I recently finished streaming Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and it is easily in the top three games I played this year. It is a game that I got lost in, the fast travel system deliberately ignored to spend more time wandering its digital recreation of Yokohama’s Isezakichō district. It offered an astounding amount of variety in gameplay, with a compelling plot frequently undercut by the manic glee of its sidequests. Even though there is still quite a bit left for me to do in its world, I admit that towards the end of my 110-hour run, I was looking forward to finishing so that I could move on.
I have followed it up with some titles from the auteur game designer Goichi “Suda51” Suda, namely Shadows of the Damned, Lollipop Chainsaw, and Killer is Dead. To say that Suda is experimental does him a bit of a disservice; he often subverts player expectation by presenting sequences from other genres or games entirely within the context of his own games. Across just these three titles, there are takes on side-scrolling shooters, bowling, pachinko, baseball, basketball, arcade classics, and more.
In playing these games - all of which released for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 between 2011 and 2014 - I’ve come to realize that mid-tier games have almost vanished entirely, having been largely pushed out by the desire of AAA publishers to have big, multi-million-selling hit after big, multi-million-selling hit.
Bioshock is one of the greatest video games ever made. When it released in 2007, it was critically praised and sold over 2 million copies in its first year. It was clever and inventive and engrossing, but at only about eight to 10 hours of playtime, I’m not sure that most AAA publishers would be willing to take a chance on it today.
One of the biggest factors in gaming in the modern day is engagement. The longer that people play a game, and the more they get invested in it, the more likely they are to continue to support it through microtransactions.
Video games are not clinical experiences and people are not robots, so no one is immune: I played Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone for years without spending anything, and I wouldn’t trade those experiences for the world, but after only three weeks of playing Magic: The Gathering Arena that $20 Mastery Pass is looking incredibly appealing.
Unfortunately, engagement has become such an important metric that many games have live service features added even when there’s not necessarily a benefit. By all accounts, Marvel’s Avengers has a solid single-player campaign, but violence is committed against it by an endgame with an emphasis on repetitive, meaningless combat. I love the recent Hitman trilogy, but Elusive Targets - single-opportunity missions to assassinate unique characters on a schedule - and community content only serve to give players more things to do without meaningfully changing much.
Similarly, in recent years there’s been more of a fixation on the cost-to-value ratio of games on the part of the consumer. If a game like Apex Legends can offer hundreds or thousands of hours of enjoyment with minimal investment or for free, anything you release needs to at least have the potential to compete.
In a video essay analyzing games as art, Jess “Voidburger” O’Brien points out that people were unhappy with Firewatch, to the point of asking for refunds, because it was a $20 game that could be completed in four hours. Firewatch isn’t perfect - people tend to forget how uniquely haunting and emotive the beginning is in favour of the ending sort of falling apart - but you could easily spend that much money on an ephemeral experience, like a fast food meal.
It’s not as though people buying one thing that gives them hours and hours of things to do is illogical, but this attitude is preventing games from standing on their own merits. Let’s contrast two excellent recent remakes of Playstation games from 1999: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 and Resident Evil 3.
THPS 1 + 2 crams in a bunch of extras in the form of collectibles and challenges for individual skaters; even if you’ve gone down the to-do list and checked off everything as the Birdman, there are still 20 other characters with their own things to do. Given that THPS is and always was an arcade game, these sorts of additions make sense to include, but it’s also a clever way to keep people engaged and make them feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth.
On the other hand, Resident Evil 3 caught flak for not having as much content as the previous year’s Resident Evil 2, despite the original Resident Evil 3 not having as much content as the original Resident Evil 2. If you’ve ever played a Resident Evil game, though, you know that they’re meant to be replayed and mastered, that arcade-style loop manifesting through trying to complete the game as quickly as possible to earn high-powered rewards and change the way the game is played.
At a talk as part of the 2020 Göteborg Film Festival, actor Stellan Skarsgård said of film,
“The fault is that we have, for decades, believed that the market should rule everything, and the rich get richer, and that is the root of it all, because what has happened is that all the different small distribution companies, all the different cinema companies, have been erased. It’s monopoly everywhere, and they’re not - cinemas and distribution and some film companies are not any more run of people who want to make money specifically out of film, because they like film. They’re run by big corporations that want to have 10% back on their invested capital, which means that as long as they sell popcorn, it’s fine. That’s why all the mid-range films, the films that are lower than $100 million in budget, and over $3 million in budget, they don’t exist anymore. It’s only $100 million films, and $3 million films, and nothing in between.”
The same has happened with video games. Due to their lack of long-tail monetization and engagement, those at the top of the industry has decided that they’re not interested in making or publishing games that could be simply moderate successes, unique stories or gimmick showcases. It’s the all-or-nothing approach, the poison of modern capitalism that we all despise.
I’d like to believe that mid-tier games can still succeed and thrive - if the damage has been done, maybe it can be undone - but there’s no doubt that undoing that damage will be a long and difficult process.
What shorter or more experimental games do you love? Let me know! You can always find me on Twitch.