“The innovation of the computer game, when it first came into being, was the source of famous anticipation. The release of any game was an event.
They were at the same time something wonderfully magical (the computer itself was miraculously) and free-underground […]. And this feeling created a sense of belonging to the famous cheerfulness of the future, which has come at the moment. The games were doors ajar to the future. Once this significance in our life was played by outer space. Gagarin flew - and now, a huge number of kids began to dream about space, the rise of scientific fantasy, "I believe, comrades, rocket caravans ..." And apple trees on Mars.
So here. The memory of this promise of a miracle is still fresh. And by the way, some reflection has also begun, but all the same, people expect this feeling of Expectation from the game. Belief in magic in the near future is probably the main motivator of our existence! It's not weaker than love. And she doesn't give it to them anymore. But the memory of this remains, and this memory is associated with the light, airy word "game" - as in that case it was called that. Not some horrible, ponderous "interactive experience" of something that makes egghead jackets dandruff a mile away."
I am very sympathetic to these words of Nikolai Dybovsky. He pinpointed exactly what we are now beginning to lose sight of. Forgetting is a hole; once you get there, it's hard to get out. First of all, you see the collapse and are ready to discuss it. Then you are no longer ready, but you either say goodbye to toys as a relic of youth, or you learn to be content with what they give you. More time passes - and such an ironic distrust of everything new appears, which can be observed among today's gaming "experts". They say, why is it needed at all, it is harmful to go against the tested laws of nature, and, for sure, this is some kind of deception. The result of such a slide into timelessness is a strangled Mozart, who was not allowed into secular circles, and he threw nonsense with music.
I believe that the coming year will be unusually critical for video games. More critical even than the spread of graphics cards and 3d graphics in the late 1990s. Comparable, perhaps, with the emergence of a computer in every home and at every workplace, when games became a truly numerous hobby and at the same time - Robinson-personal, like a home TV set.
When I call the moment critical, I mean that it is a turning point, and I do not at all presume to predict which way the chronicle of games will go next. Maybe the games will be even more famous, or maybe the other way around. Their transition to the newest quality factor may happen, but the “dark ages” have the opportunity to come. But let's, without thinking about the future yet, let's collect the announcements coming from people who are vitally interested in the fate of the games. Announcements, which, for some reason, stubbornly look through the fingers, as some arbitrary particulars.
Billion players
On November 21, the head of Activision Blizzard, Robert Kotick, announced the company's projects in the next 5 years to triple the player base and bring their number to a billion. On November 27, Ken Moss from Electronic Arts announced about a billion new players. It is interesting that the strategies for moving towards the secret figure of the companies differ almost diametrically.
Activision is counting on phones, EA is counting on streaming services. In two versions, talking about the following, in order to purchase the game, anyone could be thirsty, and not just the owner of a console or a gaming PC. The pattern is this: you need to shell out hundreds of dollars for a gaming platform, and if a person does not understand games as one of his constant passions, he does not need such a purchase. He drops out of the market, even if he has heard a lot about Warcraft and Doom. Anyone is happy to buy a phone, its usefulness is undeniable. Streaming services are also supposed to be open to anyone with an internet connection.
But there is one catch here. Since there are PCs and there are gaming PCs, then there are ordinary phones, and there are gaming ones. Already at the moment, in advertising for valuable phones, they say the following, that they allow you to play not some kind of “Farm”, but cool innovative games. Based on the beliefs of daily usefulness, it is completely unprincipled that your phone costs $150 or $1,000. And for games, the difference is big.
Let's remember the epic. By 2005, among PC players, there was an acute indignation at the constant fluidity of iron and the need for precious upgrades. Consoles have set equal conditions for all creators: within the current generation, the performance is what it is, and the player is a priori convinced that the newly-made game is getting from him.
Phones will again return us to the reality of always outdated iron. Naturally, if Activision had a monopoly on the phone games product market, it would keep the system requirements from rising so games could run on as many devices as possible. But within the framework of the competition for the attention of the player, the graphics remain a trump card in the old way, and an increase in system requirements is only one way to the formation of graphics (gullible words about optimization, to fortune, have already been forgotten).
Well, how much time will pass before "mobile gamers" will be divided into a hardcore cast with phones for 500+ bucks and a casual cast with daily, cheap devices? In 2-3 years, everything will return to normal, and only works like Candy Crush Saga will have billions.
Streaming services are more flexible. The higher the requirements of the game - a huge overload on the server, the cost of an hour spent in the game is more expensive. You don't have to take a token PS4 because of Death Stranding. You will pay only for the teraflops hours spent on overcoming, and if the game did not appeal to you, at least there will be no annoyance about the unnecessary game container house.
It seems that whatever it was, the employees of Activision and EA agree on one thing: the usual staircase from generations of set-top boxes will no longer exist. And if it does, it is no longer the main enthusiasm. Let the Google stage start unprincipled, and Diablo for phones failed Blizzard stocks last year, these are all initial steps, on which not everything is always smooth. Huge companies are looking ahead. About 15 years ago, the digital implementation of games also seemed fantastic, and Valve's desire to publish Half-Life 2 without fail through Steam looked like a stupid whim. But when people really desire something, from time to time they get it.
Big game hunters
By the way, Valve, also a gaming giant, has its own vision of the video games of the future, and the innovation skill of this company is huge. Half-Life 2 was the first single-player video game that required Steam to be installed. Yes, this requirement drove the players into a frenzy at first, the pirates in particular (HL 2 didn't hack very well). However, with this step, Valve acquired, in addition to controlling sales, the starting user base of its own online store - which could then be offered to other game creators as a consumer niche. And Steam immediately took off.
Half-Life: Alyx repeats this scheme with breathtaking accuracy. Yes, almost everyone is angry that the coveted development of Half-Life is asking for a virtual reality device, almost everyone will simply ignore Alyx. But there are other people who are sweeping Valve Index kits off the shelves at the moment. It’s not so important why: pre-Christmas is a whim, aggressive and intrusive advertising for Half-Life, or an understanding of the prospects for this gaming direction. The only important thing is that regardless of the success of Alyx, by the spring of 2020, the user base of VR games will grow significantly. Therefore, it will be more attractive for large development companies.
Valve hopes to launch an avalanche effect, as was the case with Steam: more games - more VR users - even more games.
With all this, it is impossible not to notice that VR gaming is actually the opposite of the model that Activision and EA see for themselves. VR is not mobile, it asks for precious devices, and Valve will recruit billions of players no earlier than earthlings settle on Jupiter. Specifically, such contradictions give a motive to talk about the critical, turning point in the gaming industry in general. Either one of the huge players will be deceived, and his model will be forgotten (as slot machines are forgotten now), or computer games will completely cease to be a single, integral direction of culture. You can port the game from Playstation to PC, although not without reservations. How to transfer Half-Life: Alyx to Bob Kotik's cute phones?
Where did the next gene go?
As for our usual game consoles, the release of the next generation sounded mysteriously unconvincing. Both the PlayStation 5 and Project Scarlett will have state-of-the-art silicon hardware and are ready to measure trillions of procedures per second. But when asked what this will give players, we hear about 120 frames per second, 8K resolution and fast downloads when moving between territories - very repeated, to put it mildly, improvements.
And the point is not that you can not announce softly (well, who needs 8K?), but that they will improve - existing games. It's the same game we've been playing for the past 5 years, only with fast loading times and (who cares) a wall in full swing on the screen. In separate versions - with a brand new sequence of scenes in endless pasta stories. Oh yes, there will still be ray tracing, which seems to change something in the picture, but it’s for the better - you can’t make out without a microscope.
Surely, almost everyone still does not forget what the next-gen was like in 2013-14. The graphics were blown away. Even if there was a vacuum hiding behind the exterior (as in the case of The Order 1886), it was still impossible to pass by, and anyone dreamed of a new console. Then, of course, it turned out that all the 8th origin of gaming systems are direct or indirect remakes of retro games - well, that's later.
What is there to admire today? Silence. The new consoles are due out in 2020. So either in June we will be charged with 10-ka two cool game exits at once, and until the next winter we will stop eating, saving up money. Or consoles will play in the box. In general, this fork is quite undeniable.
What's not clear is why Microsoft and Sony, after feeding on teraflops of numbers, won't let their imaginations run wild, though verbally pouring in about the cool new features of the games of the next generation. The physics of every broken glass and the incredible battles of thousands of bots with prodigy AI, a system for manually constructing full-fledged settlements and auto-generation of new levels for races and action movies, a self-learning method for selecting difficulty and live instructors in strategic fire training in a premium subscription to the shooter - draw dreams of never -never-land and galaxies far, far away should anyone whose profession - the development of video games. But the publishers have become dull and bored with themselves. Their expressions are reminiscent of the reports of party meetings of the Brezhnev era. One language - the words of Nikolai Dybovsky at the beginning of the note, a completely different language - the comment of the head of Ubisoft Elaine Corr:
“We don't know what fans want, we don't know how streaming platforms will grow in importance. But we are convinced that the upcoming origin of the consoles, which we have been told, is considered a truly significant step forward compared to today's generation. For us founders, this is a fantasy, as we always get excited before we try to "tame" new technologies. New technologies will give fans new ways to share data. And there are quite a few other new elements that will improve the quality of the game. Microsoft is talking about SSD and wants to reduce load times. We like it very much, yet we are also players! This is very fundamental, and this is a revolution. As far as graphics are concerned, it is still getting better, for this reason you will notice a difference between 4K and 8K. There are things that manufacturers give, and with them, new devices are very attractive, and fans have to look forward to them.
This “we don’t have information about what the fans want” - it’s about significant, of course?
Geniuses are leaving
Almost everyone calls Hideo Kojima a genius and has every right to do so. In this environment, it is currently being discussed what will happen if Death Stranding turns out to be a financial crash (and it most likely will be). It is clear that this will be a collapse not only for Kojima, but for games in general.
I, due to my commitment to the PC, am more interested in the fate of Arkane Studio - maybe not geniuses, but as a very small amount of huge abilities. Arkane experienced a similar situation: in 2017, the game Prey was enthusiastically received by gamers, however, sales left much to be desired. Soon the founder and ideological leader of the company, Rafael Colantonio, announced that he was leaving Arkane.
The third example would be to write here about the Ice-Pick Lodge, which left a couple of employees, but it may turn out that Xbox players are less stingy with good games than PC players - let's not rush things. Moreover, it is not a matter of personal financial success.
The meaning has exactly one thing: as long as the creation of works of art is called an "industry", it will always be a meat grinder for professional people.
A meat grinder is a tool for transforming an abundance of very different quality little things into a monotype. In other, more mature forms of art (cinema, music, painting), quite solid genre niches have formed. A rap artist will start a career in a club, and then he will gain stadiums, but he does not need a philharmonic as a step in the creative path. And for "David Garrett merch," Google didn't give me much of anything. In painting, between Photoshop and a regular pencil, there is an unbridgeable abyss, despite the presence of graphics tablets. There is no dispute about tastes, any one increases among its adherents.
Computer games have not yet matured to such an understanding, they still associate the snake with a hedgehog. And if in the conditional Steam there is an “indie” and “early access” tag, then at a higher level the problem has not been resolved. You can't buy a Playstation Indie console, a contraption with the worst hardware and the highest prices for games, the library of which, nevertheless, is strictly moderated by recognized gamers for artistic value of the works. Or purchase Xbox Cybersport - a console sharpened for an instructive game, with low ping and the highest FPS. The industry does not stop working on a pipeline principle, trying to hit everything, instead creating an average style of a regular game and an ordinary player with square meanders.
A disgusting Metacritic thing, where one figure seems to compare Mario and Skyrim. It's ugly, therefore, that rating seriously has a big impact on a developer's disposition and income. For example, Obsidian had the opportunity not to get a suitable percentage of the rating of its own Fallout: New Vegas, both for technical performance and therefore, that separate role-playing critics are deliberately against the camera from the traditional first person, and someone simply does not love Armageddon. We have information that the isometric camera and turn-based duels in a specific environment are loved more. We also have information that early access regulars tolerate techno dampness as normal. But Metacritic does not take this into account, and professional people like Kojima and Colantonio lose a huge number in the competition of everyone with absolutely everyone.
Geniuses have learned to leave, and they will leave, and there will be more truth in the words about the conditional The Last of Us as the root cause of acquiring a symbolic Playstation. As mentioned above, rivalry awaits for the very designation of a computer game - what will be called by this word tomorrow. And normally, just the founders of the best gaming masterpieces are obliged to find the most promising direction.
And what about the choice of the ruble?
I do not argue, it is very democratic when it is the players, the end players, who set the development of video games. But the collapse of such a "ruble democracy", alas, is overdue. Donate MMOs, loot boxes and decorative DLC, no matter how annoying it may sound, have taken root in computer video games specifically thanks to voting in rubles. Looking at today's list of the most profitable games in the world, it would be desirable to completely abandon the profession of a game browser.
The judgment of the players should be decisive - but not the judgment of the ruble. The computer society, as an instrument of direct democracy, disposes of the future only if other variants of the monetary unit appear in front of it, for which you can buy everything that is not sold for rubles. The probability of some kind of contractual “respect units” is a topic for a separate note, in reality, nothing similar has been given to the players yet.
So far, the trend is reverse - to reduce the weight of user votes. Both Steam and Metacritic manually clean up player ratings, remove critical comments - practically signing the failure of existing rating systems. The thing is, though: games are about will. If the game is not to everyone's liking, it is not necessarily bad, and there is no need to calculate the average temperature in the hospital. Even kids realize that from time to time you just need to go to your corners.
And yet, if there is a choice, everyone will find themselves only in the black. I wanted to - I went to a VR club, where there is enough space and everything is set up for a comfortable virtual game. I wanted to - I went through a couple of levels of Death Stranding: Immortal on the mobile. Another time, I connected my own TV set to the wall at full speed to the racing server, at the same time becoming the final leader of the cop simulator for some player from Australia.
In general, these are already guesses and requests. As I have demonstrated, there are many significant stories in this day. Let's continue to observe what is happening, remembering: whatever changes, everything is for the better.
