Flash forward 10 years. You’re back from a hard day’s work, and you settle into your most comfortable armchair for a couple of hours of hardcore gaming. You pick up your Xbox 1080 controller and don your headset. Minutes later you’re camping the enemy spawn with a noob-tube in Call of Duty: North Korea. As you clip through a wall and fall beneath the map for the seventh time, right before getting dropped from the game, you get a niggling in the back of your mind that once upon a time games weren’t as buggy as this.

This train of thought is abandoned however, as you notice the latest copy of a popular gaming magazine has been delivered. You flip to the feature on Battlefield 3742 with sweaty palms – if it’s even half as good as Battlefield: Apocalypse, you’re in for a treat. It’s been a full five months since the last Battlefield iteration, and the hype machine has really had time to cycle into overdrive.

You rush to show your wife, but she’s still engrossed in The Sims: Moon Station and doesn’t pay you much attention. You call up your friend to discuss it with him, and get into a good-natured argument about which is the better video game producer, EA or Activision. 

Finally you go to sleep, and dream of the indie developers, original IPs, creativity and innovation of the past. You wake up drenched in sweat, unable to remember anything. You leave for work feeling uneasy, like something terrible has happened and you’re responsible.

This is the future of video games – our future – and when it happens it’s going to be our own damn fault. 

This is the face of a man who’s spent more time underneath the map than on it.

The development of games is moving faster and faster towards the exploitation of IPs, with a steady decline in quality that isn’t mirrored by a decline in sales. Bobby Kotick, Activision CEO, has said this himself, and regardless of whether you think he is the essence of all things evil, the man is damn good at what he’s paid to do – making heaps of money. 

Games are starting to get a kind of mass-produced, generic feel to them. IPs such as Call of Duty are being produced annually, rushed to release to be out in time for the Christmas season. These games are no longer being purchased on their own merits, but simply due to the name attached to them. The video game industry has grown enormously in the last 10 years, and business-savvy sharks have smelled the blood in the water – there’s some serious money to be made here. With the growth of powerhouse publishers such as Activision, the focus has been switched from pleasing the consumer to making the biggest profit. 

Eventually these massive publishing houses are all going to amalgamate and swallow the little guys, and just two or three major corporations will control 90% of video game production. When Activision and Blizzard combined, the writing was officially on the wall. 

Perhaps the most tragic victims of all this are the developers themselves. Games developers do what they do because they love video games. Go and watch the pre-release interviews with the developers of Call of Duty: Black Ops, you’ll see people full of passion for what they do; people who so desperately want to make an amazing game. I think, given more time, Black Ops could have been really, really good. Instead, it comes out full of bugs and feeling unfinished, and Treyarch are the ones who get burnt at the stake. Meanwhile, the greedy, wild-eyed publishers with a whip in one hand and a fistful of cash in the other are the ones who forced an early release, so every teenager across the globe could have it sitting under their tree come Christmas Eve. I think for a passionate developer that must be really heart-breaking.

As consumers, we need to vote with our wallets. The laughable “boycott” of Modern Warfare 2 really showed publishers that they can pretty much do what they want – the consumer’s opinion is often rendered irrelevant. 

Please don’t hate me for my mad Powerpoint skills. I didn’t ask for these powers.

I am by no means saying sequels are bad, they are very often fantastic. Developers such as Blizzard, who refuse to release a game unless they deem it perfect, are the shining example of a company that nurtures and protects the credibility of their IPs. As consumers, we need to make smarter choices when it comes to purchasing games. We need to judge games based on their individual merits, and not the brand they’re attached to.

Publishers such as Activision are capable of facilitating the making of great games – we simply need to make the statement that we will not settle for mediocre.

Do you buy games just because of the name? Tell the truth in the forums – we won’t judge you.