The music industry is a joke.
The movie industry is a joke.
The game industry is a joke.
All of them have the same way of dealing with the consumer market:
1. Produce crap.
2. Hype crap to the heights of Heaven.
3. Cash in on the hype before the consumer realizes it is all crap.
I’ve gone through over a dozen games via my Gamefly account in the past couple months – and they all SUCK. Sure, there are a few gems like Crackdown and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, but the rest – if I play a game for 20 minutes and shut the system off, or change games, it sucks. I can’t tell you exactly how many times I’ve done that.
Looking at my rental history, in the time I’ve used Gamefly I have rented 22 games. That’s 22 games in 6 months. Out of those games, I actually enjoyed playing 6 of them, of those, I bought 3. Now normally I might play one new game every 2-3 months. I still buy about the same number of games per year, but thankfully I’m not wasting my money on a bunch of stinkers.
The majority of those games were played for 20 minutes and then sent back. That 75% of games is a great example of just how retarded the industry is in general. Hype is what it is, back in the 90’s the systems were sold at a profit and the games only padded those numbers.
I can count on one hand the number of Nintendo or Sega games I played that stunk. What’s changed? Now the systems are sold at a loss, games are rushed to market to make up the difference, and before people realize they suck the games are on backorder cos a bunch of complete nitwits dropped $60 based on nothing but hype.
The systems aren’t hype, my Xbox 360 is in every way superior to it’s predecessor and offers the perfect balance between price and capability. The PS3 is disgustingly powerful, it annihilates the 360 in both performance AND price. What is still topping the sales charts? The PS2 and the Wii. They win out because GAMEPLAY conquers all. Graphics, realism, power, hype doesn’t mean crap without good solid GAMEPLAY.
Kudos to Nintendo for remembering the value of Gameplay. My only hope is that as the catalogue for the 360 increases, the number of GOOD games increase as well.
Until then, I’ll keep plugging away at Forza Motorsport 2 and hope that when the last race is run, there’s something waiting in the wings to earn my gaming dollar.
