One perk of working at a college is the constant stream of speakers, presenters, and authors who visit campus. Occasionally they'll bring in someone interesting. Today I sat through an hour-long presentation from a former Electronic Arts game producer.
Turns out he didn't work on massive, AAA titles but I did recognize some of his work. The talk, as you might expect, was focused at instructing college students what sort of skills and technologies they would need to be familiar with in order to get into the game development industry: C++, Lua, Python, and XML to name a few.
The most interesting - and disheartening - portion of his talk was about where the industry is heading. Most indications point toward Free to Play (F2P) as the future of gaming. I've never been keen on DLC, where publishers (not even necessarily the developers!) try to eke more cash out of consumers for a paltry amount of extra content. I'm even less keen on F2P titles where publishers literally nickel and dime gamers until outright fatigue sets in.
F2P encourages casual, pick-up-and-play gaming. It also encourages hurry-up-and-drop-it gaming because the content seriously wants for depth. There aren't any story-driven F2P games as far as I'm aware, and that's the sort of game I like to play most.
F2P titles where you buy items, upgrades, and equipment in order to gain a competitive advantage (Pay to Win or P2W) is another story altogether.
This alarming trend toward the casual and mainstream really got to me. It might soon be time to go back to playing cards. People don't play cards as much as they used to.
P.S. Bonus reading on Free to Play methodology
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