Why Aren't Games Fun Anymore?

what happened to video games and why aren't they fun anymore I feel like that's a question that's plagued the modern gamer a lot lately and in this video I want to take a look at why we've been feeling this way lately when technology has only gotten better and games have only become more and more ambitious from an objective standpoint we should be happy with the current state of gaming so then why are we constantly disappointed with every new release why does picking up the controller almost feel like a chore at this point firstly let's start

with the obvious [Music] ah Triple A games when you think AAA games you think Red Dead Redemption 2 Masterpiece you think The Witcher 3 wild Hunt you think Gotham Knights you think Madden twenty thousand and two bro look at this I can't do anything just scored a touchdown to win the game and I can't really I can't do anything wow you think oh dear God the best we just really wanted to make sure that those people that live in the night city they're really they're real a gaming is one of those things where you see

the trailers and you're like oh my god wow then launch day comes this is your time laughs the common Trend with AAA gaming these days is that so many of these games are just completely broken on launch day can they actually just not get around obstacles that's wild well back 20 years ago there was no such thing as a first day patch so why did the need for a first day patch arise now all of a sudden this this is one of those things where you see a change in Focus over time to figure out

what went wrong let's go all the way back to the first console game to ever receive a downloadable patch to address Performance issues unreal Championship on the Xbox damn when did the Xbox initially release again okay November 15 2001 when did unreal Championship release September 24th 2002. wow it took developers a whole entire year to figure out how to apply updates to a game for performance issues on the fly so if we consider that unreal Championship was the first game ever to receive a console update that means almost all games before that date and especially

before the Xbox's creation had to basically be perfect because once your game was released that was it there was no on-the-fly patch you could create to fix major game breaking bugs or performance issues no if anything only very minor things were ever addressed hence when you go back to play a game on an emulator you'll maybe see that the ROM has one or two different versions can you imagine the amount of play testing games must have went through before finally releasing to the public back then I sure can't with that being said games were being

made on a much smaller scale back then so testing games was probably much more manageable as a result and with there being much more of a focus on testing since developers couldn't patch their games well one plus one equals two if you know what I mean but with this newfound ability to just patch games on the Fly combined with their massive scale and the need to create the next open world Masterpiece which is also compounded with the need to rush out games as soon as possible to capitalize on the hype and that little equation gives

you this freaking circus is this game worth it does that answer your question [Music] [Laughter] [Music] but it's not just that AAA games are broken on release day and for many days after that potentially that's the only problem it's the fact that even when they actually work most of them turn out to be mediocre at best and a soulless cash grab at its worst and I'm thinking that Gollum game that absolutely flopped is what I would consider the mediocre category okay at least it doesn't have Micro transactions on top of an already what is now

a 70 dollar game well they did have these emotes priced at like three bucks I don't know why the you wouldn't want to buy these anyway the game did so poorly that it caused the studio behind it to completely shut down and then they also act their next Lord of the Rings game that they had in development and to that I say we must make it move again good riddance another reason I feel AAA games are getting a bad rap is this trend in the industry where I feel developers go by the saying bigger is

always better and at this point it's just like please dear God make it smaller some AAA games that release these days are simply too big when games were made way back when on the Super Nintendo N64 GameCube era just from a technological perspective the GameCube had a measly 43 megabytes of total Ram want to know how much vram of that total Ram the GameCube had three megabytes the trend in the modern game industry seems to be moving towards a minimum of 16 gigabytes of vram which is the memory found in your graphics cards and that's

not even counting your system Ram which is also moved from a measly eight gigabytes just a couple years ago to a whopping 16 as well so that means the need for memory has pretty much gone from 43 megabytes to a whopping 32 gigabytes of RAM to play AAA release in just 20 years that to me is insane sanity insanity is how big these AAA games have become to download sometimes it feels like a one terabyte hard drive which would have been gargantuan back in the day is not enough to hold all the games I'd like

to play on a daily basis and a lot of these games nowadays are requiring ssds to be used simply because they're necessary to make loading times plausible think about that where ssds used to be a luxury even for PC Gamers they're now a necessity for console gaming Starfield is the most recent example I feel of this absolutely massive looking game that's going to turn out to be the next no man's Sky remember how hyped people were for that game before the launch dumpstered on everybody I don't know call me crazy and I hope I'm wrong

but Starfield looks like it's heading in that same direction just from looking at how many planets will be in Starfield and Google answering me that there will be in excess of a thousand planets to investigate makes me want to throw up on the floor [Music] especially when I see those nasty forbidden words procedurally generated technology you should know what does gonna be in his game not always no it's a procedurally generator they're totally random millions of planets let's talk about procedure to generate and how that is we know somebody in the comments name a game

that's actually good that uses procedural generation please and Minecraft doesn't count by the way and so with this focus on always making your games look better make them more massive overwhelm the player with content because content equals value hell some of the funnest experiences I've had in recent memory are games that are two hours long because those two hours are brimming with creativity and details that you might miss your first time through so that two-hour Journey might even turn into a 10 hour Journey Katana zero comes to mind when I describe this so if you

guys haven't played that game already absolutely try it out I also want to talk about how with the focus on making these games so massive development times continue to get longer and longer and in some cases can even result in the game's cancellation anybody remember Final Fantasy XV if a game was ever stuck in development hell that one Takes the Cake the game took 10 years to finally release that is an insane amount of time to have to wait for any video game and with that weight came an insane amount of hype and looking back

with Hajime Tabata having to salvage and rally together a lot of broken developers to finish the damn thing it's a wonder the game wasn't a masterpiece and this trend just continues on with the industry Metroid Prime 4 being another example that comes to mind anybody remember that announcement yeah we haven't heard a peep since because they scrapped the whole thing and had to start all over again because Nintendo wasn't impressed with what Bandai Namco had put together and hired Retro Studios to develop the game in their place see if it's one thing Nintendo knows how

to do it's to respect their franchises most Studios would have been like we need to make this money back just go ahead and release this garbage and us the franchise's fans would have suffered for it see Nintendo knows what's important within a game and they aren't the graphics nor is it about how massive the world is or what new technology the game implements listen in the words of Reggie fesame if it's not fun why bother this is why Nintendo is still killing it with every single release while everybody else is sitting by on the sidelines

going what the hell are we doing wrong that new Mario game looks like it's made for five-year-olds yeah well hey that new Mario game is fun okay relax then again though the new Zelda kind of has this bigger is better problem too so don't worry Nintendo I'm coming for you next that's not to say all Triple A games outside of Nintendo are bad though there are some definite good apples in the bunch like Red Dead Redemption 2 like The Witcher 3 like potentially Spider-Man 2. I'm hoping that's gonna be a freaking Banger there's definitely competency

out there but the reason I like these games I mentioned specifically so much is because they so clearly are innovating with each new release Red Dead Redemption 2 added new things from Red Dead Redemption and just made it bigger better and one of the most immersive experiences in video gaming that I dare say has ever existed Witcher 3 makes The Witcher 2 look like a cheap indie game in comparison with all that it added to its world its characters and its engaging quest lines and by the looks of Spider-Man 2 it seems to also be

following in that same great Trend and I know that I'm leaving out the elephant in the room here Elden ring which was a big part of my Channel's success back when it released and probably also why a lot of you are subscribed and if you haven't subscribed already what are you doing do it now are this guy's gonna haunt your dreams Alden ring took the gaming World by storm back in 2022 and the shock waves it sent Across The Gaming Community are still very much being felt and the numerous copies and knockoffs of the souls

formula in an attempt to recreate that success funnily enough Eldon Ring's director hidetaka Miyazaki doesn't really understand why Elden ring was so successful I quote I try not to think about it too much Miyazaki said because I think it would be a bad idea to analyze it deeply and to consciously try to replicate it in another game even the director of Elden ring recognizes the importance of not trying to replicate things that have already proven to be successful because it's a bad idea trying to replicate the magic that Elden ring created is something that Miyazaki

realizes would be detrimental to the creativity that made something like Elden ring possible in the first place and I think that's a truly beautiful thing and something I told totally respect this director for even if I wasn't a total fan of Elden Ring versus from software's previous installments part of the reason I think Alden ring was so successful even if the director himself doesn't want to take a stab at the reason is that Elden ring was so incredibly new and fresh and something Gamers hadn't really experienced before in a very long time you guys remember

how difficult games were back on the Super Nintendo man those things were a to complete nowadays games tend to hold your hand and have all these different prompts and tutorials to teach you how the game works and it's like oh my God let me just play the game already just just skip this just wait I should read this Alden ring brings back that difficulty and doesn't Hold Your Hand by insulting your intelligence with all these tutorials and prompts on how to play out the Wazoo no you complete a little tutorial-like section that teaches you the

very Basics through actual gameplay and then the game sends you out to explore its world all at your own pace in fact all of from software's games had always been like this from the beginning but Elden ring was the first to introduce its classic formula on such a massive scale and that desire to innovate on its formula to bring Gamers something entirely different is something that the majority of AAA gaming simply doesn't do the Madden that releases every year is literally the exact same Madden before it the Assassin's Creed that releases every year is also

the exact same Assassin's Creed before it and so on and so on while Innovation can be a scary thing and you do risk losing your established fan base in doing so I think it's also required for a franchise to grow and evolve and become truly beloved by its fans just look at god of war and how successful it became as a result of its transformation even if I'm not the biggest fan of it personally I can still respect that it decided to grow and evolve from its roots uh right now fortnite is is the Talk

of the Town that's what everyone's into right now absolutely uh why is that game such a a giant game you know it's it's free that's why yeah [Music] that's it I like it [Applause] Tyler ninja Blevins everybody [Music] along with multiplayer gaming came the rise of the Battle Royale my God these things are just so incredibly successful Battle Royale started as mods to popular multiplayer games like Minecraft or DayZ before the first Standalone Battle Royale was made that being H1Z1 I swear these things became popular because everybody was hooked on The Hunger Games and everybody

just sat there and thought wow what would it be like to have a video game like that and make no mistake battle royale's are a technological Marvel having so many players together on a map at the same time was something people only dreamed of Hell one of the biggest selling points of that mag game on the PS3 was that it could host up to 256 players and I remember hype being through the roof for it before the game flopped quicker than a catch on a Sunday morning fishing trip point being people loved striving to be

the last people alive in the lobby and with that love Came the rise of the Battle Royale Giants we know today like fortnite and Apex Legends problem is though there hasn't been a new Battle Royale that top either of these two giants since their release there have been a few here and there that tried to break through the mold by doing something different like spell break and Rumble verse but nothing ever really took a solid hold on the massive Market that is the Battle Royale player base what fortnite and Apex Legends did for the Battle

Royale genre was so incredibly unique in that these games while in the same genre feel totally different to play with fortnite you have that build mechanic that I will unfortunately never ever get used to that makes the gameplay Dynamic and fun well if you're any good at it anyway can we take that let's take his description what what then with Apex you get more of a battle royale that's traditional with an added twist that being the legends that you choose before the start of a match all with different abilities and differing designs to make each

and every Squad you'll meet out on the battlefield unique but fortnite released way back in 2017 and Apex back in 2019 so in all these years out of all the different variants of Battle Royale games that have tried to Trump these Giants every single one of them has failed and with so many companies focused and failing on trying to get a piece of the Battle Royale pie I think single player gaming and couch Co-op gaming have suffered quite a bit as a result even still though that's not to say that fortnite and Apex Legends are

perfect games fortnite had an issue where the average player on that game could build the goddamn Eiffel Tower in a matter of seconds meanwhile I'm just trying to build the Second Story of my crappy studio apartment building and I'm dead with fortnite's popularity came a skill gap between absolute noobs to the game who came to fortnite late trying to learn how to build versus the people who had already been playing the game who could write you a five-page essay on how to do 90s yeah I don't know what the hell those are either so don't

ask me I just searched up fortnite building terms on Google okay that's why zero build breathed new life into fortnite or maybe this is what's bringing people back to fortnite holy the amount of crossovers they put in this game is Just again and freaking ridiculous this is like the smash ultimate trailer everybody's here except at least smash has some integrity and refuses to put anime characters in its roster listen nothing against anime but when you got geralt from The Witcher next to Deku from my hero Academia that's where I'm gonna draw the line even Apex

Legends with their recent struggles and figuring out how to have a decent ranked system flip-flopping back and forth on new ranking Algos with the release of each new season even they don't have the Battle Royale genre completely figured out yet and like I said we're talking about two of the top dogs I could bring Warzone into this discussion but I'm not a big Cod guy and honestly this section of the video is getting way longer than I originally intended point being just like with the AAA gaming industry I think battle royale's are in dire need

of something different a lot of them just feel too similar to play and become boring quickly and while I understand that all battle royales need to have a similar formula at their Roots like a Zone getting smaller and smaller or a drop ship to disperse players across the map I'd love to see more takes on the genre like Rumble verse and spellbreak that feel unique to play just like fortnite and Apex Legends were back when they released that also actually have some staying power within the Battle Royale community and the game award goes oh man

I have to pay a micro transaction to unlock that's so [Applause] [Music] look microtransactions are said to be the devil's spawn they are the reason modern gaming is the way it is these corporate money grubbing bastards just can't help but double dip am I right boys everybody hates them nobody loves them wait what well damn maybe some of you out there do love them there's no denying that microtransactions are here to stay within the modern gaming space there's no getting rid of them because they've shown to be a successful way for developers to continue to

monetize their game years after they've already released it gone are the days where you could unlock that mystery character in your favorite fighting game by doing some arbitrary objective a bunch of times instead you want that sweet mystery character cough up 10 bucks Johnny Boy and in some cases microtransactions can be even more egregious than a simple character unlock they can be as ridiculous as charging you for experience points new items you wouldn't have access to otherwise extra lives honestly the list goes on hence why I think microtransactions are so successful there's so much to

monetize and use your layer base's love for your product to squeeze more money out of them and I'm here to say that's okay yes you can sit here all day and complain that games didn't used to be like this back in my day while you shake your cane at the company's responsible for this madness but I'm here to give some of you a reality check I've already established how much longer it takes to release games nowadays and how much Manpower is required to release a game in the Modern Age a lot goes into making a

game and there's lots of experimentation and right up until the point where it's burnt on a disc every decision is pretty teased it's a much more harrowing process than I think most of the fans understand whether you like it or not games are a business and they're here to make money not lose it you guys remember Donkey Kong Country rare spent 18 months developing that game with 20 people working on the thing and it cost them around 1 million million dollars with a total of 22 years in man hours invested to create this utter Masterpiece

want to know how long it takes and costs to make video games now The Witcher 3 wild Hunt again another Masterpiece took three and a half years double the time it took to make dkc with a budget of 81 million dollars along with 1500 people involved with the production globally and if you thought 22 years of man hours and dkc was a lot I can't even get a number on how many man hours it took to make The Witcher 3. do you realize what an insane investment it was to make The Witcher 3. considering the

cost and time spent if the game flopped that studio is completely ruined and while The Witcher 3 was an absolute Commercial Success without the need for microtransactions the next game from the same talented Studio absolutely wasn't your game isn't going to be a hit every single time and microtransactions can help lighten the load on how well a game needs to perform in order to be considered commercially successful while I'm totally against egregious microtransactions like stuff that's pay to win or things of that nature if you're just paying for Cosmetics within a game whether it be

single player or multiplayer then that is your prerogative to purchase with games that cost more money and time to produce comes a need to make more of a return on that money and time spent and I think way too many gamers nowadays want to have their cake and eat it too oh microtransactions aren't the reason why gaming has turned foul for you and while like all things they can be taken too far I don't think there's any reason to want to get rid of them completely because otherwise a lot of the games you're playing right

now probably wouldn't exist without them I don't want to believe it already are coming back [Music] all right [Music] remakes are one of those things that are beloved by fans and I'm right there with a lot of you having one of your favorite games remade with the beauty of a modern Graphics engine can truly be an incredible thing when it's done right anyway but lately it's getting to the point where I find the idea of a remake a bit repulsive not only because they're usually done in a way that shrugs off the identity of the

original we'll get to that in a little bit but also because there are just so many of them nowadays since number one it's a Surefire way to make some easy money off of an already established IP and number two they're just not as difficult to create compared to a completely new IP that has no established audience and that also have to be made from the ground up with a chance that the game could flop upon release just take it straight from the developers of The Last of Us it's a very challenging process to create a

new IP and you're gonna fail over and over again but that's what it takes new IPS are really hard they're hard because you don't know what's fun yet you're building new tech new AI establishing new characters new art all this it's hard mode right like it's game development on Expert and so you see all these titles getting remade that don't even really need to get remade because screw it let's make some more easy money sound fair enough Dead Space remake Resident Evil 4 remake The Last of Us remake oh they're remaking Metal Gear Solid three

damn I'm just part of the problem at this point Ubisoft is even rumored to be remaking Assassin's Creed IV a game that released two console Cycles ago now if that's not a case for remakes getting out of hand then I don't know what is remake success in the gaming industry could be stifling creativity in a way since companies have no reason to be Innovative and make new IPS that could become successful and instead go the tried and true method of remaking their old beloved titles just with a fresher coat of paint now here's my reasoning

for why remake makes don't really work one of my favorite examples of a remake Done Right was the Crash Bandicoot insane Trilogy brought back those memories from my childhood man the graphics were presented with a shiny new feeling aesthetic while also keeping in line with how the old game felt the platforming felt good and responsive to me and really overall I had absolutely no complaints with my experience playing versus from the original game with that being said I wasn't a big raving fan of the original game that knew all the ins and outs of it

by hand so one thing that I hadn't noticed was a point of contention with this remake was that the jumping mechanics had been changed from the original crash actually falls while jumping and slides a bit upon Landing making the platforming a bit difficult for people familiar with the original to get used to with someone in the comments going as far as to say the jumping mechanic is broken and makes the game unplayable to anyone that lived on The Originals all this to say this was a remake that I feel was done flawlessly which if you've

seen my channel and my opinion on remakes is a hard bar to pass and yet there were still points of contention with fans of the original on something the developers had decided to change so if something as good as the crash insane Trilogy is subject to scrutiny from its fans then when something like Final Fantasy VII remake rears its ugly head oh makes me shudder just thinking about it the whole point of remakes to begin with at least originally was to recreate classic games that were outdated so that both fans of the classic new and

old could appreciate the game in a modern setting but somewhere along the way remake stopped being Odes to their predecessors and started to become completely unrecognizable from The Originals with technological advancements comes a change in expectations and with that new technology comes more manpower and man hours to create a new game so not only do developers need to somehow recapture the magic of what made the original so special they have to somehow do it better because we've come to expect so much more out of video games than the blocky polygonal character models Final Fantasy VII

was so revolutionary for back in the day and in my opinion it really is an impossible task foreign you absolutely can't forget about the Indie scene part of the reason I think indie games are so successful is because it doesn't fall into any of the categories I've already mentioned that being AAA gaming battle royale's and remakes they are the new IPS that I've been searching so vehemently for and because these are smaller Studios they usually aren't hyper focused on things like graphics and making the next technological Masterpiece because they simply don't have the manpower to

do so so then how are they gonna compete with the monster that is AAA gaming simple make the games fun make the games unique have passion for your game and come up with something entirely new and different and interesting a lot of people are in the camp that the art of gaming has just been utterly killed by big corporations with their shiny micro transactions and how successful each lackluster release of these control C control V games are and personally while it does suck that some people choose to support games and franchises that do that kind

of thing you don't have to I'm telling you guys hop on the Xbox game pass and start playing some of these bangers like Hi-Fi Rush it's like Devil May Cry and Rhythm games had a baby where you gotta do combat to the beat and all the soundtracks are freaking bangers mixed with an aesthetic that makes me feel like I'm watching a Studio Ghibli movie let's rock big boy planet of Lana which I haven't played myself yet but it's on the list because it looks like this mix of inside and Limbo with its unique puzzle solving

and 2D platforming sections not to mention again the art style is just so strikingly good if RPGs are more your speed you got chained Echoes an RPG modeled after the ones in the 90s like Chrono Trigger just modernized with a whole new take on turn-based combat part of the reason I think the Indie scene is so successful is the fact that it does tend to pull on those familiar memories that you had playing The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time or Final Fantasy VII GoldenEye where you're locked up and your childhood bedroom late at night

with the covers wrapped around you with nothing but the light on your television screen reflecting the game back at you lighting up the room the thing is there's no denying that time waits for no one maybe that kid in that bedroom whose only worry was how he or she was going to beat that boss that night before bedtime now has to worry about other kinds of bosses maybe instead of that quest line you need to complete there are bills that need to be paid a wife and kids to take care of or any other multitude

of things that an adult needs to take responsibility for and gaming is no longer a luxury you have time to afford and maybe instead of the micro transactions being the problem or a corporate greed or rehash gameplay maybe it's just that you're getting older and with time your priorities change hell I know that's a reality I've needed to face that doesn't mean that gaming has to be this forbidden fruit that only children have the luxury to enjoy I still enjoy gaming today and even if it's a bit less fun for me than when I was

in my childhood bedroom without a care in the world it's still a place that I can escape to whenever I want to experience these vast different worlds I'd never have the opportunity to otherwise just like it was for me in my childhood and so I hope this video can help many of you disgruntled Gamers realize that too and to never take gaming for granted sure there will always be that inevitable cash grab out there that will leave us soured and bitter but as long as there are developers out there that continue to push the gaming

industry further and further I don't think gaming will stop being fun anytime soon and on that note I think that's gonna be it for this video thank you guys so much for watching if you enjoyed don't forget to like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and let me know what you think in the comments down below make sure to hit that subscribe button because I got way more videos planned like this in the future so trust me you don't want to miss out also if you guys made it to

the end consider checking out my patreon I got some things planned for supporters like unreleased videos access to my scripts my thumbnails my writing process if you guys are interested in any of that check the link down below with that I'll catch you guys in the next one [Music] foreign [Music]