Video games are dying and it’s so depressing to see – Reader’s Feature-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Concord – the main focus of Sony’s latest State of Play (YouTube)

A reader is worried that the games industry is quickly changing into something he doesn’t recognise and no longer looks forward to.

I knew the State of Play last week would be bad, so I can’t pretend I was surprised by the lack of major announcements, but I still found it incredibly depressing. Concord was so much worse than I thought and so horribly generic and uninteresting it almost seemed like a joke. It’s not though, it’s the future of gaming as Sony sees it. But rather than the future, to me it feels like the end.

Over the last year or so things have been going from bad to worst from gaming, with console sales falling, publishers laying off thousands of people, the number of new announcements shrinking, and the lack of communication from companies getting worse and worse.

It’s all happened so fast. Even the first couple of years after the pandemic seemed relatively normal but since about 2022 it’s just been a relentless stream of bad news. What I think is worse though is the complete lack of leadership. Sony has just ignored the problems, never talking about it – or anything else if they can help it.

You wouldn’t expect Nintendo to say anything, but then Japanese publishers don’t seem to be having the same problems. Microsoft certainly is, but while they do talk about the issues, sort of, I can’t believe a word they say. Does anyone really believe they don’t have plans for more multiformat releases or that hardware isn’t less important to them as a result?

I’ve been playing video games since the early 90s and I remember on many occasions imaging what gaming would be like in 20 or 30 years. Back then, there were always amazing breakthrough in graphics and game design, but you could tell it was held back by the technology and you could only guess at what might be possible when you had consoles as powerful as the ones today.

I used to imagine what would today be recognised as open world games, where you could go anywhere and do anything, with any type of vehicle you wanted. Right up to the beginning of this generation it seemed like everything was evolving exactly as I – and imagine millions of others – hoped.

Graphics were getting better, games were getting bigger and more customisable, and yet prices weren’t really going up substantially. Everyone, I thought, was happy. Then apparently, completely out of the blue, games aren’t profitable anymore and everything has to be live service trash like Concord.

Just like that the whole progress of video games as we know came to a car crash like halt and instead we got nothing at all… to later be replaced by live service games, when they’re ready.

Suddenly, it feels like everything I thought gaming is was just a dream and now that I’ve been rudely awakened it’s all just melting away. Am I being overdramatic? Perhaps, but just take a look at the release schedules right now, or the last Sate of Play, and tell me I’m wrong.

And before people say that they don’t care and that they can just retreat to their backlog or play older games again, that’s just avoiding the issue. I don’t want to live in the past. I want the exciting future that I always imagined for gaming and up until a couple of years ago seemed to be completely on schedule. Now though, it’s all fast disappearing, until I fear nothing of value will be left.

By reader Clayton

Concord – the future of gaming? (Sony Interactive Entertainment)

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