Do studios care about the games they make anymore?

Thanks to the growth of video game culture, game development has become a very profitable endeavor to take on. But has this chance to make a lot of money driven a lot of studios to focus more on ways of making money in a game rather than providing gamers with a good game?

It seems like it’s now the old times in which developers made videogames as passion projects where they wanted to tell a great story or provide a space for people to have fun with a few examples being The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time which I actually got to play as a kid and was one of my very first games that got me completely hooked on videogames as a hobby. You can tell the developers poured their heart and soul into creating a world that was intriguing with earth-shattering scores, enticing storylines, and gameplay that would make you lose track of time. Nowadays I feel like this aspect of games is missing.

Recently, every game you see has some form of micro-transaction or hides most of their game behind paywalls. A blatant example of this is a fairly popular game called Destiny 2. This game is marketed as being free but once you load into the game you can really only play about 1/4 of it without playing. If you want access to the rest of the game you have to shell out about $570. I get free games have to make money somehow but there are plenty of free games like Team Fortress 2 and War Thunder that give players access to the entire game with microtransactions being mostly cosmetical.

It feels like a lot of these games have constant bundles and other things that come out all the time. I think the biggest example of a blatant money-grab is the NBA 2K franchise. This is a sports game series that releases a new game every year. The thing is between these years there are barely any changes! There might be a slight graphics bump, updated rosters, and a new park to go play the same game you’ve been playing for the past 10 years. This franchise emphasizes people buying cosmetics and spending money to upgrade their character but the currency prices are outrageous and the in-game prices are even more outrageous which leads people to have to shell out hundreds of dollars before they can even begin to enjoy the game (ON TOP OF BUYING THE GAME!!).

Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of great games that have been released recently like Helldivers 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. All of these games give me hope that there are still developers and studios out there that want to make a game they can be proud to publish and doesn’t come off as a shameless cash grab. I’ve had the chance to play all of these games and enjoyed them greatly, in the case of Helldivers 2 the action is non-stop and it keeps you hooked with its booming sound effects and stunning visuals while Baldur’s Gate 3 was one of the most complete games at release in recent memory, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 told a great story combined with intriguing gameplay. Games like these are the ones that I grew up playing and I hope that we see more of a shift towards this type of games in the future.