In a recent Honest Game Trailer, (which are absolutely hilarious if you haven’t seen them) a joke was made that made me think about the current status of games. They were poking fun at Evolve , saying that it was the latest brilliant shooter since Titanfall and Destiny and just like Titanfall and Destiny , we will forget about it in a month and play something else.
I am someone who played Titanfall and Destiny and I don’t play either game anymore. However, I thought it was just a function of me being a game journalist and thus needing to play the next big thing for my job. So I went back to Titanfall and tried to find some matches and surely enough, I barely found anyone playing. Destiny still had some people online but it was way less active than it was after it first released.
Then I looked at Evolve . For the first two weeks it was one of the most popular games on Steam, but now it has fallen quite spectacularly in the ranking. I also noticed that matches are a little harder to come by and since the team has decided that they will support the game as long as people pay for DLC, well, let’s just say it doesn’t look like that will be too long.
But, strangely enough, it appears that games are being designed around this incredibly short lifespan. Titanfall , for example, was last year’s big FPS release from EA. But now Battlefield: Hardline is coming out, and it’s release is being planned around gamers getting bored of their other shooters. So that means that EA and we, as a community, are banking on the majority of Titanfall players, Destiny players, Evolve players, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare players getting sick of whatever game they were playing. Yes, that means that we have pretty much accepted that gamers only have the attention span to like a game for a couple of months.
I can’t help but think this isn’t a good thing. I hate to get old codger on you, but I remember the days of the NES when we would buy one game and hammer on it again and again and again for months at a time. Even long after the release of Super Mario Bros ., for example, we continued playing, looking for new and interesting ways to master it. It was a different time back then, when games were hard and were meant for excessive replay value. Now, it feels like games are simply there to distract you for a small bit until the next distraction comes along.
It’s not just shooters that fall victim to this. Fighting games have fallen victim to the “flavor of the week” problem for ages, with new and interesting games being usurped by more recent releases, even if they have a healthy and vibrant scene. Single-player only games are even worse. We barely even talk about platformers or RPGs after they release. Few people are talking about Super Mario 3D World right now, and the buzz for Dragon Age: Inquisition is already dying off.
But without time to grow we may never see these games Evolve , pun intended. I want to see what other monsters Evolve has to give us. Heck, I would have liked to see Titanfall get new titans and more guns. To tell you the truth, they could have just kept expanding Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and I’d have kept playing it. But instead, we are shipped off to the next 60 dollar purchase to keep up with the times.
What do you think? Are games dying too fast? Do you think gamers are too quick to adopt the next flavor of the week? Let us know in the comments.