Controversy Clocking Episode 12: Chasing the biggest trends and losing identities

What is the easiest way to beat or match the competition? Copy them; every entertainment medium has this problem at some point or another which sees artists taking inspiration from, modelling their own work on another’s previous contribution, or at other points looking to capitalise on the most popular trends in their genre or medium. Recently, games have been in the spotlight for the latter but not in a good way. In pursuit of the highest profits for the least amount of effort, new titles have been making concessions or worse, chopping features completely in favour of what makes more money.

With developers being so obsessed with “live service” games (which offer consistent ways to snag more of your hard-earned money after purchase) these days, it’s hardly surprising that they would go in this direction. You can’t monetise a straightforward single-player campaign nearly as well you can with online multiplayer; that’s something that companies know and will exploit to their advantage. The more modes in a new release that require an online connection, the more ad-hoc links to in-game stores, microtransactions and other schemes designed to keep players paying even after they already paid full price for a new release. Trends play a key role in making these regressions happen and the latest of these to rock the gaming industry is the Battle Royale genre, stamped onto the scene by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (Or PUBG for short) in 2017 which ranked up as the highest played game on Steam and PC for months after its release; this would be followed up by the free-to-play Fortnite from Epic Games. Both titles took their inspiration from 2012’s The Hunger Games and its formula of putting characters into a changing arena environment and pitting them against each other until only one is left standing. This genre has proven surprisingly addictive for video games, but it has also given way to some unsavoury behaviour. PUBG Corporation, the developer behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, has been called out for its nasty behavior, refusing to update and polish the bugs in the game and also demanding a full claim over the use of Battle Royale genre via abuse of copyright laws. 

However, this pandering to trends is hardly new in the recent generations of gaming; 2013’s The Last of Us drew widespread critical acclaim and soon others wanted to make their own story-driven third-person adventure games, to limited success. The Order 1886 is a prime example of how taking inspiration from previous successes can fail. A similar thing also happened with the release of Overwatch in 2016, which saw other shooter studios move to inject more colour into their shooters, though often at the expense of tone and authenticity, as 2017’s Call of Duty WW2 and the recently revealed Battlefield 5 show. This causes once consistent franchises to lose their identity and eventually their impact on the gaming landscape as well as they start to blend together in a bid to capture as wide an audience as possible. As for the battle royale genre, it is only set to grow bigger as it inches closer and closer to eSports territory; recently I checked out the gaming arena in Las Vegas and the game placed on the big screen in the centre was Fortnite, showing its massive influence in recent times.

What happened next was other studios seeing the gigantic success of Battle Royale games and working to get a piece of the pie for themselves; these changes were minor at first, with titles such as DOTA 2 and Grand Theft Auto Online adding new modes designed to tide over fans of Battlegrounds and Fortnite. The genre soon fell in line with more unscrupulous gaming practices including microtransaction based cosmetic items, many of which customers will often pay through the nose for. From here though, things have been regressing in the industry; rather than adding their own spin to existing ideas (As Naughty Dog did with the Uncharted series for example), developers are now cutting features in favour of chasing trends and by far the biggest example of this is Activision and Call of Duty Black Ops 4. Set to release later this year, it was recently announced that the game would forgo a single-player campaign completely in favour of Battle Royale style mode named “Blackout”. Fans weren’t happy, but then the framing of the announcement only made things worse. With nowhere else to go, the Call of Duty franchise proudly boasted that “Blackout” would bring new innovations after years of stagnation but most viewers saw right through this rhetoric and called them out for being regressive and not bothering to make a fully-featured game to release to consumers. To take away features that have been common-place in gaming for years can hardly be considered innovation and the way multiplayer is being placed at a higher priority speaks to a more sinister corporate procedure when making games. The higher the player base who are connected to the internet, the more players who will go to the store and keep spending real money; gradually taking away the offline features of a title, ensures this number and the potential for money-making both increase. It leaves the door wide open for microtransactions and (god forbid) randomised loot-boxes to sneak their way into online modes over time.

Overall, this idea of pandering to trends and other gaming audiences will only stifle creativity in the long run, while also opening the gates for more horrible consumer practices in some of the biggest games. Why should developers get creative and attempt to move design and gameplay forward when they can look towards the worst money-making practices instead? This regression in games due to chasing trends will only result in more exploitative practices; instead developers should work to stand out from the crowd, or at the very least bring their own style or improvements to existing sub-genres. Only then can the industry move forward.

(Images used for the purposes of review and criticism under fair use)