This week was low-key the worst in modern video game history - Reader's Feature
A reader is disturbed by the amount of bad news in the video game world at the moment, especially as most of it involves issues that have been brewing for many months.
We are in a strange situation right now with video games, where almost all the news is terrible and yet great games continue to be released. This has the side effect of masking the serious issues from many gamers, who either don't know or don't care about what's really going on.
As long as games as good as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Monster Hunter Wilds are still coming out then everything must be fine, right? Wrong.
What disturbed me this week, while reading the Metro, is that apart from job cuts (although they were implied) it had examples of all the biggest problems going on. What I found extra worrying is not only did they happen all at the same time but they're all long running issues that show absolutely no sign of being fixed.
Perhaps the most obvious problem was the growing inevitability of £80 becoming the default price for big name games. At this point it'd be a victory if it only increases to £80, because GTA 6 will almost certainly be more.
What was so awful about this week's news is that we had two big industry figures telling us that actually we shouldn't complain, we should get a second job to afford the games and just eat the cost.
I wouldn't necessarily expect better from someone like Randy Pitchford, but hearing the ex-Sony guy saying that we shouldn't complain just shows how out of touch these execs and decision makers are. Increasing costs will lower the number of games people buy and that means a lot of titles and companies are just going to have the door slammed in their faces.
People's money is not going to stretch as far as it used to and that is going to be a big problem for some games. Many are already predicting Marathon will either be a flop or just cancelled before it gets a chance, and it's not hard to see why. Nothing about it looks appealing and Sony seeming to be looking for any excuse to shut down Bungie completely, at the loss of hundreds of jobs.
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Oh, and the reason for Bungie's downfall? Corporate greed, according to the people that used to work there. That's not exactly shocking news but there it is in black and white: all these problems could've been avoided if Bungie's bosses had thought of the company first and not themselves.
But then we also had the revelation that the boss of Take-Two doesn't play video games and has no interest in trying out GTA 6, even though he totally could. This is also a massive non-surprise and probably very common in the games industry, where decisions are made on a spreadsheet and not from a place of passion or ambition.
Sometimes they just seem to lack basic competence though, such as the lack of any plan for when games become too expensive and time consuming to make – a problem they must have seen coming years ago. This was illustrated perfectly this week by Hideo Kojima saying his Metal Gear spiritual sequel won't be out for five or six years, even though he announced it over a year ago.
The amount of time it takes to make a game is out of control, but nobody is doing anything about it. And then to finish we had the rumour that Sony is only going to have a State of Play this summer, not a full showcase, or possibly have nothing at all in terms of not-E3 events. Thereby setting us up for another 12 months of no major announcements and only one or two releases. More Trending
I don't want to get anyone down, but I do think it's important to point out that just because good games are still coming out it doesn't mean that it's not chaos behind the scenes, which ultimately is only going to lead to even greater disaster if none of the problems are dealt with.
By reader Ollie
The reader's features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@metro.co.uk or use our Submit Stuff page and you won't need to send an email.
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