Moral of the Story: Play indie games.
WARNING: This is a long post of mine, so be ready for large amounts of writing and thoughts.
Youtube is a cesspit of horror. Some things on it are good, but others are just “what would the most annoying person with access to a microphone and camera say?”. This is especially true of “gaming” Youtube. So many videos are being made basically saying “MODERN GAMING IS DEEEAAADDDD!!” for one of a million reasons.
I really hate these videos, not because they’re necessarily completely wrong, because some points they make about microtransactions and videogame companies at large are somewhat true. I hate them because there’s only so many times you can listen to guys from Ohio talk about how every game released since 2007 is terrible. Also sometimes the people that make the videos are basically saying that “modern gaming is bad because of women/minorities/trans people” which is just vile.
Most of the time these videos focus on “mainstream” gaming franchises like Call of Duty, FIFA, Battlefield and other game franchises that have seen a decline in recent years. However, the videos don’t focus on any other games other than those released by major publishers or companies (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) which makes no sense, because indie games and companies are probably some of the most innovative and experimental in the gaming industry right now. Basically, these guys making these videos only play Call of Duty and FIFA then say “all of modern gaming is bad now” because the major AAA companies aren’t doing much good anymore. It kind of reminds me of bad comedians saying that “comedy is dead” when they only do the same two jokes, those being “attack helicopter” and “my wife hates me” without looking at any other styles of comedy, or at the very least newer jokes.
I’ve written much longer things in the past about this subject, mainly talking about how “no, gaming in the 90s wasn’t better” or “videogame tastes are different” or “you’re not ‘sticking it to the man’ by calling an executive of EA a ‘corpo’, you sound like a pretend-edgy 14-year-old who learnt about communism last week in year 9 history”. I just hate how so much innovation that is currently going on in the videogame industry is being sidelined because of people like this going “modern gaming is bad because COD isn’t as good as it was when I was younger” and generalizing an entire industry, and games as an entire thing.
I don’t play Call of Duty really, the only game I’ve completed is World At War, but I do play a lot of FIFA so can say that I feel as if some aspects of the games have declined in the past 10 or so years, with the increased focus on Ultimate Team and FIFA Coins/Packs. Does that mean I’m going to ignore all of the cool indie games at the moment just to fixate on FIFA being the reason that “all modern gaming is bad”. Fuck no! Sure, AAA games might not be great at the moment, but if these guys would stop playing COD, FIFA or CSGO or looking at bad videogame dialogue and saying “ugh this is why the gaming industry is DOOMED” then they might actually find some games they like that aren’t made by AAA developers.
