It Feels Strange to Go Back to a Slow Start for the Year

[A Link In Time]

Over the last three years, we had some of the best games of the year release early on in the year. There was The Witcher 3 in May of 2015, Uncharted 4 and Overwatch in May of 2016, and Breath of the Wild in March of 2017. By comparison, this year feels like a slow starter. Sure, there were some great remakes and ports in Shadow of the Colossus and Bayonetta 1 + 2, respectively, but nothing new that was amazing. Maybe God of War will be the game in a few days, but I have tempered expectations for franchise reboots. It just feels weird to go back to these early year droughts after a few years with amazing starts.

Do you feel like the current generation is starting to slow down? Are you bothered with the lack of high profile game releases early in 2018 or are you content with catching up on your backlog?

 

[Castle]

Welcome to the second collapse of the video game industry. Fortunately it will be more like a cleansing than the apocalypse, since it will only be the big mega corporate aggressively anti-consumer publishers who bite it. You see, after over a decade of subjecting gamers to their lies, exploitation and increasingly shoddy product, the AAA video game companies have found themselves without a consumer market. Oh- and they have been pricing themselves out of business by investing everything on expensive graphic technology that requires them to sell a ridiculous number of copies in one week just to recoup production costs.

They literally cannot afford to make games anymore. Who knows how long the Big Three corporate publishers can hold out? Their PR is unsalvagable at this point. Well, Ubisoft and even Activision might stand a chance of reclaiming some semblance of consumer faith but the stink of EA's sordid reputation will pursue it to its grave.

But don't fret! Nintendo will survive!! So will Sony and Microsoft for that matter. They'll just have to figure out how to restructure their business to accommodate less expensive projects from smaller middle market studios. You know? Just like how things used to be! The games we see might not be as shiny as we've gotten used to, but we'll get over it.

In the meantime, before anyone gets their act together, we'll have to suffer the slow drip of 'meh' still oozing out of the corporate video game labs. Oh, and uh- play indie and middle market stuff like on Steam and GoG and even Playstation and Switch have a lot of good stuff buried in their online stores oh and check out Kickstarter it gets a bad rep...