Gaming Industry Damaging Console's Reputation

With each and every new generation of consoles I find that the industry comes up with new ways of screwing over the people that keep it afloat. Many of these new ideas are trivial at best and damning at worst. I write this article as a way of pushing gamers to once again re-think how they spend their money as some companies truly need to be taught a lesson.

Let me put this generation in perspective for those that may not have noticed the crazy shift's we've gone through. Firstly, we've had mandatory installations become part of our gaming culture. On a console, these installations are extremely slow meaning we have to leave our consoles on for extended amounts of time basically building up a progress bar.

Then, we have the new "online pass" initiative that every publisher seems to think their game needs to have built-in to keep the industry from going too far down the second-hand game sales trail. Considering I trade in games quite a bit to keep this site full of content and actually promote various games... it's madness that they enforce this stupid one-off code usage as some sort of "benefit" to gamers.

Of course, then there's the mandatory cost for playing online via XBOX Live. Every game that is cross-platform between the XBOX 360 and PC is free to play on the PC unless it's an MMO and even then it's not to the tune of an extra £40 a year.

Where does the console gamer make a good deal here? Well, honestly I don't see any good deals here. I see lots of money-grubbing fascist companies grabbing at consumer pockets for funding that they don't truly need.

This generation has been the worst point to start being a console gamer as those growing up now will see this as the norm whereas only 10 years ago, games came on cartridges or discs and didn't need constantly patched, an internet connection and sure as hell didn't demand more than the price of said game at the store (which was £20 lower than it is today).

My favourite example of a long installation time is Metal Gear Solid 4. The game has a 45 minute mandatory installation to the Playstation 3's hard drive and it takes up quite a chunk of space. If I honestly wanted to wait for an installation, I'd play PC games. I'm deadly serious about this too.

Console gaming was at one point the king of quick-gaming. You could throw the cartridge or disc in and go on your merry way with any game you put in. Today, gaming is about installing, inputting long 25-digit keys and in the end... lots of frustration as games tend to feel unfinished or glitchy. Patching has become the gaming industries go-to method of making games and fixing later. We all go through hard drive space without truly noticing it.

I now put it to you, the reader that we spend more time installing, patching and inserting long-winded digits into a console than actually playing the games we buy. Yes, there are times when we should install games to the hard drive like offered on the XBOX 360 but there are also times when we just want to play what we've paid for.

When not-gaming while my console is turned on takes up more time than the actual gaming, I believe it's time to re-check the way we support this aging industry.

From now on, if it's going to cost me £40 or more to watch my Playstation 3 or XBOX 360 install a game and type in some huge key on a controller... the game just won't be purchased. My time and money are both much more important to me than some stupidly long-winded console craziness.

I'm going to point a finger at Sony because they are the worst at this point. I should not have to stick in a blu ray disc and have more than a quarter of it shift onto my console's hard drive. I only have a 60gb hard drive and the whole thing is cluttered with freaking game installations. I uninstall the games but why should I have to install them in the first place... it's a bloody console!

Microsoft are much better at this... but installation means moving the whole 7gb game to the hard drive. I don't really mind, I usually do a lot of gaming at night so I tend to install my games to prevent my extremely loud XBOX 360 from waking up the whole house. There's still the possiblity of playing the game from disc though which is much nicer than the Sony's mandatory rubbish.

The point to console gaming was the "no loading" quirk it carried for over 14 years. Now, we have console's that don't allow such an advantage. Consoles are now mini-PC's and with that we get all the excess baggage that the PC carries with it... only way slower than the real article.

I think that PC gaming is the smarter move these days. There may still be installations, patches and much more but at least it's quicker, the PC can be easily upgraded to handle spacing issues and there's no online costs (other than for MMO's).

Sort it out people. This stuff's getting ridiculous.