I’d argue slightly before. EA purchased them about the same time Mass Effect came out, which means they didn’t play a part in development. I would say Mass Effect was the beginning of the end for them. Yeah, it was great, but it was the game where they started dumbing things down and moving away from the CRPG into bland action games. Mass Effect was the start of the path towards Anthem and then trying to make Dragon Age into a multiplayer live-service thing, which ended up as Veilguard.
Comment on EA: Ruin Everything
thoro@lemmy.ml 2 weeks agoYeah when EA purchased them.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Fmstrat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Oddly enough, of their top 10 best selling games, Mass Effect was the lowest, and newer games were better selling. So sales figures say otherwise. Dumbing things down is bad for one audience, but good for another.
Dojan@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
I wonder how much this is because of dumbing down, and how much it is because the market got larger. For example in the year 2002, The Sims was the highest selling game of all time, at ~6 million copies.
At the time, the perception of video games was still a hobby of sweaty nerds. Some years later the Wii launched, and it became really popular as a family console. It had some sports games, and I think it did a lot to get a foothold on a more general market. Games weren’t just for sweaty nerds anymore. Although even then, a lot of people didn’t play games.
Then at some point the marketing shifted. Games had broader stories, they tried for more mass-market appeal by selling cinematic experiences and whatnot (remember the awful QTE era of like the late-2000s early 2010s?)
At that point, I think gaming in general had broadened its appeal. A lot of people had consoles, PC hardware wasn’t prohibitively expensive, etc.
I don’t doubt that dumbing down games has had an effect, by making things simpler and flattening the learning curve you make it more accessible. That’s a given. But I also think gaming becoming a more generally accessible and socially acceptable past time was a big contributor.
Once smart phones came along the mobile game market exploded, and I think that’s still the biggest market segment, though it’s moved on from its original simple puzzle games into bigger experiences, some that even translate decently well over to other mediums.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
PS1 did a lot to legitimize gaming, probably more than Wii. Up to the SNES/Genesis generation, consoles in particular were perceived as kids’ toys. With PS1, Sony and Psygnosis (who did a lot of legwork for Sony) advertised it to college-age folks, hiring The Designers Republic to make the marketing materials and the style of ‘Wipeout’, they put contemporary edm music in the game, made some edgy ads, and organized gaming rooms in fifty nightclubs in the UK alone. PS1 singlehandedly changed the audience of consoles away from just kids, for which Sony thanked Psygnosis by renaming them to SCE Studio Liverpool, making them develop just the ‘Wipeout’ and ‘Formula One’ series, and shutting them down altogether in 2012.
Now guess what people who were in college in 1995, were doing in early-mid 2000s. And note also that Nintendo never really switched away from targeting their games to kids.
Fmstrat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A very fair point.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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