Your problem is believing that any major game publisher/corporation cares about anything beyond satisfying shareholders. They do not care about you or games as a creative art form.
I learned this the hard way back in 2002.
From your avatar, I assume you have some affinity for Full Throttle and therefore LucasArts in the 90's, so I understand your pain. LucasArts was my favorite developer/publisher of the 90's and made a lot of fun creative games from a variety of genres, Tie Fighter, Dark Forces, Outlaws, all the adventure games, etc. Then the 2000's hit and they stopped making adventure games, chased the trends, brought in a bunch of executives who didn't care about their legacy and didn't understand the industry and the quality of their games quickly went downhill only to be dissolved in the sale to Disney.
However, there is an alternative.
My interest in gaming returned back in 2010 thanks to digital distribution and indies.
Now thanks to GOG (owned by CDPR who fall into point number ten on your list unfortunately) I could suddenly get my favorite classic and current indie games DRM-Free for a fraction of what I payed originally. This is much better for game preservation than any console, since keeping old consoles around takes up extra space and also the games stop working (at least this happened with my Pokemon gameboy cartridges which are now unable to save.) There's no worry about my games not working or being inaccessible in twenty years and I will be able to play them on my future PC without any problem.
Thanks to indies, interesting games are still being made. Yes, they have smaller budgets and smaller teams, but many play better than the games of the past, with a larger variety of art styles than games from major publishers. Note that the games from major publishers of the past had much smaller budgets than today and were also more fun.
My best advice is to stop caring about corporations and publishers making big budget games, it only leads to disappointment.
I think the issue is that I like a complicated mixture of games, from low budget to high budget. When I only play smaller indie-y games, I end up wanting to play something more bombastic and larger scale, and when I just play those, I end up pining for smaller experiences,
It's easy to just say "ignore the larger publishers" but it would also greatly reduce styles of games I would be playing. I'd honestly probably end up playing more older games than more indie games, because I am looking for that balance.
Also, yes, watching LucasArts kill itself over like 15 years was pretty depressing.
Hot take: Pretty much none of the zelda games have ever had particularly strong narratives and even in games like OoT what story was there was largely just an excuse for characters to tell you to go from point a to point b. Some have had a few good individual moments (I love the ending of Windwaker for example), but those moments are largely isolated and only stick out because it's easier to remember than the hours of relatively dull or straightforward narrative that surround them
I am going to agree here, I mentioned Zelda because of the nostalgia, and the love of not exactly puzzle rooms, but the way dungeons are in that series. The stories in the games have always needed work in my opinion.
How horrible it must be to just focus on negativity
I don't, I am generally a very positive and optimistic person. I just had a day where I woke up sad. Sometimes when you're sad, all the little things that just sort of nag at you end up feeling more like being hit by boulders.
The next-gen versions of games not being on the disk is likely to be a temporary cross-gen thing as we transition to new consoles. The downloaded "containers" for BC, as I understand it, are vital to making that system work (at least for 360 and OG Xbox games - less clear on Xbox One games). This is probably why PS5 doesn't natively support games past the PS4.
The discless future is inevitable though, whether it's the Series S or the PS5 DE. If Sony don't believe the DE will outsell the traditional PS5 long term, it'll only be because they supply constrained it to keep down losses.
From a preservationist stand point though, I understand your concerns.
Yeah, I hope that it goes away soon, the more stuff we own, the better. As for the BC, they way they have it set up, they'd need to have all the executables already on the Xbox out of the box, but I wish they could have all the data files they need already on the Xboxes, and have it install all the assets from the disks.
These things shouldn't make you sad or depressing.
These are more a symptom of feeling down in the dumps today, and not the trigger for it.
Re open world, this is what gamers wanted. When a AAA linear not padded game comes out, gamers say it's not worth the money, it's only X hours long, wait for sales, wait for $20 or even cheaper. It's a terrible business model for these games. Sure, Sony does it, but remember they get 42% more revenue from every digital sale than a third party publisher does, and frankly those games don't need to be profitable so long as they drive hardware sales which in turn drives PS+ sales and other purchases. An open world game offering 50 hours of play, even if two thirds of that is just getting from A to B and finding collectibles or beating the Nth combat or race challenge, feels like value.
Re platformers, good news is there has been a lot of really good platformers in the last couple of years. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but it's still been great for the genre.
Nice to see you're such a big fan of Pixeljunk Monsters. I agree, the first game is phenomenal. I'm a big fan of many of their games. I did not expect to see that getting a mention here on Era. Again looking on the positives, I think it has been $1 on Steam and it probably runs on a potato. There is also a new mobile Monsters game soon, already launched in some areas iirc.
Yeah, it's sad. I like what I like, and I can't help that, but it often seems that the industry and gamers at large don't like what I like, so I end up digging for the scraps and remains of genres and series I like. :/
Yeah, if you want to see my Tweet history, I can show you that I've been bugging folks about it for some time.
https://twitter.com/JonGod/status/1333172371243429888?s=20
You don't know what sadness truly is.
I am 100% positive there are people that have experienced much worse sadness than I have, though I do suffer from anxiety, which sometimes results in bouts of minor depression. Today was one of those days. I wasn't depressed because of these things, these things depressed me more.
Maybe Sony can push Valve to make half life 3?
What in the world..
At that point in time, it felt like something that could be possible. Stuff like Shenmue 3 was considered Dead. The Last Guardian was sort of canceled, and suddenly we have Final Fantasy VII's remake showing up at their shows. It's like, with all that happening, it felt like
anything was possible.
Honestly, if you only follow the huge news, and look at what the major players are doing, it's depressing AF.
I wouldn't say so in general. I was very happy with seeing Spider-Man: Miles Morales announced, Astro's Playroom and Sackboy all made me so excited for the PS5 launch in a way I had never been for a console launch (While I've been [console] gaming since the SNES/Genesis, and playing on computer before that, the PS4 was the first console I actually bought at launch. I generally buy them after a few years.
If, otoh, you find a couple of (relative) no-name YouTubers who release trailer compilations for new indie titles basically every day, things suddenly don't look so bleak. Plenty of smaller devs are out there making smaller, story-driven 3D platformers. This year we had Pumpkin Jack, Effie, Woven, Ary and the Secret of Seasons, Tamarin, Skully, probably a whole bunch I'm forgetting... same thing with shorter single-player games without micro-transactions or crowbarred multiplayer- a whole bunch of mid-tier publishers like Focus Home, Nacon, Kalypso, Embracer (I know there's other reason to dislike them, but credit where credit's due- the non-Deep Silver branches tend to stay away from iffy monetization), etc all regularly release those shorter one and done titles- and in Embracer's case, they've been bringing back older platformers/cult classic series as well.
Yeah, I had my eye on Pumpkin Jack, Ary, Tamarin, and a few others, but most of these have the story as not a main focus, or didn't really have them pan out, from what I could see. (I am waiting on a sale for all of those, due to them not looking like my cup of tea. In general, if there was one that looked totally my style, I'd buy it day 1 to support it)
Honestly, the biggest problem with the gaming landscape I find is that there's so many hundreds of new games... but 90% of all "games media" is talking about the same handful of headline-generating titles. It takes work to find cool new things- whether it be sifting YouTube to find channels that do that, or look through e-stores new releases/coming soon sections yourself. But if you DO wanna look, there's never been a better time to actually find stuff.
I dig a lot to find games, and I also keep a list of all the games that interest me, with release dates, platforms and so on, so I can reference it, and see what's coming out 'this week', generally there's at least 1-2 games coming out a week that catch my eye. Some pan out, some do not, but I don't focus on only the popular things, actually I am not into a lot of the most popular series... Not because they are popular, just because they aren't my style of game.
Going digital/preservation. There's a lot of pros and cons about this, but ultimately, I feel it puts more power to the devs if they don't need to rely physical media and retailers to stock their games. If anyone can publish a game on Steam or the eShop, ultimately this gives everyone a (slightly) better chance at making it themselves. Sure, for every smash indie sleeper hit there's probably 50+ games that languish in obscurity; but being able to get on the storefront themselves is (imho) still ultimately better than needing to impress a publisher enough to do it for you. I don't know, it's a complicated issue, and game preservation certainly is a big part of it, as well (it's why I try to buy games on GOG whenever possible and download each game's installer and then back them up-its the best I can do to ensure I'm not reliant on the storefront's infrastructure, even if the price is often better for a Steam key elsewhere).
Yeah, I don't use steam except for all the games I redeemed from Humble Bundles over the years. I own a few 100 games on GOG though. Basically, I start steam up a few times a year, mostly by accident when trying to launch something else.
So, honestly, I think you need to shift your attention away from the big 3 and the EAvisions of this world. Gaming is a huge business these days, so the bigger the company, the less creative risks it can afford to take if it needs to maintain profits. You'll still get passion projects here and there (Microsoft's revival of Age of Empires by involving a prolific modder team is nothing short of a fairytale in that regard, for instance); but by and large, you have to look for smaller games and devs for those sparks; the good news are, with the revenue pie being so huge, there's literally thousands of devs out there; and with the quality of tools like Unreal and Unity constantly growing, small independent teams can more and more often put out stuff that's hard to distinguish from "AAA", big budget productions.
While it's true that higher budget means less risk, it's also true that you need a certain budget to actually nail specific styles of games. I mentioned before something like Uncharted 2 could not be done on an indie budget. It's the mixture of games that keeps me forever interested in games, Big game, smaller game, big game, smaller game.
I don't think games are the cause of how you're feeling... more like a symptom. Reach out for help, please.
I agree, they aren't.. they just make me who was feeling down today, feel worse.
In general I am very upbeat and positive, but I do suffer from anxiety, and sometimes it manifests in feeling depressed. When you feel depressed things that don't otherwise bother you, can feel a lot worse.
Again being said, I am very lucky I have a great support group, and I am okay. I feel depressed today, but tomorrow is another day, and I will make it through the depressing day.
