There's a Major issue with "Triple A" Games 

"I don't mind microtransactions when..."

STOP buying AAA games. STOP full on boycott for two years. Tons of excellent older games to play ten of thousands of hours.

It's insane how there are "AAA" games that require like 60 to 100+ gigabytes of of my storage.

it was horse armor, that started the rage.

I think the worst part of microtransaxtions is it incentives companies to find ways to make the experience worse so they can sell you something that gets rid of that annoyance. Like with grinding grinding levels is fine its part of the experience in a lot of games but when they sell an exp pack they have an incentive to make the grind worse and take longer so you'll pay for the shortcut

Yea it's multiple things like firing their talent every year, catering to mass audiences. When catering to all you cater to nobody.

Cosmetics in games are great for certain situations. Hunt: Showdown is a small dev studio and I enjoy paying for cosmetics to support my favorite game. Same thing with DRG. They continue to make free content and I choose to support them because I enjoy it. They don't have AAA money, so they need some other means of monetization. That said, fuck everything about Fortnite FOMO mechanics like that. All in all, pretty good video, take my sub!!!

love me some elephants in rooms

Honestly, moving back to on demand physical media sales to suppliment online licenses would be a great move for indie to AA studios. Figure have the base game, expansion packs that would continue the story and DLC that would add additional side content that helps pad out the base game and each expansion pack as well. You could still make physical copies of each, and so long as there is an accepted standard that is common enough still so folks wouldnt have to start cramming in CD/DVD, HD-DVD, Blu Ray, 4k Blu Ray, etc drives into their current PC just to be able to play all of them, it could easily work. Not 100% certain but i think all 4k Blu Ray drives are backwards compatible with standard blu ray as well 🤔... This would solve both game preservation as well as reaching "forgotten markets" (folks with a data cap on their internet or dial-up for example, yes, both groups still exist to this day). Once a game is done with by the developers they can even go ahead and bring back the battle chest like what we had with star craft brood war and diablo 1/2.

12:23 That was also due to an oversight in the leveling process of Oblivion and having everything tied to your level. Instead of making it more traditional, they stuck with the leveled world in Skyrim with some of the same problems with leveling as in Oblivion. It's just not a good design, yet they continue with it.

Microtransactions did indeed start with the Bethesda horse armor dlc, but I don't think we can blame solely them for it, because it was most likely inevitable. Corporate greed tend to find its ways.

Just stumbled upon your channel. Good content, I hope you get more recognition!

A positive thing is that in recent years games started to become more complex again, because they already stripped a lot of the franchises to their core(bare bones) and now the only thing left is to add complexity again.

My golden rule of modern games: Assume the game devs are lying until proven otherwise by what they produce. The game industry began with nerds in their garage just tinkering around and making a cool thing they wanted to share. Today, it has become a monstrosity that has its tendrils in every gamer's pocket like an Eldritch horror mind controller. We created these corporate money monsters. It was 'give a mouse a cookie' and now here we are. "Just this one micro transaction..." "Well, this DLC is on sale..." "Ah, well I had this on my wishlist..." They are FEEDING on you. The game industry is a parasite that eats your wallet, and demands for more. They get away with it over and over and over, because we give in over and over. Starve the parasite, return to retro, enjoy your backlog, stop buying, stop preordering, stop eating the DLC bait. Absolutely agreed, make them earn it.

I dont mind micro transactions in a game where that is pretty much the focus. Like fortnite for example or the early days of love nikki dressup queen. And I have no problem grinding through quests and content I wouldnt normally play to get the free cosmetics. But in a game like wow or eso I would *never* pay for cosmetics. I want a good game, not to run around in a half fleshed out game where no one is really having fun, just grinding because that's the only way the devs can get people to spend more hours in the game.

It all started with Deus Ex: Invisible War...

Ah yes, Morrowind. The Immersive sim with simplified RRG systems. Miss that.

several issues compound: - greedy monetization - bloated budgets due to production values - inflexible delivery timelines - marxists inserting DIE - american politics bleeding into games - DRM affecting performance & ability to preserve games long-term -lack of risk-taking, leading to rehashed stories, gameplay and franchises

There was a time i used to play AAA games only, but 3 years ago i started playing jrpgs because i got bored of AAA games. I got so bored of it, i almost decided to quit gaming. I bought Persona 4 Golden and Trails of Cold Steel 1 and i haven't bought a modern game since then. I'm having way more fun now.

As a practical example of the games AAA industry trying to get mass appeal is like having a hot wings establishment decide to make all of their wings mild and then wonder why they lost all of the the people who wanted hot spicy wings. And now those people who just wanted properly spicy wings are getting ostracized for wanting spicy wings and "gating" wings to be something only for them just because they don't want every establishment to start just selling mild wings and nothing else. How dare they want them to open their own establishment for non-spicy wings or at the very least have both.

They wouldn't have to put micro transactions if the graphical fidelity wasn't as high as it is and has been for the past decade. Thanks to high graphical fidelity AAA games now cost hundreds of millions, a few even billions and 95%+ of the budget goes into creating the graphics. Not to mention many AAA developers complain that the assets and graphics aren't finalized until a few months before release so there is not enough time to bug test the game and optimize it. Graphical fidelity should go back to 2004-2009 levels, but with modern rendering technology, so that AAA games can again cost 10-30 million dollars(adjusted for inflation) and the biggest ones shouldn't exceed 50-60 million.

You mention being older... I'm 60, being a long time gamer. You are not wrong. The problems started just after 2010. Too many games are trash. Especially ones that have no single player, or needs connect to a server to play.... I avoid like the plague! That

I don't know if it can be counted as a micro transaction or not, but I know with a game like Rise of the Tomb Raider you can either find the items needed to craft the extra outfits for Lara or use the in game currency or do what I did buy the extra outfits because they were bundled with a dlc I wanted to play.

AAA is just the budget of the game which increases with each new console generation due to increased graphical fidelity brought from the stronger hardware.

I like the hair, man. I have a similar style but mine is shorter and not pink (though it does look good). I agree though, at this point, indie games are the best at the moment

Well done sir

In my older years I'm finding myself not really enjoying the newer games much, and I've just found myself going back to Shadow of the Colossus, Death Stranding, Devil May Cry, The older Resident Evil games, The older Tomb raider games and Uncharted and the occasional Lego game, My brain can't handle things on excessive difficulty levels I'm not that sorta player any more, I just love a good narrative with nothing too taxing difficulty wise at the end of my day, or play some co-op games with the mrs like Unravel 2, Mario or Vampire Survivors and then I just go to bed, Work just exhausts me so I just play for a bit and I'm retired for the night, Triple AAA games just don't feel as special or creative like they use too, tho I'm looking forward to Little Nightmares 3 and picking up Sandland soon, and Live Service games are incredibly Meh, with most content hidden behind paywalls n what not that I just don't find rewarding at all, yeah I've turned into a massive Casual gamer, it does feel pretty rare when a new game catches my attention and the only real extra content DLC type of thing is when it's story content, I have no love for content that gives me a different coloured hat or a pretty bow on my Shoe laces, and when game companies pull excessively dumb business decisions I don't even bother with any of there games or them anymore (cough: Youbesoft) it's terrible seeing game companies completely insult there long term fans, and hilarious that my nephew's and myself prefer older Disney movies and any movie in general compared to the newer uncreative yawn fest ones, I've turned incredibly cynical over the years, oh I see myself going on a rant so I'll leave it there, I'm attempting to play something now but I'm just staring at the title page Shadow of the Colossus on my PS3 it's telling me to push start, but that music is just way too relaxing, I don't even think I'm in the mood for it.. oh I'm just gonna put on that movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks and go to bed, guaranteed I'll more than likely be asleep in the next 15min, thankyou heaps for this vid you've put together, catch ya on the next one

I like how you referenced the souls games. I want to point out that the only company that still consistently releases GOOD games is from-soft. Pretty much every other major game company only releases pump and dump scams called games (looking at you blizzard / diablo 4).

I enjoyed this.

I don't mind the idea of micro transactions for cosmetics and smaller things that aren't pay-to-win or affect core gameplay, but when they cost an arm and a leg it makes absolutely no sense to me. If a character skin is $25 then I AIN'T BUYING IT. But if there were good cosmetic items for a few $ I would be more inclined to pick something up every now and again - it also depends on if it's a game I'm playing long term or not. But on the note of AAA being disappointing, 100%. I've been having so much fun with indie titles lately, that's where the fun really is 😎

Microtransactions became the downfall of AAA games.

good video.

The whole "triple a" thing, it's concept, how it is now, it's definition and value...it's funny for me because it reminds me of how similar it is to the whole broken credit ratings of banks; they're really just a pile of negative-value sh!t, masquerading as prime-grade products. You buy them, and you get negative, not zero, negative experience. You lost money for a bad product, a bad product that you continually pay for after paying for it, wuh?... Games aren't rated and appreciated as they should really be, they are simply labeled as they are arbitrarily sold. It's a product rating and labeling system that's so broken that, smaller games that provides way better experience per time and cost, has to jump through more hoops to be out of the market, while supposed "guaranteed quality" 70-120 buck titles that can't even work properly out-of-the-box, gets passed through the checks, and right up the storefront.

*I love seeing developers release a trash game and then their whole corporation collapses 👍👍👍👍 that will teach others to put their best foot forward and stop making the same mistakes that have been made for 10 years now. Be Creative, Listen To The Fans and DO SOMETHING GREAT* 🌈🙌

As gamers we've never had it better, you're really nit picking here. AAA is a term brought to us by, you guessed it, the paid gaming media. It never meant anything other than marketing hype. Just because a small 5 man team made a game, doesn't make it any less "AAA" because of that. Also the mechanics and general gameplay of Skyrim are leaps and bounds better than Morrowind. I loved Morrowind, but I wish the gameplay was as tight as Skyrim, you can really see how far Bethesda came in those 3 games. The RPG aspect of Morrowind was interesting, but in the context of a video game it made zero sense to swing your sword point blank at something and miss it. The same goes for lock picking. I'm sure there's more examples but you get the point. They didn't "dumb it down" they made it make more sense to a broader audience. We probably only got Skyrim because Oblivion was so well received.

Many gamers would rather spend $100 or more for a 30 year old game than buy the current garbage activist manifestos.

sorry man but I had to dislike for that hair