Full article here

Original Bloomberg article (pay wall)

This isn't exactly saying I dislike or hate everything about modern gaming but a statement about the future of the gaming industry. This is just a look at how things are right now. Of course there are some great games but still overall this is what is becoming more acceptable among our favorite games. All channels featured are below and in no way did I mean to infringe on their own content or steal it. I know alot of people might think I'm being negative or they just don't like negativity but this is just what I see when people say is the greatest it has ever been and getting better.

Cancer or trends that aren't good for gaming

Lootboxes/Supply Drops 
Grinding forever or buying tons of microtransactions 
Super expensive microtransactions for almost nothing
Certain toxic Youtubers/Streamers
Unfinished Games
Fake Gamer Girls
In Game Ads (...like ######)

The reason ghost recon future soldier is in this video is because the game was made backwards compatible in 2018 with no patches or updates even though for years it has been made clear by players there are glitches, network issues, severe balancing problems, and exploits. Not to metion problems with spawn camping, lag, 10 minute lobbies dlc splitting the community and etc.

Gaming Illumanaughty - 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgbsRLlukQ21Zzu4LYPrDBw

Ethos - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRbqsrRofDCw0Pz7rJR534A

Boogie 2988 - https://www.youtube.com/user/boogie2988

Isellsupreme - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU_qB8CakUJYEOv_LuRtRfQ

M3RK MUS1C - https://www.youtube.com/user/M3RKMUS1C

Angry Joe - https://www.youtube.com/user/AngryJoeShow

PrestigeIsKey - https://www.youtube.com/user/PrestigeIsKey
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABapWr5bncM

Curious what games or VR apps do you recommend.

We have all experienced this- getting so engrossed in a game (or other things like reading a good book) that is just feels like you are there. You become lost in it, and for gamers this can bring out the best moments in gaming. But for tactical shooters, what makes that awesome immersion? 

Immersion takes a few general elements. Atmosphere, controls, and interaction/reaction within the world. 

Atmosphere involves the world created and overall authenticity to that world. The world needs to follow the rules set by the time and place of the game. If the game is set in the not-too-distant future the world must match with not-too-distant technology. If in the past, you may have to exclude some more modern advancements. Authenticity is essentially being true to the world and the goals of the game, whatever it is. Various events that could reasonably happen in the world should happen. Atmosphere also includes music, character writing etc.

Controls are vital in any game, since it is how we interact. Controls need to be relatively easy to support the atmosphere in the world. Doing anything in game should be a nearly subconscious experience. This is where more complex games can get into trouble. When controls become too complicated, players may struggle to remember what controls what. While this can usually be corrected simply by playing, it makes much harder for immersion to take place. This is especially true during firefights and other high tension events which are core elements in tactical games.

Player interaction is how the player uses the world around them, and authentic world reaction to those actions. As stated before, if something can happen in the scope of the created world the option should be available for the player to use or experience if it does not adversely effect controls. Using light switches, driving or disabling vehicles, weather patterns etc. Reaction in games is vital as well. Enemy response should match their level of training if they spotted the player first etc. Civilians should respond much differently considering their general helplessness in most situations.

When properly balanced, all of these factors greatly increase the player's potential for that ever elusive feeling of immersion.

Sidenote: The more I've thought about it, the more I realized that graphics and extreme levels of realism don't directly lead to more immersion on their own, and that atmosphere and controls are the most important in my opinion. Games like Ghost Recon (2001) or Conflict Desert Storm are not photo realistic, and they don't boast vehicles or accurate ballistics, but they have been immersive to me though nostalgia plays more of a role with time. Meanwhile games like Arma have their moments, but it often gets in it's own way, especially in combat. Also, open world games have an interesting hurdle to cross when it comes to immersion. The worlds are massive, meaning that lots of small details have to be omitted or are repeated everywhere. Excessively repeated dialogue and empty/cloned buildings come to mind. In realistic games we pick up in these inconsistencies (or over-consistencies I guess) and the world becomes a bit less real. However with more closed off games, tiny and unique details can be placed everywhere. Place a nice backdrop where the playable area ends and in our mind's eye it becomes more realistic since our real experiences and expectations of what should happen there fill in the gap. This is much harder to achieve in a world where you can go absolutely anywhere. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a great example of this though it isn't really a tactical shooter. In between missions, the game lets you explore a chunk of the city you are in. It provides open world style freedom without losing atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf4ESnINq30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDdkKB10ouk

Thanks for reading!

https://youtu.be/ZxqQq6mstmQ

Quote

Weak AAA launches are a precursor to industry transition
As top games under perform, the industry must prepare to shift with consumer behaviour

It's turning out to be a pretty tough year for big games at retail. Watch Dogs 2 just experienced an eye-watering 80% drop in UK launch week sales compared to its predecessor. It's another data point to add to a spreadsheet of gloom that also includes far weaker retail launches for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Dishonored 2 than the previous titles in those series enjoyed. Titanfall 2, sandwiched in between two other major FPS titles, also took a dramatic hammering. Meanwhile across the pond, the world's biggest bricks-and-mortar games retailer GameStop cut its forecasts for the last calendar quarter of 2016 by between 5 and 10%, calling out November in particular as being likely to see a double-digit decline in the videogames sector.

There are two stories here, as Christopher Dring outlined in his feature on Monday. The first story is familiar and a bit dull; more and more people are buying their games digitally instead of physically. Precise numbers are elusive, but the trend of purchasing games online - through Steam, PlayStation Network or Xbox Live - clearly accelerated with the arrival of the current generation of consoles. While some optimistic voices opine that digital purchasing could complement rather than cannibalise physical sales, that sunny version of events does not appear to have materialised in reality. It's not exactly a zero-sum game, but for the most part, a dollar spent on Steam or PSN is a dollar not being spent at GameStop.

So far, so inevitable; and from the perspective of the broader games industry (as distinct from the perspective of the long-term decline of physical retail), that's not really a problem. It has side-effects, of course; one major driver of launch-week sales declines may be that people who have bought digital games cannot trade them in for credit in order to buy mint games at launch, a behaviour which has been hugely common especially among younger consumers. Overall, though, game publishers and developers are perfectly happy for their revenues to come from digital rather than physical products; if anything, the removal of inventory management issues and costs associated with warehousing and physical distribution is a major boon.

That story, however, doesn't explain everything. All of the available data suggests that revenue from launch weeks is not moving cleanly over to digital outlets; in fact, that transition may only account for a small fraction of the declines we've seen in so many of the industry's top franchises recently. Adding in second-order effects (like the aforementioned loss of the trade-in credit option for buying new games, which has quite probably been artificially inflating first-week sales for the past couple of decades) explains significantly more of the data, and economic conditions (especially among the industry's core consumers) aren't helping, but there's still a major fall in sales that needs to be accounted for.

That's where the second story comes in - a much more interesting story that has much more troubling consequences for the games business in general. It can be summed up in a single personal anecdote. To the great detriment of my wallet, there's a late-opening games and media store right next to the station I get off at on my way home every night. Several times in the past few weeks I've dropped in to browse briefly, and lingered over the shelf holding copies of Persona 5; a game which I've been looking forward to for a very long time, having played through its predecessor multiple times on both PS2 and PS Vita.

I haven't bought it yet, though I've picked it up and ruminated over it several times. I haven't bought it for one simple reason; of late, I don't do much with my PS4 that isn't Final Fantasy XIV (a game I bought more than three years ago) and Destiny (a game I bought more than two years ago). Though I've played and enjoyed other games since getting into those two, the huge proportion of my gaming time that's poured into these two long-lasting, regularly updated titles has largely negated the desire to buy new games at launch.

I am not alone in this tendency. What massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV began has been continued aggressively by a new kind of game, wolves in sheep's clothing which present themselves as common-or-garden AAA titles but actually require a classification all of their own. Unlike AAA games which offer weeks or perhaps a couple of months of entertainment, these "AAA+" titles are engineered from the ground up to have incredible staying power. Some, like the MMOs, ask for subscription fees; most monetise themselves through selling expansion packs and season passes (Destiny, Battlefield, Call of Duty), or through charging for cosmetic items (League of Legends, Overwatch) or in-game items (LoL again). All of them are capable of sucking in players for hours and hours each week, or even each day, over an incredibly long period of time - often on the span of years.

When MMOs first boomed, quite a few figures in the industry voiced concerns about what this would mean for everyone else - but we were still experiencing rapid growth of the "core" gaming demographic, which meant plenty of new customers to go around, and minds were quickly distracted from the hypothetical impact of MMOs by the very real (and for many studios, utterly catastrophic) collapse of the AA game sector. We live in a different world today. Budgets continue to rise inexorably, but the market isn't growing all that much (at least not fast enough to keep pace with budget growth) so margins are being squeezed and risk profiles are looking ever less attractive. Meanwhile economic pressures on younger consumers have barely eased at all since the financial crisis, with occasional positive movements in overall national economic figures hiding a disparity in the recovery that disproportionately hits the games industry's most important consumer groups.

Now, this wave of long term, hugely absorbing, AAA+ titles is adding to the strain by simply removing very active consumers from the marketplace for months or years at a time. Of course, they're still generating revenue; Activision Blizzard, Riot, Square Enix and the other creators of AAA+ titles are doing quite nicely from these titles, although the danger of hurting sales of their other franchises in the process is a constant concern. That revenue, however, is captive. The success of an AAA+ game locks up a portion of the market behind iron gates; other developers and publishers cannot compete on even ground against something like a Destiny expansion, a Battlefield season pass or an Overwatch transaction, because those players are already deeply embedded in that game and its ecosystem.

Original Article

While above article's analysis of failing AAA sales touches upon several key factors, I don't think it paints the complete picture, and I would even go so far as to claim that it ignores the by far biggest elephant in the room. As coincidence has it, lo and behold I find a comment by freelance writer Klaus Preisinger on said article, who not only hits the nail on the head, but does so using the "elephant in the room" analogy.

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There is another elephant in the room of course. At the point where a $60 AAA game is but a momentary distraction, a well crafted indie game is certainly the better choice. There is absolutely no shortage of well crafted indie games these days. So if you spend 10h of not playing that one game you play all the time, what will it be? The game which sunk most of its cost into presentation, or the one with the most attractive gameplay? AAA games are too often shorthand for visual fidelity combined with lowest common denominator game mechanics. Good riddance for that 'recipe'.

This. Industry pundits wallow through the "market numbers" trying to make sense of it all through measuring ROI ratios and attempting to construct calculable risk profiles, while the answer to the big mystery of dwindling "product acceptance" is such an easy one. If you fail to deliver a product that offers qualities compelling enough, the wallets stay closed. Simple. All the marketing efforts in the world can only put so much lipstick on a pig, and even the most advanced visuals cannot hide boring uninspired gameplay design forever, period.

Rather than ringing the bells of doom for the gaming market in general, the current situation simply signals a shift we've seen in every other market that got oversaturated with the lowest quality shovelware and contrived lowest-common-denominator drivel from the "key players" in their respective segments. Unwilling to change their cookie cutter design recipe for ultimate self-destruction, they'll be swept away by the more daring developers and publishers, by those willing to wander far off the beaten track of "proven success" metrics.

I wholeheartedly agree with Klaus Preisinger. Good riddance, indeed.

PS: Case in point...

Full article

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Press Release

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“The fans are going to win”
Comic artist and game developer Joe Madureira discusses the tension between creators and their audience

 

There's an ongoing tension across the entertainment industries, one that seems particularly prominent in video games. The tension stems from differences in opinion between the teams producing games, movies, comics et al. and the fans that follow them.

The difference often comes down to this: creators believe their products and franchises should evolve in a manner of their choosing, and their audience may disagree. Loudly. It's no secret that people are resistant to change, but ultimately isn't it the creator's decision? Maybe so, says Joe Madureira, co-founder of Airship Games and veteran comic book artist, but it's a battle that's becoming increasingly easy to lose.

"More and more, I think the fans will win," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "I think we're moving towards a society where social media pressure is really powerful. There are now single voices, whether it's a YouTuber or whatever, that carry more weight than entire press outlets. It's going to get to the point where you have to deal immediately with your fanbase. Their voices will be heard."

Full article here.

Full article

I played a lot of these games on my android phone.

Below are the games I played and placed my opinion.

I encourage to share yours.

1. Plants vs Zombies 2

Status: Uninstalled

Played a lot of this before got a lot of expansions. EA rode the popularity of the original game. Uninstalled this because it really need a lot of space

2. Zombie Tsunami

Status: Uninstalled

Fun to play at the start until I lost interest. I love the physics of this game.

3. Iron Man 3

Status: Uninstalled

Played this game until I got all the armors. It uses the gyro of my phone. It needed a lot of game time.

4. Marvel War Of Heroes

Got tired of the unending card upgrades.

5. Breach And Clear

Status: Installed

Great game, the only android game I bought so far. classic rainbow six like planning for android. If you love rainbow six, you will love it.

6. Marvel Future Fight

Status: Installed

Currently playing this game, the stages maybe repeating, but I love the way you build(upgrade) your characters and it's multiplayer component.

7. Ghost Recon Network

Status: Uninstalled

Great simulation of GR FS weapons. I uninstalled it because it lags on my old phone. I will try installing it again on my new phone.

8. Assasin's Creed Unity

Status: Uninstalled

Only tried if I can have free UPlay points for my account. hahaha

Wow, just wow.

 

"We are very sorry that many of our customers continue to be unhappy with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight,"Warner Bros. official community admin said in a recent update on Steam. "We worked hard to get the game to live up to the standard you deserve but understand that many of you are still experiencing issues."

 

"Until the end of 2015, we will be offering a full refund on Batman: Arkham Knight PC, regardless of how long you have played the product. You can also return the Season Pass along with the main game (but not separately). For those of you that hold onto the game, we are going to continue to address the issues that we can fix and talk to you about the issues that we cannot fix."