Video games have been around for a very long time.
From APS.org, the first video game ever made, “Tennis for Two”, made by William Higinbotham in 1958, kicked off the start of video games introduced to the world. Video games systems have become more popular with a wider audience in the 1970s.
Over the recent years however, there may have been a decline in gaming and gamers. There could be many reasons why video games have been steadily losing popularity. Sometimes it’s just as simple as people have started to become bored of gaming and are looking for new hobbies to have.
While it can also be more complicated where toxicity and other attributes play a role in the decline of gaming.
Possibility Number One: “Pricing”
There are two categories for pricing: The price of the electronic to buy the game and the price of the actual video game that someone would like to purchase for playing. In 2024, according to Backmarket.com, the prices for consoles from major companies such as Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft has risen from $299 to $499, rising up two-hundred dollars for a gaming console.
On the gaming website, Steam, most game titles can be bought for sixty dollars or less, but the price of these games have been steadily growing from above sixty dollars to over one-hundred dollars. The developers of the good games are passionate about their work, but are also making the game for a profit, as one who both wants to make the game and also make an income does. Then there are the developers who are making the games just for the sake of profit only, with the player’s enjoyment and quality of the game coming in as an afterthought.
Possibility Number Two: “Decline in Quality & Increase in Greed”
There are game developers who are genuinely wanting to create a fun game for people to play. Whether it be a simple sandbox game, a fun building game, a creepy horror game, an exhilarating RPG game, etc, the gamers will be able to tell if the company or development team of the game will be putting the gamers’ enjoyment factor before profit, obviously making profit to expand and continue to make more games.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are the game developers who only make cash-grab games, the sole purpose of these games is one thing and that is profit. Most gamers could definitely tell a game where the developers are passionate about making games, and devs that are passionate about making money, and that comes from the quality of the game. Good graphics, nice sound design, and other attributes of the game only play a small part.
The main part of the game is gameplay. If the game is boring and not engaging at all, the person playing the game is not having fun, which is basically the whole point of playing games. Playing games is to have fun, not to be robbed blind by greedy developers who only want money. From Midiaresearch.com, “In 2014 the median rating was 3.5/5, but this has dropped to 2.9/5 as of 2021. This indicates that gamers believe the quality of games in general has dropped.” It only makes it worse when the game in question is fifteen to twenty dollars, making a terrible combination of bad graphics, story, sound design, and overpriced for what the gamer got.
Possibility Number Three: Mainstream Media
Mainstream media and the toxicity that comes with it can influence a person’s view on the video game. Some of the more positive influences come from gaming youtubers, game theories, story explained videos, fanart, etc. But there’s also negative influences, such as toxicity in video game fandoms, game reviews on major gaming websites, social media in general, and more. Take reviewing games for example. When watching a YouTuber play a game, the viewer may want to play that game too. So they go to buy the game on a gaming platform and the first thing that they’ll eyes would go to is most likely the review section, where it will say what views are currently the most for the game, ranging from Overwhelmingly Positive to Overwhelmingly Negative. If a game has mostly negative reviews, which will show the text in a red color instead of blue, that would make the person not want to purchase the game anymore because a lot of other people who played it did not like it and left a “Don’t Recommend” comment. But that’s just a small, sort of irrelevant thing since reviews also help make a game better.
One thing that does not help make a game progress in terms of quality is the toxic fanbase of the game and social media. Fanbases, or in game terms, “fandoms” can have both negative and positive people in them, but there’s also those fans who constantly think they know everything about the game and whatever they say is factually correct. People like that could definitely push new players away from playing that game and also make normal people in the fandom look exactly like those types of people, when they are the exact opposite of those people.
Social media can either be a blessing to gaming or a curse to gaming. Social media is a place full of differing opinions, negativity, positivity, the list goes on. When it comes to games, social media plays a big role in helping said games become popular. Without social media attention, the game would never be played since nobody would even know of its existence. But social media can also lead to a game’s downfall because of videos trash talking the game, hate-groups formed, and many more negative aspects can come from social media.
Now video games are not going anywhere anytime soon since they are still regularly played by millions of people worldwide, but if the corporate greed and declining quality of games continues, just as many as people play video games, there will be thousands, if not millions of people putting those video games down since they wouldn’t interest them anymore.
But rest assured that video games aren’t leaving, the amount of players would be the thing that is changing. If the corporate greed subsides and we get back on the right path to where game developers actually care and cherish their game, many old players would most likely want to return to the gaming setup they once loved.
