gotrocks I did actually read the whole thing and on a lot of your points I do agree with you. You speak of the future and it's potential and I do have high hope that you're right, back to my arcade crash of the 80's example before, what happened right after that? The age of NES and SNES/Sega and the earlier years of the PS/N64, the golden age of console gaming if you would. It could happen again, and while I hope it does the eternal pessimist in me won't let me get those hopes too high.
You call it a transitional phase that we're in right now and we may very well be in one, but at the moment is it so wrong to call it the shit that it is? I still think the biggest issue is the consolification and no solution to that seems to be on the horizon, I don't think it was addressed in your thesis there. In large part because of the consoles even the so-called AAA titles are garbage 9 out of 10 times, I think back to when the PS3 first released and Unreal Tournament 3 was the first of many many multiplatform letdowns, Skyrim and Rage were so unfinished when they released that neither game was playable in the first week, the former being merely passable after a plethora of patches and the latter single handedly turning ID who were THE (and later one of the top) premier FPS engine company into a laughingstock. Those are the three examples I can think of off of the top of my head.
Then there's Blizzard who produced Starcraft 2 with a boring campaign with a shitty story that amounted to training to shove you in multiplayer and yet at the same time the game had DRM that never even allowed basic network support! Diablo 3 I don't even need to get into detail about as the joke of a game speaks for itself (oh look that's going on consoles as well).
I wouldn't be so pissed if I didn't spend money on each and every one of those games expecting them to be any amount of quality because of how hard the developers claimed to be working on them. It's been so long since I bought a title worth buying I don't even remember what it was (It likely was a Mario Kart game or something Halo Reach was ok I guess?).
TL;DR version: I hope you're right man but I think this transition period sucks and I'm not afraid to show it, bitching about it is my primary coping mechanism.
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