The Old Industry Was Better!, Life Lessons from Games, Disgaea Mayhem - The Shane Satterfield Show 25

What's up and welcome to Boss Fight which is a little editorial thing that I do that gives me a chance to riff on some of the big topics in the video game industry for the week and this week I am going to lament the death of the old video game industry.

There will never be another game like Grand Theft Auto 6 and I feel like once the game launches everything is going to change.

Yes, this is my chance to deliver my get off my lawn rant.

To be honest, the tone of the games industry has completely changed since I entered it.

It's gone from a fun, creative, sky's the limit industry where they trusted that great ideas will result in financial fortune to a cutthroat business environment where it's trying to squeeze every penny from gamers and the actual crafting of the art has become a joyless slog of fear.

Fear of being laid off no matter whether your game sells or not.

Fear that being creative might be viewed as stepping out of line or not gelling with the quote unquote corporate culture.

Using spreadsheets and data to overpower common sense.

Now don't get me wrong, I've been in this industry for 30 years and I will say that a lot of the old heads were definitely incompetent, but they made the industry fun and interesting.

A lot of people who had a little bit of money decided to invest in video games back in the 80s and 90s and let's be honest, they struck gold.

Now that didn't mean that they were competent to run a video game company though.

Yet they all did because it was about as fun a job as you could have.

There was a naivete about the industry that resulted in crazy things like Nintendo's Vitality Sensor.

Stuff like that will never be shown in public again because the social media backlash would be catastrophic.

There used to be an innocent ignorance in the industry that caused all kinds of things to happen, both good and bad.

That's all gone now.

There used to be creativity, even in the coding of video games.

Think back to programmers trying to master the cell processor in the PlayStation 3, or master the microcode in the N64 development environment.

You had rock star programmers back then, people who they would put on camera to come out and talk about the games that they're working on.

That never happens anymore because now the programmers are viewed as not media friendly, unreliable, they may say something we don't want them to say.

We never read stories about how some crack programmer solved some new conundrum like prior programmers solved before them.

Look at John Carmack.

He used to be an industry figurehead.

Now he's been relegated to commenting on things related to id software.

And not officially, he just does it all on his own.