It's the half finished bits. Helpfully, I only pick up AAA games when they've been out long enough for all the bugs to be fixed... The last time I actively sought out a review of a game I wanted to like was pre-GamerGate. I know you asked about the "scene"...i guess my contribution is that the "scene" is the problem. I like big open world games you play on your own, so it's pretty easy for me to just pick up, say, Witcher 3, about 6 years after all the hype died and fall in love with it. And when I talk to other people who genuinely like and enjoy games, they are usually excited to find new people to be excited with.
The lead up to big game releases is fun, but the crushing disappointment that seems to go with all of them isn't. I'd rather have way less frequent releases and see more finished masterpiece level games. I understand that eSports is a thing, and speedrunning, and modding, and all that, but none of those people seem to get much joy out of gaming and I have no interest in the groups themselves. I'd rather talk to people who...you know...LIKE video games. I do. I think I have convinced at least ten people to fire up MGSV again, because my childlike glee at how great it is seems to get people to forget all the critic noise that surrounds the thing. Helpfully, MGS has a big, aggressive fanbase that kind of forcibly shuts up the critic machine anyway, one of the few franchises where people preferentially seek out the unofficial critics (o7 PythonSelkan) because what the hell does Kotaku in Action or whoever know about MGS anyway? Not as much as PythonSelkan.
A lot of the noise just screams past me and I pick up what I want to play and like what I like. I do feel let down by games like MGSV though, when I find out that the studio shoved them out the door before they were done, and how much greater they could have been. Cyberpunk2077 came out and was barely playable. Skyrim STILL has sections that are so buggy you think you're losing your mind until you finally give up and google why you can't get into the vampire castle. The symbiotic link the studios have with their online/connected audiences is a problem, in my view. They need to put out finished products that can be played without tapping into the steam community or whatever. Because I don't want to. I don't want to engage with the noise around the game and I sur dont want the constant stream of advertising for paid additional content that goes with it.
Idk. I've never been the target market for video games, and that's actually kind of comfy. I'm not a white male under 25 so it's ok for me to think Quiet is a great character and video game companies don't even care about why I'd rather play as Big Boss or Geralt than whatever disabled lesbian grrlpower character their vapid corporate diversity department cooked up.
Wow. That's a lotta words. You want to hear what an irrelevant old person thinks about comic books next?
