Ravielsk
Magister
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2021
- Messages
- 1,535
The decline started when Halo 1 released and became a success. Because Halo at that moment definitely proved that to succeed you dont need to make an exceptional game just have a exceptional marketing campaign. Since that moment shooters have been on the decline as they removed more substance and replaced it with bigger marketing campaigns. Everything after that was just more or less the symptom of this realization, even COD.
You see Halo even at its best was never more than a mediocre shooter with some good ideas and OK writing. Really its the definition of a minor middle market success, you know one of those games that would otherwise show up in "top 10 Obscure games for X" videos on Youtube. But Microsoft managed to hype it up to a point where not only it was for many their first shooter ever but also make it the basis of their Xbox brand. The industry did not immediately catch on but slowly over time everyone started aping Microsoft's approach. Make a at best mediocre game and then market it to rubes who never played a shooter. I'll link here a translation of a article by Dan Vavra talking about how this was handled in the case of Halo 3 just so you get a bit of a feel for how it went down.
Articles:
Thing is that by default such a strategy can work only for a limited quantity of games. As much as publishers deny it there is a limit to the number of rubes who have never played "X game but would want to". So during the 7th gen when everyone tried to ride this "marketing uber alles" horse, outside of a few successes(COD, Killzone, Army of Two) most crashed and burned so hard that they usually took the studio with them. The surviving ones however took the exact wrong lesson from all this and concluded that the problem was not making shit games with overblown budgets but that anything that does not appeal to the lowest of the low common denominators is automatically going to fail. Thus the decline of the genre started as since then every shooter has to somehow account for the absolutely retarded, so no complicated mechanics like aiming, no smart AI, definitely no big levels you could get lost in, no exotic settings or characters and absolutely no stories that go beyond "bad man bad".
And this has been only intensifying over the years and while it has somewhat slowed down in the recent years its only slow down not a reversal.
You see Halo even at its best was never more than a mediocre shooter with some good ideas and OK writing. Really its the definition of a minor middle market success, you know one of those games that would otherwise show up in "top 10 Obscure games for X" videos on Youtube. But Microsoft managed to hype it up to a point where not only it was for many their first shooter ever but also make it the basis of their Xbox brand. The industry did not immediately catch on but slowly over time everyone started aping Microsoft's approach. Make a at best mediocre game and then market it to rubes who never played a shooter. I'll link here a translation of a article by Dan Vavra talking about how this was handled in the case of Halo 3 just so you get a bit of a feel for how it went down.
Articles:
Thing is that by default such a strategy can work only for a limited quantity of games. As much as publishers deny it there is a limit to the number of rubes who have never played "X game but would want to". So during the 7th gen when everyone tried to ride this "marketing uber alles" horse, outside of a few successes(COD, Killzone, Army of Two) most crashed and burned so hard that they usually took the studio with them. The surviving ones however took the exact wrong lesson from all this and concluded that the problem was not making shit games with overblown budgets but that anything that does not appeal to the lowest of the low common denominators is automatically going to fail. Thus the decline of the genre started as since then every shooter has to somehow account for the absolutely retarded, so no complicated mechanics like aiming, no smart AI, definitely no big levels you could get lost in, no exotic settings or characters and absolutely no stories that go beyond "bad man bad".
And this has been only intensifying over the years and while it has somewhat slowed down in the recent years its only slow down not a reversal.
