American publishers are ruining the video games industry – Reader’s Feature

Following the closure of BioWare, a reader is worried that the root of the video games industry’s problems lies in greedy publishers from across the pond.

This year has been so strange for me as a lifelong gamer. I keep reasonably up with the news, thanks to GC, and I understand that most companies are in a bad place right now. Or at least most American companies are. Japan, and even Europe, seems to be largely fine but for some reason nobody ever talks about that.

BioWare on Thursday was the final straw for me, especially knowing how much debt EA has put themselves into, just to make their execs even richer. It’s when I realised that the games industry as we know it is dead and what’s going to replace it is not necessarily anything I’m interested in. Especially with the shadow of AI about to make everything 10 times worse.

And then I look at all the great games released this year… Resident Evil Requiem, 007 First Light, Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, Saros, Pragmata, Star Wars Zero Company, Star Wars: Galactic Racer. It’s literally one of the best years ever, except it’s also easily the worst.

I didn’t realise at first but all of those games are either Japanese or European made, with the exception of Zero Company – whose developer was so badly treated by EA that they couldn’t pay their staff in the last few weeks and was only able to bring some of them back when it was confirmed a hit.

That almost says it all, I think. I’m sure there’s been plenty of good American games this year, especially indie ones, but I don’t happen to have played them. Forza Horizon 6 was good, I heard, but I don’t have an Xbox [Forza Horizon is made in the UK – GC]. Big Walk was meant to be good, but I think that developer is Australian.

I’m not suggesting for a second that Americans can’t make good games, obviously they can, but what I am suggesting is that American big business is what is destroying the games industry. When people started saying that PlayStation is basically an American business, because they’re based there now and act like an American company, I didn’t really know what they meant but it’s becoming obvious now.

On the one hand you’ve got companies that seem to have a vested interest in the games industry and its future, who want to keep it going and do good work, but they’re almost exclusively not American. I mean, even Rockstar North are Scottish!

Some of my favourite video games ever are American, from The Last Of Us and Destiny to Half-Life 2 and God Of War. And, of course, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. It’s not a question of talent it’s a question of publishers being terrible at managing these amazing developers and their answer to any problem always being to lay off people.

Japanese companies have people that have been working there for 40 or 50 years and they value that; they encourage them to stay because they know they’re highly skilled and can train up newer people. To American companies though everyone’s just an obstacle to more profit. Why employ hundreds of talented people when you can cut them by a tenth and have AI do the rest?

The worst thing is I only know this because gaming is my hobby and I know a bit about how the industry works, but I assume all this is happening everywhere right now. We are entering a very dark time, where skill and artistry is not valued – it’s stolen and constantly reused.

This year we still got a ton of great games but what about next year and beyond? Even if you say you can live without American-made games, it cannot be healthy if the biggest market in the world cannot produce great games like it used to.

We all know the problem with big business, that’s been a problem since forever, but in the last couple of years it’s got so much worse and I now fear for the future of not just gaming.

By reader Grackle

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