Are "hardcore" gamers ruining the industry?

[PreZZ]

Are Hardcore gamers ruining the industry? No. The industry is ruining the industry. DLC, micro transactions, season pass, online pass, no manuals, dirt cheap prices 3 months after release (*cough*ubisoft*cough*), releasing the same game on 2 or 3 different skus with added content (street fighter 4, borderlands come to mind). When you know borderlands 2 will be available GOTY with all DLC a year after release for 39.99, why bother with the original 59.99 game? Companies are wasting too much time making DLC instead of making new quality games. And also whats up with every single game getting special edition packages with figurines and whatnot at 79.99 to 99.99? I can understand for a couple of franchises to have something special, but generic games like Duke Nukem forever and ghost recon? I prefer a company like Atlus making limited early editions for the same price with bonus stuff or Xseed with the Last Story (the awesome package made me buy the game!!!). Games have never been as affordable as they are this generation, I own so many ps3 and 360 games its crazy, they are tons of great software at 9.99 to 19.99. I have games still shrinkwrapped from 3 and 4 years ago, I dont have time to try them all, my nephew went nuts when he came over and unwrapped many games and tried them one after another! Also companies like EA for making dick moves on every game they release. When you know hardcore gamers are expecting games to be 19.99 or less, something the industry created themselves, you know that something went wrong. Back in the 80's if you had more than 8 cartridges for your nes you were either a spoiled kid or a rich kid! Games like final fantasy 3 cost 119.99 BEFORE taxes in canada in 1995 and they still sold a lot of copies.Im sure a lot off you here have tons of games you have never played and never will and are still buying them when you see bargain bin prices on cool games.

[Gameguy]

Are Hardcore gamers ruining the industry? No. The industry is ruining the industry. DLC, micro transactions, season pass, online pass, no manuals, dirt cheap prices 3 months after release (*cough*ubisoft*cough*), releasing the same game on 2 or 3 different skus with added content (street fighter 4, borderlands come to mind).

I basically agree with you, I blame the industry more than the customers. Not just with all the points you mentioned, but I feel they're targeting the wrong audience. They should be targeting younger players instead of older ones, kids get expensive stuff bought for them all the time but adults tend to spend less on themselves. How many parents buy video games as gifts for their kids? Usually they'll be buying them new as giving used items as gifts usually comes across poorly, excluding antiques or out of production items if people are looking for those. For people who now collect NES or SNES games, how many were created specifically aimed at an older audience? Not many that I can think of, yet plenty of adults like playing these games as much as kids do. Targeting games at kids isn't a problem.

Plus people are buying more games than ever before. When people owned a collection of games for a console in the 80's or early 90's, how many games would that be? It would easily be less than 20, finding someone with a larger collection of games from that time period would be rare. Today finding people with less than 20 games is difficult, of course people choose to spend less on games so they're able to buy more of them. The exception are adults who are either rich or just manage their finaces poorly so they keep buying new games at full price all the time.

In the past plenty of games were aimed at adults, but these were mostly available on the PC or other personal computers. It makes sense as PCs were more complex compared to consoles, you could choose your hardware and operating systems, plus change settings for how the hardware ran and you'd be maintaining it more often compared to consoles. Adults would have computers for various purposes anyway so it made sense to target them, they'd have the platform to play the games already. Just about every person has a PC now so going back to PC games would make more sense. The problem is that people are good with computers, why buy an expensive game if you can get it for free for just a little extra work? Having extremely large hard drives and fast internet connections haven't helped, all that did was kill off the retail industry. Making PCs compatible with DVDs and BluRays makes little sense to me, why buy movies at a store when you can watch them in the same quality for free? It doesn't even take a lot of work to copy them so there's little deterent to lazy people from uploading movies. It's great for consumers but bad for the studios selling movies. The same thing happened with music as everything is digital now and easy to distribute.

By now I'd rather be playing older games to newer ones and I can find old games for under $5, I wouldn't spend $60 on a new game. Not unless it's something really special and comes in a nice physical version, and without any type of online activation. Something that would come across as a future collectible, even if I won't plan to sell it. I don't like buying things for entertainment when I know it will be next to worthless later on.