Shocker: Big Guys in Armor Kicking Ass is Popular
What video games have become these days
I used to be a huge gamer. I got started on my 386 with VGA graphics in DOS. I still remember having to configure my Sound Blaster IRQ. Some of those early titles like Command & Conquer and X-Wing remain my favorite time ever spent in front of a computer.
I even built a water-cooled desktop in 2003 (this was back when you used an aquarium pump and hoses you bought from home depot) for a game called Planetside. To this day, it was the most incredible title I’ve ever played. It was a massively multiplayer first person shooter. Imagine COD or Battlefield, except with 10,000 players in a huge world with tanks, mechs, and aircraft. It was also squad oriented and the only game I remember that had two different ranking systems: soldier and commander. If you were the commander of a squad and successful at achieving objectives, you would rank up as a commander. I was one of only a handful of players to ever reach CR5, the top rank. At that level, once every 24 hours you could call down a strike from an orbital platform that could vaporize hundreds of enemy troops and vehicles. It was bliss.
Then came the Xbox 360 and my endless nights playing battlefield, Halo, and COD with friends. Man those were fun nights. I even had the entire Rock Band setup with drums, a wooden guitar, and a mic stand. My cronies would come over and around pizza and whiskey, we’d rock out all night long on my 120” projector screen. Unbelievably fun times.
Sadly, like many things, gaming is not what it used to be. As with TV and movies, the quality of games as well as their stories has gone downhill. I won’t get into the reasons as they are many and varied, but I haven’t seen a game I’ve wanted to play in a long time.
Although the gaming world in the last month has had something of a rejuvenation.
First here was Dustborn. It’s been called the “Antifa Simulator.” You literally learn to use speech as a weapon. It’s beyond dumb. Yet of course, it got glowing reviews from game journalists, only to peak at less than 100 simultaneous users. That is to say, it was a total disaster. Much laughter was had on the internet.
At the same time, a game that took Sony eight years and over $200,000,000 to develop was release called Concord. The gaming community scoffed as it pushed woke ideology with ugly characters and pronouns into a community not exactly known for adopting such things. Again, it peaked around 700 simultaneous users and sold so few copies Sony shut it down after only 10 days. It is literally the biggest disaster in gaming history. And again, the internet laughed.
Gamers also begged. We know what we want. We want adrenaline, good stories, great gameplay, moving character arcs, and beautiful graphics. Certainly not to be preached at. It’s really not a complex formula but game companies would rather push politics than make money these days.
Except hope has arrived. First here was Wukong. This is a Chinese exploration and fighting game with no modern politics or woke thinking in it. Journalists called it sexist and panned its lack of diversity. And it’s sold 10,000,000 copies in weeks and is one of the most popular games of all time.
Now we have Warhammer 40k: Space Marines 2.
SM2 is an unabashed class in toxic masculinity. You are a genetically modified super soldier who literally carves through thousands of enemies with a chainsaw sword. The gore is off the charts. You can even execute your opponents in hundreds of different ways that serves absolutely no purpose than joy. And of course reviewers gave it lower scores than Dustborn or Concord.
And guess what it did? 1,000,000 copies in its first 24 hours. Over $60,000,000 in revenue ($100mm in its first week). I even played the demo and boy was it fun. I’m too busy to get back into gaming and don’t think it’s a good investment of my time, but I am not surprised it’s doing well.
Maybe game creators and Hollywood will finally realize the turn away from what their customers want is not working. One can only hope.