Do I really need to comment on this garbage of an article?
This guy does a decent job on commenting about it.
Here is what I want to point out: the decline of gaming as a medium (evident with the collapsing sales) coincides with the game industry attacking its customers.
The newspaper industry began to collapse at the moment it began to attack customers who complained about the product. “Just who do you think you are saying my news article doesn’t actually have news in it!?” Have you seen the stock of the company who owns the New York Times? It is collapsing… and for good reason.
Gamers and game developers want the same thing: to make a great game. Customer response is just gamers trying to help make a better game. Developers shouldn’t take it personally. And in most cases, they don’t.
There is much discussion about video games ‘growing up’. But it seems to me that the Game Industry hasn’t grown up yet. A grown up view about video games is realizing that what you want to make doesn’t matter but what people want to buy. In the same way, a grown up view about writing books is that it is not about the book you want to write but about the book people want to buy.
When gaming was in its arcade days, I never recalled this attacking of the customers. I think it is because game makers these days really want to act like movie makers or novelists and get their creative work slammed as amateurish trash (which is accurate). Just because you have the skills to make a video game doesn’t mean you have the skills to make a good movie or a good novel. I know it takes a lifetime of skill building for many novelists to succeed. You think just because you can manipulate a camera in a digital 3d space that you now possess the skillset to tell a good story? Hahahaha.