This is what’s actually literally killing gaming

Wait. I’m’ma let you finish, but before you rush to tell me how misleading, hyperbolic, and downright trollish the headline is, hear me out.

Back in 2013 a number of online dictionaries including Oxford, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster made the informal use of the word “literally” official.

Literally may be used “for emphasis”, the dictionaries now say.

In other words, we can literally use literally to indicate that something is not — in fact — literal.

This leaves us with precious few options for a word that unambiguously means “take the literal meaning”, unless we break out such clunkers as connotation.

“He was ‘connotatively’ going to kill me” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

Which brings me to “actually”.

I was going to say that I’m just preempting the inevitable change to the definition of the word to include its use as short-hand for “not actually, but in my differing opinion”.

Sadly, it would seem I’ve already been beaten there.

Quoth Oxford Dictionaries online:

Used when expressing a contradictory or unexpected opinion or correcting someone.

Which now that I think about it, actually makes sense. Actually, using actually in this way is nothing new, just like literally’s alternative meaning isn’t actually new either.

Now that we’ve literally got that out of the way, let’s actually start the list, shall we?

Pre-order hell

Watch Dogs pre-order matrix on Wikipedia prior to launch

If your game’s Wikipedia page has a table like this in it before launch, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong

There once was a time, not that long ago, when you only had to decide between getting the normal or collector’s edition of a game.

Getting a collector’s edition also didn’t mean you get to unlock additional game content. You’d get a map, a statuette, a Steelbook case, a T-shirt, a poster, and/or other assorted swag.

The game was the game, and when you bought it you got the whole thing.

This doesn’t mean that all day–1 downloadable content and pre-order incentives are a bad thing, but the nonsense that is being peddled as “greater customer choice” nowadays is just madness.

We have got to a stage where it has become necessary to build spreadsheets to figure out which version of a game to buy. Where publishers try to dangle high-budget content in front of us like some sort of pre-order carrot.

Then on the other end of the spectrum there are the pre-order pants.

Quite the language metaphor for the current state of video game pre-orders. Because it is exactly that. Pants.

Death by a thousand microtransactions

Pay Once and Play iTunes app store collection banner

Pay Once and Play banner on iTunes

When Bethesda launched horse armour DLC for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion at the low, low price of $2.50 in April 2006, we chuckled and poked a bit of fun at what seemed like a misstep that the industry would learn from.

We’re not laughing anymore.

Although not all microtransactions are bad, and not all games that include wait times for activity progress are bad, there are a few “free-to-play” / “freemium” / “free-to-start” games out there that take taking the piss to the next level.

Some have even forged an unholy union with the worst aspects of microtransactions and waiting games, resulting in monstrosities that would happily devour anything between $250 and $12,500 from your wallet, or make you wait years to unlock all the content or features available.

You know it’s gone too far when an app store operator like Apple decides to launch a “Pay Once and Play” sub-category.

My recommendation? When you feel like getting feedback from a game for watching a progress bar fill up, “play” ProgressQuest and Godville.

Milking a franchise until only pus comes out

Guitar Hero

A toast for the fallen! To Guitar Hero! To Rockband! May your legacy long be remembered.

They stand as a dire warning against releasing sequels for the sake of it, yet publishers such as Activision (which handled Guitar Hero back in the day), EA (Rockband), and Ubisoft continue to push annual releases.

Franchises such as Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, and a variety of sports games are all on annual release cycles, with the latest batch leaving gamers complaining about bugs and sometimes a lack of any improvements warranting a sequel.

How long will consumers continue to stomach the declining relative quality of annualised game franchises? Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe this time it’ll be forever. Probably not, though.

Flooding the market with rubbish

Though Steam is often blamed for the current deluge of shockingly poor games that people are actually charging money for, Valve is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis.

The terrible games that sometimes make their way onto Steam’s Early Access system are not the only problem, however.

This point can be used as a summary for everything discussed above:

Asking gamers to make complex purchasing decisions before the game is even out.
Overpriced DLC and asking money for content that should have been in the game in the first place.
Exploitative microtransactions.
Forced annual releases.
Unplayable tripe on Early Access.

This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but hopefully I’ve covered the most important ones.

Things that aren’t killing gaming

We can’t end off an article like this without being a little (more) controversial, and frankly I don’t want to just list negative things.

How about a list of things that aren’t actually literally killing gaming?

The industry

Though my little tirade above might give the impression that I believe the industry is killing gaming, it’s actually somewhat more complex than that.

There are plenty of studios and quite a few publishers out there doing really interesting things on budgets that don’t exceed a small country’s GDP.

More than that, they actually seem to treat their customers with respect.

Here’s hoping we gamerkin collectively throw our money behind them in 2015, rather than falling for the tricks of other parts of the industry.

Gamers

The One True Gamer

There have been some knee-jerk reactions, and generalisations thrown around in the past year which — while perhaps being well-meaning — were unhelpful.

The “gamer” sub-culture and identity is not dead, though it may be overdue for a name change.

Gamers are also not killing gaming.

Even the most hateful, toxic people that count themselves among our number aren’t killing our hobby. What they are doing is far more terrible, but that’s the subject of a far more serious article, I fear.