Author: A.K.H.

I’ve been working on this video for a few days, and co-incidentally, it is coming out at the same time when there is a fresh debate happening in the industry about the feasibility of game subscriptions. But let me not get into that right now. The purpose of this video is not to talk about whether game subscriptions are good or bad. There’s no right or wrong answer, because every consumer has their own needs, and every developer has their own results from using these subscriptions. So let’s not spend time discussing that. This video is simply to list the sheer number of choices a consumer has in early 2024. Just one note before we start, since we already have a lot of subscriptions to cover, I won’t be going deeper into each tier of each subscription; most of the time I will just talk about the highest tier available for each subscription to look at the best value it offers.

I’m currently working on a video about the different video game subscriptions available in the market, and during my research, one subscription seemed quite interesting and also odd. The name of that subscription is GTA+, offered for $5 a month by Rockstar Games. I’ll speak a bit more about why this subscription is odd in the episode about subscriptions, but looking at it got me thinking about how Rockstar Games maintains a special status in the industry. As seen recently during the reveal of the GTA 6 trailer, if Rockstar announces something, the entire gaming world stops what it’s doing and pays attention. Rockstar releases games very rarely. They believe in bringing a game as close to perfection as possible before pushing it into the world. And very rarely do their games suffer from any of the issues that games by most other studios have at launch. The only exception was perhaps the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online in 2013, where there were a few bugs, but that was quickly forgiven because that was the first major online game released by Rockstar.

Buying video games is a luxury. There’s no other way to put it, because not buying a video game won’t have any negative impact in your life, apart from the fear of missing out. It is exactly this FOMO that publishers use to try and hype up the launch of their games, because all of them know that customers have way more choice today than they did in the old days, and even franchises like Call of Duty can see a dip in sales if they get a bad review at launch. That is why publishers use FOMO to try and get as many people as possible to pre-order the game or at least buy it at full price on day one. And to be honest, a lot of us have games that we would definitely buy on day one, no matter what the reviews say, because we are emotionally attached to them.

It’s a new year, and nothing much has happened in the world of video games yet, so let us spend some time looking back at what happened in 2023. It was a year full of amazing games, but sadly, also a year full of data leaks. These leaks were very unfortunate for the companies involved, and in some cases, downright dangerous, since the personal information of many employees was also leaked. The silver lining for the rest of us was that these leaks gave us an insight into how some of the biggest companies in the game industry work, and these are things that no one would normally know unless they actually worked in these companies, or personally know someone who does.

So let us take a look at what these leaks taught us about the video game industry. I have to warn you though, that there will be no video footage of any of the leaks shown here, so this is one of those videos where there’s not much to see, so you might want to treat it as a podcast or something.

For the last video of 2023, I decided to do something different. Instead of reviewing a single game, I decided to take a look back at some of the noteworthy games that came out this year.

2023 has been a great year for video games. Players have been quite spoiled for choice this year, as we have had several highly-rated games coming out. Not every game featured in this video turned out to be a hit, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting.

Like I have said multiple times in previous episodes, the video game industry formally began in a little over 50 years ago. A lot of the games that were popular back then may not be enjoyable to play today, but without the lessons they taught, the video game industry might not have been as huge as it is today. Then again, things aren’t that good today. Yes, the games we have look and feel much better, but there are also many warning signs that we are headed in a dangerous direction. The future of video games is going to be very depressing if certain mistakes that we’re making today are not corrected.

In this video, let us talk a bit about the past of video games, and then a little about what the future might be like.