Decline When did decline start to you?

[Wyatt_Derp]

There wouldn't have been such a decline if not for the casual consumer drones who make things like mini transactions in games lucrative for the publishers.

And sadly, they're made up of people who also want a regulated industry. Might as well tell a friend to punch you in the face if you mention buying a plane ticket to Las Vegas. Feckin' maroons.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

For me it was 2005/2006 when for some reason every new game had to look grey and brown.

Lukely they released Oblivion.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

~2000
I started to feel the decline when I played BG.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

This recently updated graph from mobygames database shows this perfectly, with the dominance of consoles and start of mobile growth in mid 2000s, the appex of console-mobile dominance around 2012-2013, when thanks to indie boom, PC creativity recovered greatly, but the extreme growth of mobile market didn't allow it to regain its primacy.

What has happened in 2018?

 

[lophiaspis]

Decline started when Team Fallout left Interplay in 1998 and entered its deepest valley when Troika closed in 2005. Those were some salty years...

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

More of a per studio basis when I stopped caring about further games from them.

Interplay: Icewind Dale
PB: Risen 2/3
Troika: when it closed.
Bethesda: Oblivion/FO3
Bioware: DA2/ME3
Obsidian: stick of truth/POE

A mix of getting drowned, losing their touch and eschewing the previous core audience for a wider more casual one.

More generally, whenever there's some new console/gaming platform development that significantly increases the number of people willing to pay 20$ or more for a videogame, most big games are going to try to appeal to those new gamers by making them more "accessible", usually at the cost of making them less appealing to the previous audience.

Last time it happened was with the wii/x360/ps3 gen. The current PS4/XBO gen was mostly more of the same or even contracted audience-wise, the shittier aspects this time around coming from mobile gaming-inspired moneytization schemes and political drama.

If upcoming game streaming services ever widely manage to lower the cost of entry of big games from 350$+ to less than 20$... you're gonna get the big D.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

More precisely, I felt the incoming decline when I played:

Thief 3 (after playing Thief 1&2)
Deus Ex - Invisible War (after playing Deus Ex)
Baldur's Gate 1 (after playing Fallout 1&2)
Oblivion (after playing Morrowind)
Bioshock (after playing System Shock 1&2)
Resident Evil 4 (after playing Resident Evil 1,2&3)
Arx Fatalis (after playing Ultima Underworld 1&2)

 

[user]

Decline started creeping in as games slowly started becoming more mainstream, same with pretty much everything else in the age of consumerism.
I think that when the target audience and market is niche, it is more demanding and you tend to focus on quality over quantity and marketing. But when it grows larger and becomes more diverse, with a lot more products competing with yours for the audience's attention, accessibility and marketing become more important than the quality of the product itself.

 

[Catacombs]

Decline started creeping in as games slowly started becoming more mainstream, same with pretty much everything else in the age of consumerism.
I think that when the target audience and market is niche, it is more demanding and you tend to focus on quality over quantity and marketing. But when it grows larger and becomes more diverse, with a lot more products competing with yours for the audience's attention, accessibility and marketing become more important than the quality of the product itself.

Shareholders, of any kind, also accelerate the decline, regardless of niche.

 

[SlamDunk]

When the first signs of consolitis started to appear in PC gaming. That's when the decline and dumbing down began.

 

[circuit breaker]

The original release of Outcast had a bug that uninstalled the game directly after installation.

I watched the shortcut appear and disappear on the Desktop... right before my eyes.

That's when I sensed the beginning of the decline of QA.

 

[Cryomancer]

On MMOs? with WoW. Now EVERY mmo is a everyone is a clone with carnavalesque armor and cooldown based combat who fells more like a boring work than a actual living breathing fictional world simulator like Ultima Online.

On SP RPG's? With consoles. A game made for PC ported to consoles like Morrowind is fine, but Oblivion is focused on console so is crap. The unique exception to console games is from software Demon/Dark Souls(that also is a exception on the rule that states that every jrpg is about androgynous children with fast swinging blade saving the world)

 

[DalekFlay]

There wouldn't have been such a decline if not for the casual consumer drones who make things like mini transactions in games lucrative for the publishers.

That's the dirty secret no one ever wants to hear. You must be reconditioned to say it's the companies who are evil, not the consumers who vote with their wallets for all this shit.

 

[Open Path]

What has happened in 2018?

Last couple of years are always more a WIP in mobygames database. However seems that indie production started to slow down in the last years -PC and mobile- and old consoles enter in a transition period towards "next generation".

 

[aris]

There is no decline. It's all a figment of your imagination.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

What has happened in 2018?

Last couple of years are always more a WIP in mobygames database. However seems that indie production started to slow down in the last years -PC and mobile- and old consoles enter in a transition period towards "next generation".

This make sense. Interestlingly we have another broad minimum about the end of millennium, in the so called rpg renaissance period.

 

[Melan]

The root of the decline, it's true origin, was circa 1995, when gaming industry began moving towards 3D polygonal graphics. Up until that point making videogames was craft work. The iterative nature of 3D enabled an unprecedented cutthroat approach to game development. Developers that had spend the last decade or more creating 2D games were asked to adapt or GTFO, a new generation was introduced to the Industry as we know it today. An evolutionary process was cut off, a new one began. Decline.

For sure, the mid-1990s was the first time I experienced it. There was a generation of games right before that had perfected the technologies and design approaches allowed by the hardware, and produced complex masterpieces like Ultima VII/SI, Wizardry VII, the LucasArts greats, a wealth of strategy games, and so on. There are highly visible examples, but there were also a lot of outstanding second-tier games you could play for many years afterwards (indeed, I only exhausted them around 2002-2003). These would run on a hardware generation that was by that time fairly standardised.

New technologies pioneered by DooM, Quake, the CD-Rom and increasing HW capabilities pushed the game industry towards tech demos where game design took a backseat, but also a mad stampede to copy a few hyper-successful formulas. FPS and RTS games like Quake and C&C were not the true representatives of decline, but the copycat activity and shitcanning of complex, thoughtful gaming did tremendous damage. It was believes that genres like RPGs and pixel-based adventure games were "out", too ponderous and complicated for a new generation of gamers. Look up that Roberta Williams quote. She got a lot of shit about it, but she was right. RPGs eventually recovered with Fallout being the first example of a new generation (but Baldur's Gate representing mass marketed schlock), but adventure games died when the multi-CD "interactive movie" sagas and the rush into 3D killed their original appeal and subverted their design to badly used tech. Strategy gaming got mired in a deluge of FPS twitch. Worse, everyone was now playing high-tier games, and there was suddenly a lot less place for mid-tier stuff. Creating games had become a lot more expensive, too.

There was a second good period of gaming around the millennium, where you find Thief, SS2 and Deus Ex, and a bunch of lesser hits. You also find the FPS classics which could combine broad appeal with great twitch design. However, this time, these formative games were abandoned in a gaming industry now entirely dominated by a low-risk, low-creativity production model trying to produce "megahits" for the widest possible audience. That move killed off the excellence that could have resulted in a new renaissance of gaming. That is decline as it is usually discussed in the Codex, and it has only gotten worse - way worse. The SJW plague was not even there yet when shitty "cinematic" plots, bad writing and lazy design somehow propped up by shiny FMV cutsenes had already done its work. Gaming as a creative medium is just as dead as movies, and until there is an enormous market crash that kills of a lot of "good market practice", it will not get better.

In the last decade, indie gaming has offered a partial way out of this model, and Kickstarter has helped with financing (somewhat). There are games worth buying again. However, this is only sufficient to raise money for 90s-style second-tier games (with slightly nicer graphics), and even there, it is all a big crapshoot. You can't really produce a new Ultima, because the corporate stability and the talent base are not there. The only one who made a great Wizardry was Cleve (but Cleve proved maniacs were right, and the wait was all worth it). Nobody has made a new Thief or System Shock - not even as a clone, and definitely not an innovative game that could carry forward the desing principles of these games to a new peak of excellence. This model can provide decent nostalgic knockoffs, and that's already pretty good. But it can't return a genuine Age of Incline.

And so, we wait.

 

[SlamDunk]

The original release of Outcast had a bug that uninstalled the game directly after installation.

I watched the shortcut appear and disappear on the Desktop... right before my eyes.

That's when I sensed the beginning of the decline of QA.

Half-Life had the famous bug when uninstalling the game the Sierra Studios uninstaller deleted the root folder as well. I experienced it. My games folder was gone. Just like that.

 

[DalekFlay]

Seeing people say decline started in the mid-90s makes me suspect it's all age-based. The idea of the decline cutoff being when Doom came is out is just... baffling. No wonder some people think it's all nostalgia goggles.

 

[aris]

Seeing people say decline started in the mid-90s makes me suspect it's all age-based. The idea of the decline cutoff being when Doom came is out is just... baffling. No wonder some people think it's all nostalgia goggles.

The fact that the answers are all over the place is very telling.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

That is decline as it is usually discussed in the Codex, and it has only gotten worse - way worse.

Nah, in the last 5 years things have been looking up.
We've been getting genuinely good and original titles even outside the indie scene.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Seeing people say decline started in the mid-90s makes me suspect it's all age-based. The idea of the decline cutoff being when Doom came is out is just... baffling. No wonder some people think it's all nostalgia goggles.

First-Person Shooters and the mid-90s craze for them were considered popamole decline by many who preferred RPGs, tactics games, strategy games, etc.

Of course, the FPS genre was later afflicted with its own decline, causing relatively-monocled FPS-fans to look back with nostalgia at the mid- to late-90s.

 

[DalekFlay]

First-Person Shooters and the mid-90s craze for them were considered popamole decline by many who preferred RPGs, tactics games, strategy games, etc.

Those people sound pretty stupid, since the existence of A does not prevent the existence of B, and those other genres were arguably entering their heyday at the time with games like the Infinity Engine titles and Westwood games.

 

[Melan]

That was not the situation, however. Companies (or rather, their paymasters) quickly stopped funding "A" style games to pour all their resources into trying to compete in the exploding "B" market. As a result, the supply of new A-style games dried up mostly overnight, and were replaced by a deluge of B-style games made by developers who had no expertise in making them. Quake, Doom, C&C and Myst were not the problem (well, Myst... maybe); their shitty knockoffs were. A few of these knockoffs were actually good in their own right, but most of them were rubbish. It was a major step down.

 

[JarlFrank]

Decline started creeping in as games slowly started becoming more mainstream, same with pretty much everything else in the age of consumerism.
I think that when the target audience and market is niche, it is more demanding and you tend to focus on quality over quantity and marketing. But when it grows larger and becomes more diverse, with a lot more products competing with yours for the audience's attention, accessibility and marketing become more important than the quality of the product itself.

Shareholders, of any kind, also accelerate the decline, regardless of niche.

Yep. Any time a company goes public instead of being privately owned by some nerd who likes games, it inevitably turns to shit.