It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.
Ill preface by saying I didnt read the article. But I also think that the state of gaming today is much worse than it was in the early 2000s for millennials.
When I was growing up, games had to come out complete so they were generally much more polished. However, when the Xbox360 came out, console makers gave the ability to devs to release patched versions via updates. Initially it was a great idea - devs could fix bugs they might have missed while testing. But then this quickly spiralled into studios forcing devs to release 1/2 baked games in a horribly broken state.
I also think how much you generally have to pay for games has gone way up with respect to the cost of living. Video gaming is much more of a luxury now, than a simple past time. Plus there are so many F2P mobile games out there, that there is even less of an incentive to get into a console / PC gaming.
I gotta argue against the games costing more compared to cola. A new Nintendo game in 1988 was $40 to $50. At that time hamburger was 99 cents, a value meal from a fast food place was $4, a house was $80,000, a new car was $10k to $18k, and you were pretty much a Middle class family if you made $45k\year. Some original NES games even hit $60 a piece.
So videogames are one of the few things that haven’t kept with inflation. In no small part due to more people purchasing games and less physical overhead, but that doesn’t take away from my stance. 40 years later and a game price has gone up by like $20.
And the other side of the coin, with the advent of DLC, being able to take a complete game and carve pieces off of it to sell separately for more profit.
For a long while, DLC has been just an excuse to foist unnecessary content on the consumer for sales. There are a few notable exceptions in this like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, earlier Borderlands, and, surprisingly, the recent Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon.
For the most part, though, I have not bought DLC without thoroughly vetting it. I’m not talking about cosmetics. I’m talking about actual story/content additions being overpriced fetch quests which are, more often than not, just vehicles for more useless cosmetics.
As an example, Fallout 4 DLC (much like the basegame itself) was a mistake seated in brand loyalty/a hope of redeeming the title. The DLC featured cosmetic additions for their Sims style settlement minigame, a couple cutesy fetch quests for armor, and two unfinished story DLCs that played like the elevator pitch of what would have eventually been fleshed out of this we’re an earlier entry in the series.
With most story DLC, at best, you get a lackluster and entirely forgettable addition to the basegame. At worst, you get horse armor disguised as a new campaign or an unforgivably half assed hodge podge of storylines that cheapen the rest of your experience with the game.
Gaming was always expensive. Super Mario 3 was 50 dollars in 1990. That’s 120 dollars in today’s money.
Every era of video games was affected by its business model. Games used to be far more obtuse to sell guides and hint hotlines, and they used to be hard to the point that they were less fun so that it took longer to finish them. In the early 2000s, when the industry was largely between alternate revenue streams, you tended to get a lot of padding so that they could put a larger number of levels as a bullet point on the back of the box, so the first few levels would be great, but somewhere in the middle, they’d be pretty phoned in.
Release a non finished game, and finish it only if it’s a success ™