I do not believe in purchasing new video games. I believe that the gaming industry engages in a whole slew of terrible business practices, and should not be rewarded with sales of poorly designed shipped games. This is a difficult task, as the primary consumer of games, young men, and children, tend to want to satisfy their immediate desires, rather than think of the long term impact of their decisions. As a group, gamers allow the industry to profit off of poor practices. If gamers went one year without purchasing a single new game, or any additional products or services, the gaming industry would change for the better. A lot of businesses would fail, and they need to fail. Businesses would rise, producing actually good products and services. Imagine purchasing a brand new car, and the car manufacturer forgot to install the tires. That’s basically what’s happening.
I’m writing this as my Steamdeck updates my Steam version of Halo 2. In fact, it’s the 20gb update that spurred me to write this blogpost. Halo 2 has been on the market for roughly 20 years, and it has been on Steam since 2019. I honestly do not understand what 20gb of updates are necessary for a game that has been out for 20 years, and a rerelease that has been out for almost 5 years at this point. And this is not the first time I’ve encountered massive updates for older games. Virtually any digital copy of any game I have owned, has undergone massive updates post release. The reason for this is simple: developers and publishers want to push games out the door as fast as they can, so they can get the bulk of their development teams working on the next project. Developers, and producers especially, rely on the fact that end consumers will purchase an unfinished game. Sometimes this is met with ire, but more often than not, gamers just accept that newly released games will be buggy, not function correctly, or may not even work for the first few days (or even weeks or months like in the case of Fallout 76) of release. Subsequent patches and updates will attempt to fix the problem. However, once the game is shipped and purchased, developers and producers have less incentive to fix broken games, and the support team for any given game will grow smaller as time moves along. They already have your money, and if you continue to give them money despite continuing the same behavior, why would they ever change?
Another issue is post purchase in game sales. Also known as Downloadable Content (DLC), or micro transactions, producers will attempt to increase marginal revenues and/or profits off of a title by including content that gamers can purchase after they’ve purchased the game. This is all well and good if a game had unexpectedly good sales, and the additional content was created in order to bridge the gap in time between titles. However, nowadays it is expected that virtually all titles will have DLC and micro transactions. I do not believe it is right for a producer to intentionally wall off content that has already been shipped with the product, but is locked out because you didn’t pay a certain amount. Again with the car analogy: Imagine you purchased a car, but if you wanted to drive on the highway, you had to spend an additional $10,0000 to unlock highway driving, which some car companies are already considering.
For these two main reasons, I do not purchase new video games. I refuse to participate, and reward terrible practices with profit. I have not purchased a new game since 2018, any game purchased after 2018 was a game that had been on the market years prior. However, I seemingly stand alone, as all of my friends continue to purchase video games, despite these problems that I have pointed out. The main issue is that most people are not interested in playing an older game. Novelty is a major factor with video games, and it has been this way ever since games like Pong came out in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Gamers seek to satisfy their appetites with new games, new features, and new stories. I can play Halo 2 over and over again because I don’t really grow tired of experiencing the same thing over and over again. Most people are not like that, and will eventually grow bored of a title, and move onto whatever the next release is.
It is because of this that the gaming industry will continue to grow worse. If the customer base is essentially captured, and customers behavior does not change, there is no reason for the business model to change. Games will continue to be released incomplete, with content locked behind a paywall. Businesses are run by people, and people respond to incentives. If you reward behaviors, those behaviors will continue. If you stop rewarding behaviors, and punish those behaviors, they will stop. The gamers have full control over the industry; If gamers stopped purchasing games tomorrow, the industry would change its tune by the end of the business day. However, gamers refuse to do this, because they are too weak to forgo their novelty. Despite having this discussion with literally hundreds of different people over the years, they all say the same thing: If I boycott the industry, I won’t get to play the new game that I want to play. Nothing good comes easy, and most people are too weak to do what is good for them.