Marathon by Bungie has once again been struggling to retain its player base while Battlefield 6’s many developers have been removed by EA. These two games are from different genres yet they represent an important issue in this new medium of Video games. The lack of vitality and continuity.
Japanese video games were built in a more authoritarian and traditional culture. Strangely, however, this gave the video game industry an ability to build a culture of competency over the money chasing of the Atari company. The American video game industry and the many companies in it have produced many important games but they have not managed to get recognition by the public for their efforts. Video games remain in a niche in public opinion, seen as a craftsman job of code rather than of wood and stone. Code is tough for people to treat the same way they would a piece of marble on a table.
What needs to be done is that Video games need to listen to their audience before they can keep an audience.
Battlefield 6 was highly successful yet it cannot keep the players engaged with the gameplay? Why? It’s because the desire for money is outweighing the need for player enjoyment. This is why Arc Raiders is successful and Marathon, while successful in an artistic sense, is going to have a bumpy ride here.
Meeting the players halfway is the best way to make a game successful here. Sometimes one has to take risks and attempt to provoke something novel and original inside the minds of gamers. However, one can take it too far and get distracted by feature creep. Some of that hurt games such as Starfield or games such as Civilization VII, where they obsess over reinventing their games before even asking their players.
The games that meet where their players’ needs are going to be the ones that have player counts that remain high.
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