things were with the PS2 generation. Games that don’t have crazy graphics, aren’t monetized to hell, can afford to take risks, and not take five years to produce. And if the higher ups ask if this sort of thing can work, literally just point them to indie games. While AAA has been stumbling around, indie games have been shining more and more. Indie games are proving just how viable they are compared to AAA games and the industry needs to take notice of this.

I love video games, and if last week has taught me anything, it’s that I’m not alone in that. No one wants to see this industry die but we do want to see it change. Things clearly cannot continue like this. Successful studios that make awesome games should not be on the chopping block. We need this change and we need it soon. Here’s hoping that more people recognize that…

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? How are you feeling about this generation? Any games you’re looking forward to? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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