Modern gaming is often frustrating for all the wrong reasons; companies getting away with ripping off customers and veering into the territory of gambling. We’ve already seen the horrendous debacle of loot boxes cooked up by EA in Star Wars Battlefront 2 in 2017 but on the other end of the spectrum lies another insidious trend in today’s gaming industry; the lazy cash-grab video game. This is where developers put in little effort and simply ride the hype train to release, taking advantage of the community in the process. These titles can be identified through several traits…
· Broken, buggy or unstable performance all around
· Countless features not being in the game at launch while selling at full price
· Incredibly shallow gameplay and design that grows tiresome very quickly
· Considerable reusing of assets and files from previous game releases
· Developers being unresponsive or arrogant at worst after player backlash
Over the last few years, we’ve had three major examples of this abysmal behaviour from developers. These include…
By far the most disappointing game of 2016, No Man’s Sky was far too ambitious from the offset; first announced in 2013, the game became infamous for the high amount of overpromising by its creative director Sean Murray. What made the hype cycle go out of control was how he appeared in so many places outside of E3; there was a constant bigging up of how amazing No Man’s Sky was going to be and this was exacerbated by the strange fact that no one was asking any specific questions about the game. Previously I talked about the game’s hype cycle in “Controversy Clocking Episode 7” and suffice it say the title was poorly received when it released. At the very least however, No Man’s Sky was able to claw its way back recently, adding many features and expanding the game over the last year. Yet despite a somewhat redeemed player reception, Hello Games should still be held to account for what they did in the future.
Sea of Thieves, released earlier this year, was promised to be the grand return of Rare, a popular UK studio which had fallen so far since the turn of the millennium. Suspicions should have risen when the developer took to the stage multiple times at Microsoft’s E3 press conferences, only to show a very similar demo repeatedly. We should have known the game would come out as basic and dull as it was. Sure, the game may have been bursting with the developer’s signature personality, but it offered little other than performing the same fetch quests and ship battles over and over again. For such lofty promises of a wide world to explore and sail, with your friends many players grew bored of the game after a short time. Others bemoaned the developer’s seemingly lazy approach and declared the title as an early access title masquerading as a full release. Rare have promised to fill the game with more content but it’s too late to change that first impression and it will continue to haunt them for the immediate future.
And now we come to Fallout 76, the worst game of 2018 and easily the biggest meltdown of a AAA game developer in years. While titles like The Quiet Man and countless asset flips on Steam are bad in their own right, Bethesda appears to have made it their mission to deceive customers and dupe Fallout fans in buying a shoddy cash-grabbing product. First, they ditched Steam and opted for their own Bethesda launcher, an obvious attempt to circumvent refund policies and the bad reviews they were sure to receive. Then Todd Howard took to the stage at E3 to lie about how Fallout 76 was the biggest and most technically ambitious game they had ever made as a developer. Finally, the so-called beta was met with great negativity as players realised that with only two weeks to launch, Bethesda had no intention of fixing the numerous bugs that plagued the game. The excitement over a Fallout multiplayer quickly dissipated on launch, where players were met with a stripped, broken down product. On top of this, Bethesda proudly boasted about the sales of the game and refused to apologise for misleading people, a dramatic step-down for what was once a well-respected developer.
Why these crappy titles have sprung up is open to debate, but the most likely reason is a means to please shareholders; the gaming industry has become incredibly greedy and it’s no longer enough to make back the cost of development. So instead of delivering quality products and earning strong critical and commercial success, developers are instead making cut-backs. Simply minimise the cost of development by committing no effort to the product, hype the fans up before release and that artificially extends the amount of money the game will bring in. It’s both insulting and disgraceful behaviour all around and what makes this so frustrating is that we the consumer are now paying for demos and early access titles at full price, while the developer kicks back as the money rolls in, maybe adding to the game later. This common trend of live-service games is synonymous with the cash-grab title.
How to spot a lazy cash grab
1. Approach the hype cycle with caution, particularly with major press conferences at the Electronic Entertainment Expo; take promises with a grain of salt
2. Look out for developers who are evasive or refuse to ask specific questions about a upcoming game or demand that queries be given in a prescribed manner
3. If companies plan on releasing a beta, look at how close it is to the game’s release; too close and you can easily class it as a demo rather than a means to fix bugs
4. Follow information and steps taken by the company; if they’re veering around particular policies or game platforms to do things themselves, be suspicious
5. Don’t pre-order, this one should be obvious. No matter what kind of fancy special edition companies are offering, always be wary of what may be going on behind the scenes
As of November 2018, Fallout 76 is selling very poorly when compared to Fallout 4, a sure sign that players are slowly catching on to company rubbish and beginning to vote with their wallets. With Bethesda now on notice as a developer, we now need to apply this same scepticism to any game company making grand promises. Here’s hoping this trend doesn’t last…
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