Thinking about quitting gaming

[TinCow]

My thoughts on your situation are that you should quit playing games. Clearly you are not enjoying them, so they're just a waste of money. It seems like a pretty simple decision to me. This is not a life-altering decision, it's just a choice not to buy games because you don't like them. It's no different than not buying a book you're not interested in or not watching a television program that you find boring. This is not divorce we're talking about, nor it is something traumatically difficult like breaking a substance addiction.

My personal opinion is that we're at a transition phase for gaming. Over the past 10 years, gaming has started going from a children's pastime to an adult pastime. You only need to look at the curve on the average age of gamers to see that. The gaming industry has simply exploded with the advent of console gaming for adults. There is far, far more money in it now than there ever has been since the genre was created. Thus, you have a large number of corporations that are jockeying for position in a very lucrative market that is likely to equal, if not surpass, the television and film industries for profit and market share.

When these kinds of industry booms occur, the very nature of the product tends to shift dramatically. No one really knows where the industry will end up, so they start firing out products like random, hoping to find the next big hit before their competitors do. When a success is found, the companies dogpile on it to make as much money as possible until the 'fad' wears off. When it does, they move on to whatever else has been found to be profitable since then. This results in many low-quality games, designed to focus on a few 'new' aspects in an attempt to test the marketability of the concept, followed by boatloads of cookie-cutter games that mimic the successes from the first part.

This is not a permanent situation. Eventually the gamer base will level off, the competitors will get used to their market, and the consumers themselves will become more discerning. This is especially true of the console market, which is increasingly turning into a PC market. Console players want to be able to download mods, install tons of patches, and generally make their games more than they are from just a plain vanilla install. For this reason alone, consoles that allow this will be more successful in the future and eventually consoles will become nothing more than pre-assembled gaming PCs. Stick a wireless keyboard and mouse on your coffee table, and no one will know the difference.

With this increase in consumer demand for more flexibility from the console market will come a greater demand for quality PC gaming. Smaller developers with 'niche' ideas will become more profitable and innovation, rather than cloning, will be rewarded by the market. This exact trend can be seen in the history of television and film entertainment. Both industries were originally small markets where hordes of independent groups made whatever programming they felt like making. There was a great deal of development and experimentation that really created the basis of the industry that we have today. These original pioneers showed the public what these new forms of entertainment had to offer and go the consumers interested in them. As they public got more interested, they started spending more money, resulting in higher profits. Then the less successful companies began getting bought out by more successful ones, and eventually you had a handful of major network broadcasters and movie studios who owned everything and controlled everything. With this concentration of control in a small number of hands, innovation took a back seat, as the producers concentrated on formulas they knew would sell.

Jump ahead to modern times, and you see all of that dissolving. Consumers became tired of the limited, staid choices offered by the networks and movie studios and began looking elsewhere. Today there are a vast number of television stations that cater to smaller segments of the market. The total amount of specialty programming has increased and people are now often able to get exactly the kind of shows they want to watch, whenever they want to watch them.

Consumers also started becoming tired of the formulaic Hollywood blockbuster. Box office sales began declining dramatically and many major studios are having financial problems. At the same time, independent movies are doing huge business, far outperforming their mega-budget brethren. They may not make as much money per movie, but due to their lower cost, they are far more likely to return a profit. This has encouraged many actors and directors to split from the major studios and do new and innovative work. The studios themselves have recognized this and now each major producer has their own 'independent film branch' which is responsible for scouting out new talent and distributing their works for a cut of the profits.

The gaming industry is going through this exact same transition. It's natural and it's impossible for any successful industry to avoid. Eventually, gaming will complete its move from a niche market to a mainstream market, and the quality and diversity will quickly start to re-emerge. I suspect it will happen far faster than it did for television and film as well. Both of those markets had technical and market constraints that made it exceedingly difficult for small companies to survive. For television, cable eliminated the major entry hurdle (broadcast bandwidth) and for film, digital cameras and computers eliminated the major entry hurdle (equipment and studio expenses). That is not an issue for the gaming industry, as there are few, if any barriers to entry. The internet itself guarantees access to all, no matter how low the budget. Once the console gain internet access comparable to PCs, the barrier is down and the flood of independent gaming will revive. As we've seen with the 360 and PS3, that time is not far off.

If you want to bow out until then, that is your decision to make. Personally, even with the lack of variety in gaming, I am still having a lot of fun. Yes, I may have to buy twice the number of games to get the same number of entertainment hours, but it's still worth the money in my book. I look forward to the days when 'independent' gaming resumes its former glory, like it has in television and film, but until then I will keep playing and buying as long as I have fun doing so.