The State of Modern Gaming In 2024...

The State of Modern Gaming: 2024 Edition

Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we’re doing a health check on the video game industry in 2024 – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Let’s start with the good things about gaming because, let’s be honest, there isn’t a lot to talk about. Yes, the standard of individual games has been higher than it’s ever been in the last few years, with monster hits like “Alan Wake 2”, “God of War Rangarök”, “Final Fantasy VII Remake” and “Rebirth”, “Elden Ring”, and, of course, “Baldur’s Gate 3”. Big RPGs are enjoying a new heyday as well – though, it’s rare to find a game nowadays that doesn’t include some kind of RPG mechanics, for better or worse – while live service games finally seem to be dying a death as gamers no longer want them. Indie games are also better than ever, with indies like “Hades”, “Palworld”, “Balatro”, “Vampire Survivors”, and more taking the industry by storm. And finally, we’re in a new era for hardware, because handheld gaming has taken off even more with the release of the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck wasn’t the first PC handheld, but it is the most affordable and has ushered in even more competition from devices like the Asus ROG Ally and the MSI Claw.

Now, we’re moving on to the negative things about gaming in the 2020s, and there are a LOT. First, we have to talk about hardware. While handheld devices are doing great, consoles are not. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S released in 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic still raging and in the midst of a years-long chip shortage. There were shortages of both, but especially the PS5, for years, which led to more games than ever before in a new console generation being released for older platforms. In fact, it wasn’t until the last two years that we started getting games only for ninth-gen hardware, meaning the potential performance of both devices has been throttled by this necessity to release on old machines. Considering all this, it looks absurd that Sony wants to release a PS5 Pro when we’ve barely reached the potential of the base PS5. As well as that, hardware prices haven’t come down, and in a lot of territories, have actually risen. Sony introduced a PS5 Slim at the same MSRP as the base PS5 at launch, despite it not having a disc drive – and the Pro doesn’t have a disc drive, either. There’s an external disc drive on sale for $80, but already, scalpers have bought them up anticipating the increased demand when the Pro releases. Even after years, scalpers remain a huge issue across gaming, buying up consoles and graphics cards, and companies still aren’t doing enough to stop them.

While Microsoft hasn’t released a “pro” version of the Xbox, it HAS released a Series X that also has no disc drive, pushing people even closer to all-digital models. While a lot of people like owning games digitally, it’s a model with a LOT of problems. Not only does it lock you into a vertically integrated system, paying prices Sony sets to buy Sony games on Sony hardware, for instance, but you don’t actually own any of those games. In September 2024, California – the most populous US state – passed a law that would force sellers to admit that you don’t own digital games, removing words like “buy” from storefronts. This came after Ubisoft shut down “The Crew”, but plenty of other old multiplayer games have their servers shut down after a long enough time, as well. Only GOG.com avoids being forced to admit this because it’s the only digital platform where you really do own DRM-free versions of games. All-digital ecosystems also mean companies that own the devices like Sony and Microsoft can set the prices of games to be whatever they want, and you have no alternate way to buy those games unless you want to switch to a PC. It’s also terrible news for backwards compatibility, because without disc drives, your collection of older games won’t work on new hardware. Worse yet, you can’t even rely on digital storefronts themselves to keep existing, because those keep getting shut down, too. Nintendo has shut down the eShops on the 3DS and Wii U, while Microsoft also shut down the Xbox 360 store. Sony announced the closures of the PS3 and PS Vita stores, but after intense backlash, walked back this decision. But how long will it be until they try again? This is all awful news for game preservation – but it STILL gets WORSE!

You may argue that even if those eShops close down, we still have emulators, but companies are doing more and more to shut these down, too. The biggest culprit is Nintendo, which has recently sent copyright takedown notices to YouTube videos that show people emulated games running on non-Nintendo hardware. Nintendo has also been filing patents to try and kill competitors, notably “Palworld”, which is being sued by Nintendo for violating patents that Nintendo didn’t even file until AFTER the game came out. And even if you do buy into these digital ecosystems completely, Sony has taken its IP protection even further by trying to block people from playing its games on PC if they don’t log in with a PlayStation Network account. If you’re in a big, western country, you may think that this isn’t a big deal, but actually, PSN is completely unavailable in more countries than not. 70 countries have PSN and 120 do not, meaning that even if they have all the hardware and buy those games legitimately on PC, they can’t log in to play them. Sony walked this back with “Helldivers 2”, but recently a modder got in hot water for making a mod removing the PSN requirement for “God of War Ragnarök” on PC, while the “Horizon Zero Dawn” remaster also requires a PSN login.

But if you thought not owning games you pay full price for is bad enough, what about subscription models? Popularized by Netflix, subscriptions are EVERYWHERE now, with people often paying for dozens of them to access movies, TV shows, video games, books, and music. Xbox introduced subscriptions through Xbox Game Pass, but in 2024, it’s become clear that Game Pass is not profitable. Sony has multiple tiers of PS Plus, each offering different game selections, to compete with Game Pass, but you might still end up paying out every month for these subscriptions. And that’s without talking about publisher-specific subscriptions, like EA Play and Ubisoft+, which are even more unpopular. There is something to be said about the convenience of them and getting to play day one releases without stumping up $70 upfront, but when Microsoft also introduces tiers and starts removing big exclusives like “Starfield” from the cheaper ones, it’s no wonder that people are cancelling Game Pass subscriptions in droves. You could end up spending hundreds, if not thousands, in subscriptions over the years, and you still won’t own anything.

Despite the price of games rising to higher than it’s ever been, within the industry, employment has never looked so bleak. That’s right, we’re talking about the layoffs and studio closures, which have gotten worse and worse since the pandemic. From Microsoft shuttering Tango Gameworks after making the acclaimed game “Hi-Fi Rush” – and then turning around and saying it wants to invest more in popular indie games – to huge job losses at massive companies like Microsoft, EA, Take-Two, Riot, Sony, Epic, and more, you may start to feel like there’s never been a worse time to be a developer. It’s not just developers, either, with “Game Informer” magazine also getting closed down by parent company GameStop – which, yes, still exists, somehow. With the risk of layoffs hanging over studios’ heads, it’s now even more essential that every game that gets released is a hugely popular, critically acclaimed game of the year contender.

But this isn’t good, either. While you may think it leads to great games, it doesn’t. You only need to look at Rocksteady, once a studio that never missed, and the release of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League”, to see that these conditions don’t make good games. Rocksteady has survived this failure, but only just. Ubisoft, meanwhile, has also put out middling games for years now, and with its stock prices in the toilet, is allegedly looking at a potential buyout from Chinese conglomerate Tencent. There’s no room anymore for solid, 7 out of 10 games that, while they’re not perfect and they don’t reinvent the wheel, are still a blast to play. If studios don’t release perfect, system-selling titles, they run the risk of being axed, and even if they DO, they could still be subjected to huge layoffs – or, indeed, closed down anyway, like we saw with Tango.

Despite all these layoffs, though, big companies seem to have no shortage of cash, because the last four years have seen a huge increase in acquisitions. This is largely coming from Microsoft, buying up companies in a desperate bid to compete with Sony. We saw the ZeniMax acquisition give them Bethesda, but then, despite years of opposition from trade watchdogs, the Activision-Blizzard acquisition was allowed to go ahead. To fund this, Microsoft again raised the price of Game Pass and added the aforementioned tiers, with only the most expensive tiers getting “Call of Duty” on day one. But with Starfield ultimately a flop for Microsoft, leading to no notable increase in sales of the Xbox, it’s looking like all that cash was a waste of money. It’s also extremely bad for competition and means that Microsoft is haemorrhaging money in its games division with no way back other than abolishing Game Pass completely and going back to the old model – which we imagine it’ll probably have to do before the next console generation.

On top of raising the price of games and raising the price of subscriptions, publishers are still going to great lengths to add even more monetization to their titles. We still have relentless microtransactions even in paid games. “Skull and Bones” released at full price and was STILL full of them, and Ubisoft hasn’t yet made it free to play – even though it definitely should be. And a new predatory strategy to try and get more money from us has appeared, as well: early access. This isn’t the early access you get with PC games, where games still in development release in unfinished states to get player feedback. No, THIS early access is a model that lets you play a brand-new game a few days before anybody else if you pre-order. Pre-ordering itself is nearly always a terrible idea – you shouldn’t spend money on a product that doesn’t actually exist yet – but this new incentive is very shady. We saw it with blockbuster games like “Starfield” and “Star Wars Outlaws”, and it doesn’t seem to have helped them, so hopefully it ends soon.

But after all that, it’s still true that many of the biggest games coming out are remakes and remasters. This trend began with Capcom’s “Resident Evil 2” remake back in 2019, and while Capcom is still knocking it out of the park, other companies are also getting in on remakes – even if those remakes are unnecessary. Yet again, Sony is the main culprit, releasing remakes like “The Last of Us: Part I”, not to mention remastering games that barely need any changes – like “Spider-Man” and “Horizon Zero Dawn”. Even Nintendo isn’t great with this; while it did remake “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door”, the remake only ran at 30fps on Switch, despite the original running at 60 on the GameCube.

While we’re getting a lot of good games, the future of gaming itself is clearly in question, and there’s no telling how we’ll be playing games – or what devices we’ll be using – in just five years’ time, and whether the future is actually going to be better than the past.

Let us know in the comments what you think about modern gaming and whether you think it’s in a good place or whether you think previous generations were the peak of the medium.

And that was the state of gaming in 2024.