There is a plague that has been circling the gaming industry for months now. Few people are aware of the situation, however most people are completely blind to it. The issue at hand is that most triple A video games are not only underwhelmingly disappointing, but not even fully playable upon release. The few people that are able to see passed the gaming companies lies are noticing that the issue is not going away, but getting worse as the months go by. Why aren’t people noticing this issue? Because people are pre-ordering games and companies see that as guaranteed profit.
I personally think the game Destiny was the start of trouble in the gaming industry. Take a legendary company like Bungie (creators of the Halo franchise) and a 500 million dollar buget, the possibilities are endless. The pre-orders were through the roof. Even GameStop stated that the game broke all records of any pre-order in the company’s history. Some people who pre-ordered the game sold their pre-order ticket for an average of hundreds of dollars if they manged to get the collector’s edition.
Then like moths to a flame, we all waited and stood in line ’til midnight hit, but once we had our game, it was an utter disappointment. Sure the game was fun, but the experience was underwhelmingly bland and repetitive. It just wasn’t what everyone expected from the ex-Halo developers with a 500 million budget to play with. Bungie just told gamers that the game will change and improve over time, and with that some gamera just accepted this as an ultimatum.
It didn’t matter whether Bungie kept their promise or not, they already made back the money invested. So with gamers just accepting the fact that a multimillion dollar game can just be half full and continue to wait for the rest, other companies saw this as an opportunity to do the same.
Next out of the track were two game series’ that both came out the same day and both had issues at launch. Assassin’s Creed Unity was going to be the biggest and most detailed Creed in the games series. Top it off with the series first leap into multi-player to spend your time with buddies. Nope, the game had major bugs that made the story’s main protagonist just fall through floor or just never show up at all. Well, at least multi-player is fun right? Worse, after spending half an hour trying to connect with a friend your game would connect then disconnect in an instant. If you did managed to finally get through, sometimes you or your buddies will be an invisible zombie, lost in the screen where no one is around.
At least we still have Halo, right? Halo: The Master Chief Collection was a HD remake of all the classic Halo games from the original to the latest game, Halo 4. Add in the fact that each game had their own source of multi-player maps, modes, and the ability to play the entire Halo campaign with friends was more then enough reason to freeze in line ’til midnight for. It was a huge let down with the campaign mode so broken that the game would delete your save file without any reason. The multi-player was worse due to the fact that it literally took players an average of an hour just to find one match.
Needless to say, these games went on to be complete disasters with critics given both games low scores, but due to pre-orders the games sold very well. Both companies just put a statement apologizing for the issues and say that they will be working hard to improve the game soon. Once again gamers wait.
Even now, big budget games are still half baked and have a huge problem even running correctly. Drive Club, as racing video game, was promised to be this big open world racing game and a love note to all who love cars. Pre-orders went in, in return a broken racer was given. Hardly any racing matches, most tracks having bugs, and most players can’t even start the game up without an error popping on screen.
Even last week, Dead or Alive 5 Last Round was a huge fighting game to grace the new consoles with all sold content rolled into one game. PlayStation 4 fans had a blast, Xbox one fans had crashed that just stopped the game from even playing. Another game that had decent pre-orders, but wasn’t delivering what was promised. To this day all the games covered are still, “being improved” and it just makes hardcore gamers sick.
Many of us are giving up a full nights rest to stand in line just to get and play these games. Some are even requesting or skipping the next day and missing a while day’s pay just to play. With that kind of devotion gamers put out their, shouldn’t developers do the same? Why should they? Pre-orders tell them that no matter what happens, they have a guaranteed sale. Just pump more action packed ads on YouTube and offer pre-order exclusives and gamers will plop down five bucks easy.
So how do we break the chains of repetitiveness? Stop pre-ordering games in general. The point of pre-ordering in the past was to guarantee a copy for you no matter what. With the change to digital copies being offered over the internet with no need to even leave the house, physical copies never run out. You could even pop into a local store a week after the launch and still grab the game so there is no need to worry. In not pre-ordering, companies wallets will start to thin out and force them to rethink whether a game is ready for release or not. With this year’s huge list of triple A games on the horizon, I refuse to have this year be a repeat of the last. Companies need to know that we are the consumers and without us, they wouldn’t be where they are now. The revolt is near, will you be apart of it?
