Aaaaah what a good year 2023 is promising to be for the gaming industry, right? We’ve got amazing shadow drops like Hi-Fi Rush and the Metroid Prime Remaster, great titles like Breath of the Wild 2, Resident Evil 4 Remake and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor on the horizon. Can we really be upset about the transphobic controversy behind Hogwarts Legacy? Or the crunch time suffered by most triple A game studios? That’s all water under the bridge now, and come on, it probably won’t ever happen again… Right?

Guys… why is everyone looking at me like that?

Okay look, I know that these topics aren’t to be made fun of, they are pretty serious things happening inside of the gaming industry and there should ABSOLUTELY be people talking about it. People that are prepared and well informed about these difficult topics. That’s why I’m here today, instead of doing that I’m just going to give you the perspective of a baby game designer and how game development can seem pretty scary, but also how I believe that all of this controversy around games is actually good for the industry. So just hear me out.

The poop was always there. We just didn’t see it before…

First I want to paint a picture for you. It’s the late 70s, you and your buddy finally managed to create a squiggly circle that one day will become an asteroid in an arcade game for this new company called Atari or something. Things are looking good. There are a few arcades popping around the country that sport the game named after the squiggly circle and kids are going crazy for Asteroids. Just make sure they pronounce the “a” sound, we don’t need to ruin history that much. People around the world (or most of it at least) seem to enjoy your game, but the majority of those people don’t seem to know who made the game, they only know that Atari made it happen. So, as you take a sip of an ice cold Coca-Cola with a faint smile and a shy look at your feet as someone screams out of excitement because they broke their high-score in YOUR game, you realize that maybe it’s better that no one knows who made the game. Life is nice like this.

Now jump about 42 years into the future. It’s 2021 and you’re sitting at home, drinking a warm beer, alone in your apartment reading through angry tweets about how you are human trash and the character named after you in the fun team based shooter game you made with your friends should be re-named because you are a sexual perv. Life is not so good and you probably deserved it. You definitely deserved it, so you keep drinking your warm beer and realize that maybe you shouldn’t be drinking it at all, it’s 11 am on a Tuesday and you just got fired after all. So you get into Overwatch and enjoy the last few moments of hearing the voice actor say “McCree” one last time before they change character’s name. Life is still not good.

Now why did I tell you this weird sort of historically accurate story? You may think it’s just because I’m wasting your time, but in reality it’s just to start talking about the fact that in retrospect, 45 years – give or take – of the gaming industry is not that much when you look at the big picture. The industry is just a teenager compared to other forms of media like TV or movies. It’s just a moody, angsty teenager who punches walls out of misplaced anger and is pretty obnoxious to deal with sometimes. But that isn’t necessarily something bad.

IT’S TOTALLY JUST A PHASE MOOOOM!

Teenagers are never fun to deal with. Or at least not all the time, and as I stated before, I think the gaming industry is going through its own little puberty, filled with controversy, cancellations, moral disputes and the inevitable corporation looking at it with big cartoon dollar shaped eyes.

Gaming is an industry that is ever growing and evolving, I mean how could it not? When it started booming in the late 90s as a more popular media, technological advancements were thriving and video games were some of the first entertainment commodities to get inside of our homes just as the internet did. It’s an ever growing market that for better and for worse, anyone can try its hand at it.

Making games is easier than ever. With just a few google searches, some clicks here and there and downloading a few assets from the Unity store, anyone can make a video game. This opens up the doors for aspiring developers to start creating and work on their dream projects, the only thing is, well… Now anyone can make a game. According to VG Insight (2022) there were more than 11,000 games uploaded to Steam during 2021, with an average of around 30 days uploaded every day during that year. And from those I can assure that no more than 50 were actual triple A titles, maybe a few hundred good indie games. I mean, maybe I’m wrong and there really are more cult classic games like Megacraft Hentai Battlegrounds.

Not only is making video games more accessible than ever before, but industry standards are getting higher and higher every year. Both triple A and indie studios are working on bigger projects, which don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing, but it also puts the level of entry for an upcoming indie studio kind of out of reach sometimes. Game developers are selling more ambitious projects and the quality expected out of them is always higher. And I don’t mean just like “make a good game”, I mean that games are expected to have super realistic graphics, have a way to monetize every aspect of the game and make it run on all and any console possible to maximize sales. If it was actually a demand of “make a good game” I think we would have less battle royales and team shooter games, we can all agree that games as a service are getting pretty out of hand lately.

A COMING OF AGE STORY… HOPEFULLY.

From my perspective the gaming industry truly is just a teenager, even more so when we compare it to other forms of media. The movie industry is like the grandpa that the gaming industry takes a lot of inspiration from, but sometimes doesn’t want to admit it. TV is the dad that tries to be “cool” in the eyes of his kid and YouTube is like the brother who just went off to college. We’re still growing and learning as an industry, and just like a teenager, sometimes the gaming industry can be pretty obnoxious and controversial.

I think it’s fair to say that in the past few years, the gaming industry has had – and still has – its few shares of controversies and issues. All the way back to Gamergate and the misogynistic outrage of capital “G” gamers on Twitter, to the more recent issues caused by crunch times and moral… uncoolness behind Hogwarts Legacy, that still causes games to leave a kinda shitty legacy behind. But as all teenagers, it’s expected of them to be shitty from time to time. 

So here’s a hot take for you: I’m glad Hogwarts Legacy was made by a transphobic, antisemitism group of people. There I said it. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not because I don’t think it’s okay or support their ideals, but it’s what was necessary, ya know? We had to take out the poisonous weeds from the bunch. There’s currently a lot of game studios and a lot of upcoming artists and developers in the gaming industry and we had to get rid of a few of them that have been there for a biiiiit too long.

The kind controversy created by Hogwarts Legacy is the kind that starts talks about separating the art from the artists (in the good kind of way), or unionizing so that game studios can’t crunch that hard on their employees, or hell, even to make big producers and companies invest on actual good “new” game ideas and not just soul less battle royals cash grabs like the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League game. 

Look, all I’m saying is this is a good thing. All the problems generated around game dev studios right now are going to make the industry grow, and both as a gamer and an indie game dev, it makes me really happy and excited to see the riots happening. Not (necessarily) because of the big attacks or cancel movements on big money makers like Blizzard, but because this is gonna start a change in the industry, and from where I stand, making a game in the future doesn’t sound as bad (and anxiety inducing) as it is now.the moral polemics surrounding games like Hogwarts Legacy or Overwatch. Most of this issues got to Twitter and social pretty quickly, creating a backlash of hateful comments and basically the equivalent of an angry mob attacking the castle of doctor Frankenstein with torches and pitchforks, but this time around the angry mob wants social justice and the cancellation of a 50 year old lady who wrote a kids book about wizards and unicorns.

And all of these stories, the bad ones about crunch or harassment towards women in the work environments of the gaming industry, but also the good ones about developers unionizing so that big businesses can’t bully and overwork indie studios. All of these events are natural in the course of a new industry growing, but just like most things of this current era of social media, everything is just happening 10 times faster than it did before, so of course a lot of us are either scared of what’s going on or really confused about the next topic of anger trending on Twitter.

The gaming industry is a teen, and apparently I can’t stop reminding you of that, but I repeat it to you just to reach the conclusion that we should just give it some time. We have reached a point where a looooot of new games are coming out each year and that’s awesome, but you know, also a lot of games are coming out and maybe that isn’t so great. As the growing massive industry that is gaming, it is pretty inevitable to have big business people looking at it with big cartoon dollar sign eyes and try to milk it for everything it’s got, and sadly sometimes -most of the times- that means soulless battle royals or team shooter open world games that just want to get you to buy a battle pass for a year and then only actually play the game for like 3 of those months.

Now no one likes this kind of practice, I’m not saying the games that do this can’t be good or fun, but at the end of the day, they are just products sold to you by a company, and that company only cares about your fun if you’re giving them money. A LOT of money I should say. And if you’re already paying a lot of money, shouldn’t the games be at least finished? But that’s a topic for another day.