Decline of Gaming

1. Games in the past

Taking the example of Call of Duty (COD), and well know franchise, the first 3 were pretty much the same, world war shooters with good lore and history that somehow, were revolutionizing the industry of shooters. The games needed to be fully finished before they released, because patching games via update back then was not a thing. In 2009 we get the first modern military shooter released by infinite ward. The Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (COD 4) was something that the gaming community haven’t seen before. The campaign was truly amazing with well develop characters and lore, new mechanics and movement and visuals. But the real deal was the multiplayer. The  COD 4 multiplayer was something new and never seen before. It established the standards for todays COD’s. The introduction of arcade and consistent gun fights, good maps with perfect flows, perks, killstreaks and gun customization, showed that the developers were trying to the right thing and making a really good game based on their passion. Fast forward one year, treyarch releases COD: World at War with a new game mode: zombies. That new game mode was thrown in the game as just a project from de developers but in nowadays, is one of the trademarks of treyarch COD’S. The game mode was unique and it attracted a lot of people that basically made the developers create for maps and features for zombies. In 2010, Modern Warfare 2 released and that was one of the most iconic games of all time because of its campaign and specially the multiplayer. Gun customization was taken to a new level, the introduction of tactical nuke in killstreaks, new killstreaks, well designed maps. We can see the game was made for someone who really wanted the game to succeed and established a new standard for online multiplayer. The COD’S released in the next years were innovative in their own way and we start to see some problems in 2014.

2. Microtransactions and RNG

In 2014, activision releases Advanced Warfare. Surprise surprise, it has loot boxes. Now, the problem was not the loot boxes, but what was inside it. They started to put over powered guns inside loot boxes and the only way to get those was through spending some money spinning those boxes. You could of course, play the game and earn the currency to open boxes, but that would take a long time and you needed to have some pure luck. Everything that was new and putted in the game, besides maps, was basically unlocked through loot boxes. Other games started to implement this loot box system in their games, like PUBG, Fornite, Star Wars Battlefront II, Battlefield etc… Basically, companies tried to extract the most amount of money from customers based on their pure greed. For example, PUBG, it was a success in its alpha phase and everyone was really enjoying and what they decided to do? Add loot boxes to a game that was in an ALPHA PHASE, I mean, they didn’t even try to fix the issues that were affecting the game at the time, and they released a terrible port of the game to XBOX to money grab the costumers. Star Wars Battlefront II, EA made the most overpowered character in the game a 20$ unlockable or 100+ hours to unlock it. How is this even fair to someone who doesn’t want to spend any more money on the game, doesn’t have much free time to unlock it, and every time he enters the game, gets stomped by someone has the character because he had extra 20$ to spend on it?

3. Gaming in 2021

After some from the fans of gaming in general, most of the companies decided to end with the loot boxes and created other mechanisms for people to get customization for their game, like battle passes. You no longer have to pay to get the gun you want, the best character in the game, to access to content like maps. The only thing in most games behind a paywall is customization, which is not a big deal because we get to unlock everything else for free without the need to pay for anything.

Best regards my dudes