Tag: Gamers

What Video Games Need in our age to Succeed and Gain an Audience

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.

Marathon: A Unique Game in Sea of Imitators and Nostalgia

Marathon, Bungie’s new Extraction shooter was released today and one thing that I found really interesting was the artistic style of the game.

The original game, which was released in the 1990s was made in a style about the internet before the internet ossified into websites. Cyberspace was seen as a place not as infrastructure. That shows up in how the game appears. The neon lights and high contrast colors are divisive but to be honest, I rather this game have this style than having the earthy style that almost every high budget game seems to have in this age.

Marathon has been struggling with some players, who just see as more content than a creative vision being brought to life in our stale age. People have a right to be cynical here. However, I think that this game is better than all those independent games which are just copying those 16-bit games.

I think that games with a unique visual style is what we need more of in this age.

Growing up with Web 1.0, I think that that era gets unwisely maligned by people now. There was a lot more experimentation in that age and some styles would work and others would not. I think we need to be more charitable. The internet was seen as a place not entirely yet as a place dominated by money. We need to remember that mentality and I think we should try to recapture some of it here.

Marathon is a niche game, and I think Bungie was right to put the price at $39.99. This is the right price for a game which will be getting more content in more seasons. In comparison to Battlefield 6, they need to make sure that the player’s choices actually have an impact on the game and they respect the player base.

Too many games have been issues recently and it would nice to see AAA game have some success here.