"There's Too Many Games, They Say"
On the one hand, I kind of want to agree with this. On the other hand, I kind of feel that this is another case of Mr. Lowell being too jaded and cynical for even my tastes. I just can't quite decide whether I like and agree with this article or not. I mean, he's talking about stuff like a "benevolent supercomputer that strikes down terrible games, or a digital world where large companies can actually enforce quality control" as if those are things to be desired and... while I mostly don't want those things, I also kind of do. There is, for instance, a whole lot of stupid, pointless, broken (sometimes intentionally so) shit slipping through the cracks and making it onto Steam and such, after all, and there are a whole lot of people who suck that shit down without a thought so as to make it worthwhile to the, essentially, scammers who make that kind of shit in the first place.
But he also says this, "...if you want to do away with the world where everyone is entitled to make a game-and continues to prove that democracy sucks-then you would have to blow up the internet. You'd have to blow up the distribution model that allows anyone to publish a game and revert back to the pre-2007 world where publishers ruled the industry. And unfortunately, I don’t have that much dynamite. It is an inevitable reality of the twenty-first century and it's something you’re going to have to live with. Those are the rules, man up." He's essentially lamenting the fact that he can't reset the video game industry back to the days when giant publishers unquestionably ruled the roost. I'm kind of glad he doesn't have that much dynamite, honestly, because I don't think living in a world where anyone and everyone can potentially make a game is necessarily as bad as Mr. Lowell seems to think it is. I mean, sure, you're absolutely going to get a much higher chaff to wheat ratio, because Sturgeon's law applies to video games just as much as to anything else, but I also think that just out of the sheer number of games being made overall, you'll see an objectively higher number of good games, period, than you would were it just a few publishers making a few games a year, compared to now. Especially when the big publishers have tended to become so risk-averse that they put out the same old banal shit year after year.
But, as he says, the problem then becomes successfully separating the turds from the chocolate, which is more difficult when there's so many games, though I'd rather have that problem than the problem of being limited only to those games big AAA publishers deign to release. I kind of like to think that my own radar for sniffing out good games is pretty good, in any case. Yeah, I've admittedly bought a few absolute stinkers in my day, but those are fortunately few and far between.
But he also says this, "...if you want to do away with the world where everyone is entitled to make a game-and continues to prove that democracy sucks-then you would have to blow up the internet. You'd have to blow up the distribution model that allows anyone to publish a game and revert back to the pre-2007 world where publishers ruled the industry. And unfortunately, I don’t have that much dynamite. It is an inevitable reality of the twenty-first century and it's something you’re going to have to live with. Those are the rules, man up." He's essentially lamenting the fact that he can't reset the video game industry back to the days when giant publishers unquestionably ruled the roost. I'm kind of glad he doesn't have that much dynamite, honestly, because I don't think living in a world where anyone and everyone can potentially make a game is necessarily as bad as Mr. Lowell seems to think it is. I mean, sure, you're absolutely going to get a much higher chaff to wheat ratio, because Sturgeon's law applies to video games just as much as to anything else, but I also think that just out of the sheer number of games being made overall, you'll see an objectively higher number of good games, period, than you would were it just a few publishers making a few games a year, compared to now. Especially when the big publishers have tended to become so risk-averse that they put out the same old banal shit year after year.
But, as he says, the problem then becomes successfully separating the turds from the chocolate, which is more difficult when there's so many games, though I'd rather have that problem than the problem of being limited only to those games big AAA publishers deign to release. I kind of like to think that my own radar for sniffing out good games is pretty good, in any case. Yeah, I've admittedly bought a few absolute stinkers in my day, but those are fortunately few and far between.