Opinion: Kill The Big Game

Games are always messy. Making them, launching them, playing them. That’s fine. 

If you ask any game developer about the messiness of development and launch, they’ll tell you it’s a miracle. After all, games are a conglomerate of often-hand created parts, the fragile art of software coding the least of worries. Quality assurance only has so many hands; to release a game is to, in essence, bump up the scale of playtesting by no less than a thousand-fold. 

But bigger things usually leave bigger messes, and the past few years have shown that these messes are getting too big to ignore. 

So it’s time to kill The Big Game. 

It’s the AAA golden child, attached to the beloved, historic studio. This time, more than ever, the graphics are better than ever, the gameplay is outrageously fun, the world is vast, and you’ll spend dozens of hours traveling to the vast edges of the special seamless lands to see each buttcrack of every unique NPC. 

…gods above, aren’t you sick of that yet? 

If you’re not sick of it personally, then at least you’ve seen this exact game straining against the collective sanity of the games industry for a few years now, met with anxiety about whether it’ll live up to the fraction of its anticipation. It’s one thing for games to be messy, but at this point, the sheer weight of every AAA release bringing burdens of time, price, and collective attention in the industry is getting too frustrating to handle. 

When building the “modern game experience,” the leaders of the largest development companies proclaim to its audiences that the sky’s the limit, then ask its developers to architect a new bridge to those heavens.  

Achieving better is always good. But achieving too much, too fast, too quickly already has a name: crunch. It’s pressure on developers, yes, but also pressure on gamers to expect more, consume more, complete as much as fast as possible. 

On the development side, of course, is the crunch that’s made the news over the past few years, pressuring game devs to push out games in unrealistic time frames. Speaking to one personally-close game developer friend, who has experienced and talked about the trauma of burnout in the industry, she put forth an observation: A game’s scope broadens as it’s developed, then is toned back as the developers are pressured to finish, which then inevitably creates compromises. 

The expectations that come with the infinite growth of The Big Game are disrespectful of developers’ time–and if developers don’t feel respected, how will players feel respected? 

The same way game developers are forced to sink time into making a product, increasingly, it feels like game time is there as a means to justify that stressful project. There’s no better example of this bleeding out into gamers’ expectations than the frankly piss-poor “dollar per hour” layman’s measure of a game’s worth. Excessive game time is also disrespectful to other games that vie for attention. We should feel not only permitted, but encouraged to explore everything that this genre has to offer. 

And while there’s some fairness to a 20- to 30-hour streamlined “main story” length, players are encouraged, often allured by both games and peers, to spend two to three times as long to explore and hunt achievements. Even if it’s nice to have a reason to poke around, that deep well of goodies is still part of those elevated expectations that studios have set for all involved. 

The Big Game asks all to expect this among many, many other things, with eyes only on its own growth. Unless you’re a well-oiled franchise machine like FIFA or Call of Duty, the result is almost always some sort of compromise. If it’s not the game developers’ health to a point of infamy, then it’s in bugs, in file size, in a feature being put off or missing entirely. The player can’t always tell what it is (though a 100GB day one patch is hard to miss), but the developers will always have to carry that cost and lost effort with them. 

There is absolutely some hypocrisy in writing this on MMORPG.com, of all sites. But the genre of the MMORPG, or any major live service game, comes with tempered expectations. The servers may crash; map areas may be smaller, or hold less players, to accommodate user loads. The difference is, these are multiplayer games where server and user strains are considered, and QA is scaled and considered (and not paid enough industry-wide for it, for the record). Many of these games not only work but, in so many cases, are sustainable and playable, even a decade later even when devs quietly let players take the reins. 

Again, this is precisely what is ruined in the video game industry from all sides: expectations. Good media literacy is entering a piece of work with some expectations held by the consumer, whether it’s about the media or genre, or perhaps something about the creators. A first-person shooter will likely involve guns, and a freemium mobile puzzle game will probably gate you out of progressing if you mess up too many times. 

Consumer hysteria for the corporation, though, has become the foundation of ‘gamer culture’ to the point where many gamers will literally blindly accept anything the corporation expects them to. The sky? Right, they’re working on that with a $2 billion budget, with realistic simulations of cloud water and the faces of every plane passenger passing by; pre-orders are open now with a figure of a cloud as part of a deluxe pre-order. That’s never gone wrong before. And ignore the chill they’ve put over the industry for reporters asking about work conditions. 

Buy the game. Download all 127 GB. Nothing is wrong! But wait, there’s a day-one patch, and the puddles aren’t detailed enough, so the game’s dead! Time to harass an irrelevant coder online, play anyway, and then get excited about the next $70 pre-order on your queue, because that’ll be different. Surely.

With Big Games bringing weighty compromises and frustrations–not at the least Cyberpunk 2077, The Avengers, Jedi Survivor, Callisto Protocol, Redfall, Battlefield 2024, mainline Pokemon releases, Anthem, Fallout 76 and its original single-player engine source Fallout 4, and the ever-climbing Star Citizen, as well as further Big Games bracing for crunch–players are promised the sky and given an observation deck. 

Further, are we willing to let the ones that are acceptable justify the pressure that’s causing this industry so much strain? 

The gaming industry, through its creators, players, and commentators, has to accept at some point that The Big Game is the prodigal sky here: intangible, a concept more than it is something that can actually be achieved. We have to know better what a game that achieves a reasonable vision looks like, and root for it when it passes the finish line with as much as they hoped for intact. 

Like many truly awful things in 2023, the obvious foundation of these problems lies in capitalism, which, in its broader modern fundamentals, expects perpetual expansion at any pace and especially rewards unhealthy growth to capture markets. The state of The Big Game, and the way game development has outpaced its own growth in the past two decades alone, reflects that beat-by-beat. And to be clear, these decisions regularly, primarily come from executives who care more about money and sales as broadly and quickly as possible instead of the livelihood of the industry and the art of the medium.  

The potential of video games, like any art, lies as a counter to that expansive philosophy: a game of any size or scope should have the capacity to be memorable and valuable. 

And of course, it’s great to see over the past decade that smaller-scale games are becoming serious market and cultural forces. Perhaps this shift in size will leave more manageable messes.