Games aren’t for you these days. There’s two ways that you may read that sentence, and both of them are wrong. The first one is a rallying cry that games have been taken away from you, that companies have gone woke and have stopped caring about the little guy. The second is a taunt that the future is now, that if you like any game with a white protagonist, you must be racist. I don’t believe either of these things, but I do believe that video games are no longer for you. Or me. Or maybe anybody.
We fight a lot about the direction of games these days, often with the shallow minded points that the first paragraph puts forward. The truth is gaming is a global hobby, and it becomes a richer art form by allowing for wider perspectives and more diversity. At the same time, diversity becoming a buzzword leads to pandering or shoehorning, and inclusion when done for the benefit of focus groups can end up diluting a story, not enriching it.
In any case, while we’re feuding about this, games are changing beneath our feet. Do you want to know the real reason we’re fighting overSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? It’s not becausejournalists hate gamers, orbecause of a trans flag, or even because ofwhat they did to Batman. It’s because they made this thing a live-service MTX-fest, and nobody really wants that.
When I say nobody, I mean nobody. No body. No single person looked at the worldRocksteadyhad created and thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if it took nine years for the follow up and it’s an always-online endless grind with a seven hour campaign?’. This is not a thing people wanted. Even people who enjoy live-service games likeDestinywant something like Destiny.Suicide Squad doesn’t commit to being a Destinybecause it needsa single-player campaign wedged in as the selling point, and its live-service options are currently far more barren than a true live-service would be at launch.
There has been a fundamental shift in how games are developed. This has always been a business, but game ideas used to start as just that - ideas. Some guy would think of a cool concept for a game, get together with friends to make it, and hope it made enough money for the same group of friends to make a sequel. It started with ‘this would be cool’ and the cash followed. These days, it’s all backwards.
Yes, the guy with the idea used to pretty much always be a cishet white man, and now there’s more diversity in the field. This correlates with the issues we’re seeing, but it’s not the cause. It’s entirely unrelated. You can not like a story, or trope, or the fact your favourite characters die sometimes, but that’s not the reason it feels like gaming is pushing you away. It feels that way because it’s true.
It’s not deliberate. Gaming is a business that seeks eternal growth, hence why companies are still doing layoffs during growth because that growth was smaller than expected. Gaming wants as many fans as possible, but it’s going about the whole thing very clumsily. It sees how much money games likeApex LegendsandFIFA/EA FCmake (73 percent of EA’s revenue in 2023 Q4 was from live-service income like Apex battle passes or FUT packs), and wants that money too. It’s no longer ‘have idea - make money with it’, the process is now ‘this thing makes money - gimme an idea’. It’s backwards.
That same report says Apex’s profits are falling, which indicates why publishers want to keep adding revenue streams to their old favourites.
Games aren’t made for real players anymore, and it’s not because they’ve gone woke or are inserting the writers’ political views at the cost of developing the game and its narrative. It’s because people enjoying and appreciating a game has fallen too far down the list of priorities. Instead, they just need to pay and keep putting money in the slot machine. So games are designed as slot machines, and nobody enjoys them.
Suicide Squad feels like a relic of this era that hopefully is coming to a close, but the fact is regardless of what the behind the scenes VTs say, no one wanted this sort of game. It exists because, if successful, it has a format that allows it to make a lot of money. But because no one wanted it, it’s unlikely to be successful, and you’ve got almost a decade burned in possession of one of the most cast iron IPs, to end up with a faulty slot machine.
Suicide Squad being outdated means we may not get many games so much like it again, but gaming still looks set to prioritise money and retrofit ideas, rather than start with the idea and make it good enough to generate a profit. Games made like this aren’t made for you, or me, or anybody. The only ideal player in mind is the one who can be fooled into paying extra money for shiny digital items time and time again. If you’re fighting about wokeness you are looking at the wrong thing - games have been taken away from all of us, and it’s not because of a Pride flag in the background.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League
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An open-world action-adventure from Arkham creators Rocksteady, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League puts you in the roles of the antihero squad. You must take on the aforementioned Justice League, either in solo play or online co-op.
