I've asked this question on c/gaming, but I'd love to see what KotakuinAction2's members think of this topic:
In an age where every game genre from shooters, strategy, fighting, and racing games are seeing a decreased emphasis on single-player content and in some cases, obstructing the single-player experience through mechanics like forced Internet connections to save progress, I want to ask this community:
Do you think the increased push behind esports and dedication of more resources to it has ruined gaming?
I've noticed that developers have been increasingly neglecting the offline experience and sometimes making some features exclusive to the online modes.
Take how Rockstar stopped adding content to the single-player mode of GTA V, Blizzard and Respawn omitted single-player modes from extremely popular games like Overwatch and Apex Legends, and how racing games like GT7 and the upcoming Forza 2023 are forcing everyone to play online to "prevent cheating", even those that would never touch multiplayer.
Do you think that this has done more damage to gaming in the long run? Do you see things ever trending back toward a more balanced approach where both single player and multiplayer gamers are equally accommodated?
How do you think developers can know that they're alienating a big part of their player base by focusing so extensively if that's how you feel?
Would love to see your thoughts on this topic.
There's a time I would have scrambled to say yes. Instead I think of esports now as what parents do to kids sports--suck all the fun and sportsmanship out of it for the sake of winning in the most crude ways possible.
Instead, I actually blame streamers and Youtubers, and I think that was always to blame. They are the new marketing, the "gamer journalism" to the young generation now. A lot of microtransactions are sold by these people. Do you think the kid watching when they run around and shit on the guy endlessly for not having some $40 fucking cosmetic items is going to do anything different than beg for money to buy it? Tons of tons of the videos I've seen is nothing more than a show off my purchase fest. Hell, I remember being shown some sort of custom room full of people in Fortnite literally doing nothing than walking around flexing cosmetics.
Once the companies realized just how much people will spend on extremely low effort stuff like player models, weapon skins, in-game currency of course that's where the effort went. Why is single player online only? Well, we can't have you cheating to steal our microtransaction dollars. Even if you're like me and couldn't give less of a shit about cosmetic items, look at Ubisoft and their tactic of adding grindiness to a game or skip it with some of your $.
I do think there's a lot of single player stuff though. You just have to look away from AAA studios. I just bought up a bunch of indie FPS games yesterday, I think I'm going to do little mini-reviews of them and "what are you playing" posts every couple weeks while I play them just to have some gaming chat on here.
Also the same reason support for user-made maps and mods have died off.
Fuck e-sports. League of Legends used to have some elements of strategy, but it was discarded in favor of twitch-focused flashy characters to make watching it more entertaining.
and now the entire esports thing is collapsing because VC money ran out
Unless you can fill a legit stadium I don't see how it pays for itself. The going minimum rate to I think attend such an event is like $50 or $75. Sports have ticket sales, and they get advertising bucks. So I don't know if you can power the business on advertising alone.
I don't think we can blanket say esports is the reason modern gaming but it's existence as led to extremely bad game development and management.
There was a rush for so many studios to focus on esports because of the money LoL and Dota were making but it's extremely rare that they are successful and get a dedicated viewership, I think R6 and Rocket league are two that I can think of.
Most are just incompatible for it, I remember when Battlefield 4 came out there was a push for it to be an esport but it was 64 player matches, how the fuck do you keep track of everything happening so that died off quickly. Some studios pushed so hard for it that they failed to make the game fun so people just stopped playing.
Tldr; Esports didn't ruin gaming, it was studios over focusing on this and other money grabs like loot boxes and leftist corporate money that did that.
It's certainly strengthened the impetus for the overarching cancer which is games as services and turning gamers into paypig whales to be eternally milked and bilked. If as a dev you sell players on the idea that your game is something to be played competitively, for big bucks worldwide, possibly even as a route to e-fame, then the game needs a perpetual referee. The game implicitly becomes accepted as a service. Players feel they need to pay to keep the dev around forever, in order to keep the balance fair, and they have to buy the season pass to stay updated on all the new characters, etc. the game can't ever be allowed to stay static or shrink in its appeal because then it's failed as a competitive exercise.
In the past you had smaller, organic competitive communities for multiplayer games, with P2P connections and community servers. There was no need for centralised servers and no need for centralised rules enforcement because the community would pick and play whatever version of the game they liked. Don't like some silly modded lowgrav server? Don't go there. Think a guy's cheating? Voteban - okay that's not perfect but if someone does get away with cheating in that context, at least there's not a shitload of money involved, which also means the incentive to cheat isn't tied to real world success. The more corporate money you introduce, the more the scale expands and the more incentive there is to take the controls away from the community and put them in the hands of some overlord. And eventually that removal of control extends down to the level of what you're allowed to say and do in-game, or even outside the game, because X company doesn't want to be associated with muhsogginy/whatever. At that point, you're a short hop from the community's transformation into virtue signalling faggots whom you wouldn't want to play a game with anyway. Pretty much where I'm at with SF6 - not buying that shit.
Maybe I'm the wrong person to ask, because I'll always prefer single player games for other reasons. Generally I think there's too much focus on meta-gaming and solving things as a community. It can be an interesting thing to do, but there's a tendency towards groupthink. If a story or piece of entertainment has something to offer me as a solo experience, or among a small number of likeminded individuals, then that's that - I don't want or need to hear some internet autismo sperging over damage values and 'optimal' techniques that he's regurgitating from his favourite YT speedrunner tranny, to have a good time. Quite the opposite.
I hate this trend. I was just talking about this a few days ago with one of the few gaming buddies I still have. Stuff I grew up on was so simplistic, Dooms and Quakes, early Halos and CoDs. There weren't stats, if there were loadouts it was fairly simplistic. There wasn't a lot to balance because there just wasn't a lot of variables. Now everything is infested with places you can min/max and if you aren't either testing it yourself for hours on end or cheating off someone else who does online, you are at a disadvantage.
The gameplay was simple too, that's actually what got me started on the topic. I was just trying to tell him that my old brain is just not interested in trying to learn all these advanced movement mechanics at the high speed and precision the people that grew up on that stuff do. It's funny too, because I've dragged some of these younger gamers into my type games and they are just as fish out of water without their sliding, double jumping, structure building, etc. as I am in their stuff.
Yeah, there's something about enjoying games 'as a community' that gives me the heebie-jeebies. It used to be that people would experience a game on their own, they'd seek out others who enjoyed it in the same way, and a community would form organically. This whole thing of outsourcing your own understanding of the game by immediately seeking out the community's interpretation of the mechanics (and even the story, through youtuber analysis videos) just feels off to me. It's more like an ARG and a psychological trick than real enjoyment. People got rabidly excited for Valve's ARG in the buildup to Portal 2, they went crazy for PT... but 'solving things as a community' isn't gaming, it's something else, and becomes indistinguishable from marketing very quickly.
I don't even dislike that modern games can require a lot of deep analysis. I'm usually pretty good at getting a feel for high level mechanics on my own, even nowadays. I just don't ever really trust this modern ecosystem where everyone looks to everyone else in order to figure out how to play. It should never be required in a single player game. Sekiro was a great example IMO - most of the community of Fromsoft memers, stream watchers and metagamers did not know how to play, and in the process of not knowing how to play, they gave eachother atrocious ideas on to how to play. Anyone who shut off the net, took the game on its own terms and learnt how to play properly was far better off.
I don't think it's deep analysis that bothers me at all. I mean I'm sure a ton of people saw my rant about not needing games to be hard in another post, so yeah I don't really like what most people call hard games. Really, I just prefer difficulty to be moved to strategy or puzzles and less on reflexes and timing. So I should like deep games.
What bugs me is more of a phenomenon since a lot of games went from LAN and small server play to widely online. If there's cheese tactics among friends in a small group, you can agree to cut it out, work together to figure it out, etc. Online, you damn well better enjoy getting kicked in the crotch by the meta of the month until you follow the meta or it gets patched out.
Another causality of the lack of dedicated servers, It would be the solution to the problem. And even where you have queue pools for quickplay and stuff, all you need is to make it so people can make their own queues etc.
When your ideas are applied to racing games (my favorite genre), it sounds like they're specifically being turned into always-online live services because an entire generation of consoomers has successfully been fooled into thinking that spending their entire lives playing these games every hour of the day online (we tend to call this "no-lifing" a game BTW) will be their tickets to real-world professional racing stardom a la Jann Mardenborough or Lucas Ordonez.
So, because so many people focus so much on the online portion of these games and demand more regulation and attention to them from the developers, this is the part of the game developers commit most to.
Anyone who just wants to play the game for fun gets neglected by the developers because they're too busy basing their game around being the subject of the next feel-good media story.
It sounds like you're saying that the pursuit for unrealistic fame and fortune is what ruined games rather than esports specifically.
What do you think some solutions to this could be in the long term?
Hell they made a movie out of one of those stories
Not exactly, as I say I think the overarching cancer is always-online stuff, microtransactions, etc. Devs were already pushing this without esports, which I'd define as corporate cash-driven competitive gaming, and not every game is compatible with that. Esports gives devs another route towards normalising it, in player expectations, but like others have said, esports didn't create this landscape.
I don't know anything about racing esports, but I've heard a little about the famous names playing iRacing and such. I'd be interested to hear how that scene has played out. But Forza for example is already kind of cancerous in terms of DLC and devs punishing players for custom decals, etc. yet afaik that isn't being driven by competitive gaming, am I right?
With games that have gone the esports route, it's like you say. Anyone playing for fun has to play second fiddle to mercenaries and metagamers in terms of dev priorities, plus they have to put up with a sterile, stiff sense of community and lots of cynical cashgrabs. There isn't any way back from that IMO, until the money dries up.
Apparently, car racing esports are not nearly as popular as sponsors and developers make them out to be.
Your average sanctioned iRacing event can barely get 5,000 views on YouTube, the official esports teams have very small social media presences and only like and retweet each others tweets; and at official Gran Turismo and F1 esports events, the crowd sizes tend to be rather underwhelming.
When you do see an audience, that's because it's mostly made up of sponsors, VIP members, and family members. There is almost no organic, grassroots fanbase around racing esports.
Gran Turismo Sport was curated around esports to the extent of being online only, and only a fraction of that game's players play the esports modes it was designed around.
Furthermore, that game has official FIA (the promoter for WRC, F1, and other big name real world racing leagues) championships, and the participants don't even get paid. They all have to pay for their own travel and accommodation, and in especially egregious cases, have had to give controllers and other prizes earned in the events back to the organizers.
All those hours spent behind the wheel of a pretend racecar, sacrificing one's life to become a top pro racing game player; are essentially for nothing other than maybe bragging rights. The same is almost certainly true of GT's contemporaries like iRacing as well.
Never been serious enough to get into iRacing but I've done some other sim racing games like Assetto Competizione and paid a bit of attention to iRacing. My opinion they thought through a lot of the issues other games have and tried to fix. DLC aside perhaps, it is NOT a cheap game to play.
It's a monthly sub that I think runs about $15 a month and doesn't include a ton of cars and tracks. Then the cars and tracks are pretty pricey. None of it comes off as predatory or rewarding no-lifes in that respect though. No lootboxes, no battle pass where you play 100 hours in a week and you unlock exclusive cars. You want something, you exchange money for it.
It's still really serious and a time and money sink, and that's why I've never taken the plunge.
I want to encourage everyone on this forum to check out the YouTube channel Austin Ogonoski.
He's done an excellent job of breaking down what really happens behind the scenes of racing game culture and how it has sometimes even affected real world racing. He has also discussed how esports participants in this genre are essentially tricked into thinking they'll be big stars by dedicating their whole life to a game only to be taken advantage of by greedy promoters.
He's currently a game tester, but also an oval race car driver at the grassroots level and a former aide in the mental health field, so he knows exactly what he's talking about having come from all these scenes and understood their respective ins and outs.
He's also discussed how the esports to real life racing stars are grossly misrepresented in the media. Essentially, such drivers like the GT Academy graduates and NASCAR racers like Josh Berry or Willliam Byron already had a good amount of real world race experience; therefore, their performances in video games were simply another way the people around them helped market them to teams and sponsors better.
I think his channel is well worth your time. A good starting point would be his videos on Jason Jacoby, essentially the Chris-Chan of racing games.
Looked for a minute before I got distracted by a more fun Monster Truck Madness 2 video of his. So it sounds like some crazy guy got in his head that he was going to make it to the real world racing scene and then ended up stalking Austin for some reason. Weird. That guy is insane. Racing has always been a money over merit game. The low levels just do not justify themselves. It's pay to play. I guess the video game players haven't learned that yet.
Esports has ruined multiplayer gaming. Dota used to be much more fun before Valve started balancing everything towards pro tournament play. It's not that the game was necessarily out of balance before, it's that big teamfights involving all 10 players are more "fun" to watch, so the game is tweaked to require teamfights and punish independent plays. The impact of an individual player is decreased.
This results in a really frustrating experience when you play with people online and one online stranger messing up one little thing ruins the teamfight and the game. It also makes everything boring and samey because strats like split push don't really work anymore unless the person executing the strat is smurfing and way better than everyone else in the match.
Yeah, I agree that it's a problem for some games, but I think there are bigger problems.
The always-online aspect is either tied to microtransactions or used as DRM to prevent piracy. I don't think it has anything to do with e-sports, as many of the games that require an internet connection are not even focused on competition.
I think the main reason they prioritize multiplayer is that people are more likely to spend money on useless junk like cosmetics. They tried that shit in singleplayer a few times and I'm sure it doesn't make as much because people don't get to show off their parents' credit cards.
I gave up on playing competitive games. I don't even like PvP unless the game's mechanics make the advantages from cheats like wall hacks and aim bots insignificant. Making them online for this reason is an excuse, since cheaters can cheat anyway.
You also should recognize that the only games that get funded by large publishers are ones that use proven formulas because publishers are so risk-averse. That is why there are so many Call of Duties, FIFAs, and Forzas. Publishers are also the reason entire game modes, maps, and assets are ripped from the game and placed in microtransaction stores and day-one paid DLC before release.
Furthermore, the publishers pay developers based on review scores from outlets like IGN and Kotaku, who are not only corrupt and unethical, but also radical leftist ideologues and cultists. In effect, they are ensuring the developers include overt wokeness in their games. They also have to make the games easy, since the journalists really do suck at playing games. That's why every hidden path has a yellow strip of paint along the edge, every enemy is visible through walls, and every quest has a marker showing you exactly where to go.
But would-be pirates almost always find a way to crack the DRM.
Even Ubisoft admitted that nothing they do will ever stop piracy. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ubisoft-drm-can-t-stop-piracy/1100-6420602/
So why do developers keep adding it? All it does is complicate the experience for honest players.
Doesn't DRM implementation just take resources away from other critical areas of the game?
The old thought process was if a game's sales could be saved in something like the first week or month it was worth it. Don't they usually just buy DRM spyware like Denuvo anyway? At least a lot do. So I say just drop it all a few months in and put the game up DRM free. Some do, there's a handful of things I've bought on Gog that they wait some time after the Steam release.
Right - DRM delays piracy, it doesn't prevent it. There are a small fraction of would-be pirates they can convert to customers because of this delay. Some people just can't wait. I don't think it's so significant that it makes it worth the cost of developing it, though.
It's likely just misguided greed. It is like hiring security guards at a store that are instructed to pat down and search everyone on their way out. Sure, you may prevent some thieves, but treating paying customers like thieves is a good way to make sure they never come back.
Nearly every single game I've pirated I either had no plans to ever buy, or it was unavailable to buy, or it was so good that I bought it anyway.
The pirated versions are frequently better, have more features, and come with all the bullshit paid DLC and cosmetic packs. They are often superior in every single way, and for free. That said, the only anti-piracy strategy that actually works is to compete with it. It has to be more convenient, have more features, frequent updates, free content packs, etc.
I think e-sports is more of a symptom of the decline in game innovation than a cause. Multiplayer game design has at its core the appeal to game designers/publishers of turning players' efforts into content, for free, and E-sports is the pinnacle of that.
Simulated opponents are technically difficult to make fun and challenging and even the best efforts struggle to be realistically challenging on an even footing, they need clever and interesting asymmetrical design to accommodate their flaws in interesting ways. Otherwise you just end up making things bullet sponges to provide some semblance of difficulty. But a multiplayer game can be perfectly symmetrical and inherently balanced because both the player and the opponent theoretically have the same limitations, it's much easier to design.
Another facet of the online push is to give publishers more control over how you use their software, if they add grind to a single player game to sell microtransations to skip it people can just mod it out or use cheat engine. But if it's online only with cheat protection checks it's much more difficult. And if they release a sequel that is inferior to the original they can just kill the servers for the original to force migration over to the sequel anyway.
The root cause is a profit driven design to make games just barely appealing enough to pay for, with the minimum amount of effort, and a consumer base who are on average too stupid/weak-willed to forcibly incentivize publishers into making higher quality products to earn their custom.
But there a slight silver lining to that, since the average online gamer you will meet is functionally illiterate and borderline retarded, we're soon approaching the point where AI opponents can reliably emulate that, and that takes some of the incentives back from multiplayer as easy content generation.
There has been a slow advancing rot in how multiplayer games have worked, too.
Back in the day, you made a server, added it to the community, and there it was, free for you to play on if you wanted. You could lock it with a password to keep it to friends only, or you could leave it up for the masses.
Now you have to rent a server, and there are very little to no custom things you can do in a multiplayer game. At least in the AAA space.
It's all a form of control, and that control isn't really over game fairness, it's about control of your wallet. And that's what sickens me about gaming.
Gaming is still fun, and every now and then, there's a shining beacon in the sea of mediocrity. But more often than not, it's just because that merely okay title lacks the things that make modern gaming horrible, and is more open and accepting of mods, free to set up community servers, lacking an in game shop, etc.
It feels like the old way is dying, and the new way of fleecing you is 'that's just the way it is' even though older games have proven it doesn't have to be. It's just programmed that way now.
Yes, the lack of control for the community due to removal of modding and dedicated servers (which is not a technology problem, perhaps mmo, but even then it is something you don't need a special mainframe, unless it truly is shit code).
Esports are maybe part of the problem but the focus on multiplayer is do to money. Lol made a ton of money from skins so they figured that is where the money is.
I also expect multiplayer games to be more popular. Among my friends all we talk about is usually games that have multiplayer, I'm probably the only one that cares about single player games.
I can see esports making things worse but is just greed mostly.
I don't think eSports is the culprit so much as it's just the overall money-seeking factor.
The fact of the matter is that the majority of people who spend money on video games are trash humans overall. That means video gaming must be made and marketed to trash humans. If everyone is content at playing slot machines and hand their money over to slot machines then that's all we're going to get. The quality of gaming will only ever improve if the quality of gamers themselves improves or the money motive is removed.
Gaming had a golden era in the past because the average gamers was a high IQ nerd. Now that gaming has hit the mainstream, the people who games are made for are much lower quality than the people games used to be made for and that incentive to make games for people such that the makers earn money is just too great of a motive such that the people with the talent to make good games never bother to because they don't need to.
eSports is merely an adaptation to the current situation rather than a driving force behind it. We wouldn't have eSports if there wasn't enough money in gaming and there's enough money in gaming because it has gained popularity but because it gained popularity now the lowest common denominator of human that developers make games for is lower and this brings the quality of gaming down.
Until the quality of gamers themselves improves, we'll never get better quality games.
Modern gaming's getting ruined because their continued addiction to marketing expanding the demographics of the game's players. Taking a good game idea and arbitrarily adding target audiences can only detract from the core idea. Imagine taking ANY game you like, and adding a target audience of 80+ year old women to it; how much of the game needs to be removed or over-simplified?
Tears of the Kingdom was an incredible first player experience for me; we will see how Starfield pans out; single player JRPGs are thriving as never before; fun indie single player games are abundant.
I've been playing games since my parents bought us a Nintendo in 1990, and I'm not sure it has ever been much better. There is so much coming out it is impossible to filter through, but in that jumble, if you mostly ignore what is marketed to the 12 year old boys and the 20 year old women, there is lots of quality.
Esports has little, if anything, to do with it. It's all about money.
They can charge for microtransactions in online games.
Barebones games like Overwatch are also cheaper to develop. You can keep players busy with minimal content. Singleplayer requires a lot of well-crafted content that doesn't get replayed, i.e. it's expensive.
I can only speak for myself, but when I stopped paying attention to esports and nerds crying on youtube about whatever game, my gaming experience went back to when I was a kid and everything was enjoyable again.
Too many look to other people to validate their gaming experience when you really shouldn't give a single fuck.
As far as multiplayer goes, I would have to say that streamers have made online multiplayer much less enjoyable in terms of having a fun casual match. I remember the days of Halo 3 and Modern Warfare 2 where you would be matched up with people who have random skillsets and you would effectively be evenly matched.
Nowadays people just seem to copy whatever the streamers are doing, and if you try to do something that isn't meta, you essentially tank your team's odds.
As far as microtransactions, that has been a problem for awhile, and I don't see a solution to it outside of some sort of gambling law for lootboxes, etc.
No, Western big corporations are what ruined AAA gaming. E-sports is just a big corporations abduction of what was local gaming tournaments. As per everything big corporations bastardize, they pushed them to a whole new level that they are now a money sink.
Indie games and double A games are still awesome (DRG, Battlebit, and Squad just to name a few fantastic titles.)
Data mining, wikis, and cosmetic DLC were worse but esports definitely didn't help.
Since I primarily play fighting games with few exceptions, I kinda saw esports as something inevitable, as least with fighting games as it’s very clear how fighting games can be esports. Imo, esports affects how the waifus look more than anything with balance imo, but right now they’re just making sexy skins DLC and abusing people’s leggings and thigh high kinks for base game.
My opinions have largely been covered, that yes, it's part of the problem, but it's also the ever moving trend to squeeze people for money, shitty devs/companies being shitty, lack of talent that actually cares about gaming making them, and lack of people refusing to consooooooom.
People have their esports, and I don't think it takes anything away from my single player games.