Gaming
This post is somewhat inspired by conversations last night and by Catherine Goode linking to this.
When I was a kid I had an Amiga. I played games on it.
Games cost a couple of quid, sometimes they'd cost as much as a fiver. Occasionally I saw one go up for a tenner, but it was barely a week or two before the price dropped below this outrageous threshold.
Once I bought a game, I owned it and could do whatever I liked with it. If I didn't like a game, or if I finished it, I would swap it with one of my friends for something they had. I could even copy-paste the entire game off the disks if it suited me, though I never felt the need to do that.
New games were exciting, I'd eagerly await PC magazines which would have the latest demos and talk of other things that were coming out. Over the course of the coming years I'd see all sorts of exciting things happen, people were coming out with new ideas all of the time, for every sequel there was a game that was trying to define a new genre. Some of them failed badly, but some worked better, the FPS was invented, the RTS too (Okay, I was a little late here, I played Hexen and Warcraft rather than Wolfenstein and Dune)
Then some decades happened.
Games cost £40 new, the technology to run them is more than ten times as expensive as it used to be. Many of them will have some part of the game held back unless you pay more for some DLC. Some will rely on a subscription model to get you to pay for it more than once.
Once you buy a game, the company owns it. You can't swap it with a friend and you're definately not making a quick copy for multiplayer (Presumably because games that allowed multiplayer spawns didn't sell very well. Starcraft for example.). You need to authenticate who you are to play them, having a internet connection that never fails is a must (but also an impossibility) and in some cases your (well the companies, you never own it) game stops working for no good reason, such as having too many hard disk fails and reinstalls.
New games seem unexciting and bland. Almost everything announced is a sequel, which isn't a problem in its own right, but so many are unimaginative sequels. We don't see truely new genres very much anymore, but we see the death of old ones. There are more games but less choice.
What the hell happened?
I had more to write, about exceptions to these problems, hope for the future, things that might work out alright in the end. Also a big rant about companies engaging in DRM that increases piracy, someone should be hanged for that. I'm going to leave it be for now, I'm curious as to what you guys think and what you'll pick out as important.
When I was a kid I had an Amiga. I played games on it.
Games cost a couple of quid, sometimes they'd cost as much as a fiver. Occasionally I saw one go up for a tenner, but it was barely a week or two before the price dropped below this outrageous threshold.
Once I bought a game, I owned it and could do whatever I liked with it. If I didn't like a game, or if I finished it, I would swap it with one of my friends for something they had. I could even copy-paste the entire game off the disks if it suited me, though I never felt the need to do that.
New games were exciting, I'd eagerly await PC magazines which would have the latest demos and talk of other things that were coming out. Over the course of the coming years I'd see all sorts of exciting things happen, people were coming out with new ideas all of the time, for every sequel there was a game that was trying to define a new genre. Some of them failed badly, but some worked better, the FPS was invented, the RTS too (Okay, I was a little late here, I played Hexen and Warcraft rather than Wolfenstein and Dune)
Then some decades happened.
Games cost £40 new, the technology to run them is more than ten times as expensive as it used to be. Many of them will have some part of the game held back unless you pay more for some DLC. Some will rely on a subscription model to get you to pay for it more than once.
Once you buy a game, the company owns it. You can't swap it with a friend and you're definately not making a quick copy for multiplayer (Presumably because games that allowed multiplayer spawns didn't sell very well. Starcraft for example.). You need to authenticate who you are to play them, having a internet connection that never fails is a must (but also an impossibility) and in some cases your (well the companies, you never own it) game stops working for no good reason, such as having too many hard disk fails and reinstalls.
New games seem unexciting and bland. Almost everything announced is a sequel, which isn't a problem in its own right, but so many are unimaginative sequels. We don't see truely new genres very much anymore, but we see the death of old ones. There are more games but less choice.
What the hell happened?
I had more to write, about exceptions to these problems, hope for the future, things that might work out alright in the end. Also a big rant about companies engaging in DRM that increases piracy, someone should be hanged for that. I'm going to leave it be for now, I'm curious as to what you guys think and what you'll pick out as important.