Gaming is no longer fun in many areas. The communities that sprung up in the early 00's are now defunct and have been shut down for several years. People have moved towards streaming and YouTubers only seem to be in it to get picked up by larger companies. The deep-rooted movement of gaming culture going into streaming has left people a bit wary of buying games. Now instead of seeing gameplay videos they wait for their favorite streamer to play the game to see if its any good. Reviews and scores can no longer be trusted, and with the recent debacle of #Gamergate a lot of people have turned to hating reviewers because its the "in" thing to do. Journalists and reviewers who had nothing to do with the underlying problem of #Gamergate are being hated for their review scores of popular games, many games are released outright broken and deserving of low scores. But let's face it: unless you have a journalism degree, you can't get your foot in with major review sites, and unless you have thousands of dedicated readers, no independent site will proudly display your writing. No one has time to read detailed reviews, they'd rather watch them.
Hype trains have derailed as $60 games only have $30 worth of on-disc content while DLC that costs $40 or more completes the experience. I'm not sorry to say: Destiny is only half of a game. Day one patches are commonplace and special editions charge more for season passes. Others have packed in much more content and didn't promise to "finish the fight" with 10 years worth of DLC on dying last gen systems. Size doesn't matter when more than half of the map area is unpopulated or has nothing to offer in terms of loot, things to see, or enemies to fight. Speaking with our wallets doesn't matter when there are 10 million other gamers who dive blindly into recycled IPs.
There is no need for written reviews anymore. No one reads. No one shares. That's the sad truth. Feedback as to how to improve my writing style would have been greatly appreciated, but almost everything I wrote went unnoticed.
People want to see and hear about a game.
"Well why don't you buy the video capture equipment and quit complaining?"
If it were that easy I would have done so long ago. There's this little thing called "LIFE" that gets in the way of that plan. Gaming is such a deep-rooted part of who I am that its become mostly what I know. I realized something a while back and to put it simply: I'm not interesting. I can't talk about politics, world news, or recent discoveries but I can talk about my opinions on games. I find that unacceptable in the grand scheme of things.
After 15 years of calling myself a gamer, what do I have to show for it?
I'm not going to stop playing games, but I have greatly slowed on my collecting. I've already sold off a small chunk of my collection, bringing it back below 600. I've wasted a ton of money on games that I don't even play. Games that I bought just to have, ones that would look good in a collection. Some I have no idea why the hell I spent so much money on.
I have no plans for other projects or to keep writing reviews when they go unread. So with that, this blog has come to an end.
Keep Playing.
- Garrett