When did games become so soft?

does anybody else notice how soft games have become the past 10 years I remember when GTA San Andreas came out in 2004 you could kill the police you could kill moms you could kill dads you could have sex with prostitutes and basically engage in the most depraved nonsense imaginable fast forward to 2024 and games are so afraid of offending people they won't even let you misgender somebody now guys just first off I have no interest in a political debate I don't want to get political about this because I honestly don't care but can we just acknowledge how much games have changed in the past 20 years Phil Spencer the head of Xbox keeps saying this slogan quote when everyone games we all win meaning he wants to get away from console games being just for us heterosexual EDG Lord males but does he understand that we are the dudes who play console games Xbox was just in the news this past week for shutting down a bunch of studios and the reason Phil Spencer gave was quote stagnant growth in the video game Market basically people aren't playing games as much as they used to but Phil is it is it possible it's because the video game industry stopped catering to Their audience now before we move on I want to Define what we're talking about here and on the left of the screen you're going to see characteristics of what I call edgy SL offensive games on the right are the soft games that they have become the past 10 years so on the left edgy games have dark humor they're actually funny they have offensive content and they have attractive women whereas on the right what I will call soft games have cringe attempts at humor not funny games they say we can't possibly offend anybody and they have unattractive women uh some games on the left would be GTA 5 New Vegas Saints Row 2 cyberpunk games on the right would be fortnite the Saints Row reboot of 2022 Fallout 76 Borderlands 3 safe for the whole family is what I would call the games on the right so now you might say Andrew why do you even need edgy in offensive games why can't you just be happy with the Safe Water down schlock that's made in 2024 and I would ask in response why do you care what I do in my free time I enjoy being able to do whatever the hell I want in a game and it's clear millions and millions of other people feel the same way GTA 5 is still like the number two bestselling game of all time and is incredibly offensive by 2024 standards furthermore it's honestly only Western developers in the past 10 years that have become so sensitive and started nerfing these offensive games uh Japan and Eastern Europe are still making the same great games they always have but to take a closer look at a very offensive game with unprecedented player freedom I want to talk about Fallout New Vegas New Vegas is one of the edgiest games I have ever played and it's also probably one of the most celebrated RPGs to come out in the past 15 years to anybody saying people don't want edgy offensive games I submit to you Fallout New Vegas in New Vegas you can go up to a war memorial and shoot it with a gun when one of the people people mourning at the memorial tries to stop you you can call him a [ __ ] and kill him there's a side quest in New Vegas where you are looking for a missing teenager and you find out these masked people at a casino have abducted him and are going to cook and eat him once you discover this you can kill all the cannibals or you can get this join them as a fellow cannibal there's a faction in the game called Caesar's Legion and they crucify people and are horrible and you can join them and do all the stuff that they do too now you might ask me Andrew why would you want to do that and I would ask well why did you want to kill cops in GTA sometimes games aren't necessarily about wanting to do something but about a game giving you the freedom to do whatever you want it's not that I have a secret fantasy to go around killing cops in GTA it's that the game is cool enough to let me do it I think this is what's missing from the whole edgy games debate people who want edgy offensive games just want free speech they want creators to be able to make whatever game they want and they want players to be able to play the game however they want do I want to sell arcade Ganon into slavery after he's been an awesome companion the entire game no but I have never laughed harder at a game when after hours and hours of great meaningful conversations with him getting to see his reaction to me selling him into slavery it was funny I'm sorry okay so what happened to The Fallout franchise well we saw this softening take place in Fallout 4 and it finally reached its Pampers Ultra status in Fallout 76 I've played a decent amount of Fallout 76 and it has some of the blandest least offensive most unfunny dialogue and situations I have ever found in a game take Rose for example a robot in the area of Fallout 76 called the top of the world I feel like she is one of the game's attempts at being quote funny I've noticed a lot of modern games like Borderlands 3 do this they think a character is funny by being annoying and talking in a weird voice well let's just settle this once and for all it's not it's not funny it makes me want to go elsewhere and do other missions when an NPC acts like this do you know what is a funny situation the atomic Wrangler in New Vegas used to be a brothel but they ran out of women to stock the brothel so you go on a mission and you find a dude a ghoul with a melted face and a robot to stock the brothel it is comedy gold there's many examples of developers doing this softening and watering down of games but it's almost always garbage Western developers doing it for some reason Eastern European devs and Japanese devs don't do this junk they're making the same games that they have for the past 30 years if you look at games like cyberpunk Witcher 3 Kingdom Come Deliverance all the coima games Stellar blades a recent game that came out these creators are all obviously making the exact games they want without fear of being censored and I love that it's only Western devs that decided not hurting anybody's feelings was their most important goal in life one of the most blatant examples of a game being watered down recently is the Saints Row Series in Saints Row 2 and three you had a bunch of traditionally masculine guys ribbing each other constantly making offensive jokes and just being a general menice also the women were empowered but did cool stuff and they were really hot these games were great the Saints Ro reboot in 2022 seems to have been made by a bunch of Jin Z College grads who just went to a seminar on how not to offend anybody and how to have as diverse a cast as possible also the main characters are gay bisexual and lesbian and the quote boss your character is of course course a woman now the interesting thing is I don't necessarily mind any of this Watchdogs 2 is a great game and pretty much had the same kind of characters and I really enjoyed that game the difference with the Saints Row reboot is that they just literally killed like six beloved characters and replaced them with these sanitized 2024 inoffensive 20s somethings that just popped out of a seminar on diversity I think most people don't have issues with gay characters in games but go create a different game instead of tinkering with a franchise what Saints Row did which was so awful to the community is they killed characters they had spent 10 years building up and replace them with these really awful characters and do you know what happened volition went out of business so I know there was a bunch of layoffs and Studio closings and that's awful and I hate to see that but isn't it interesting that a game was less offensive and got shut down meanwhile companies that make quote unquote offensive games like GTA 5 are incredibly successful so perhaps if Studios actually listen to what their fans want they would do better I think there's also just a major disconnect in the very soul of video games sometimes games like GTA are built on the premise of being as offensive as possible when you say quote but we can't make a game where people's feelings get hurt you've completely lost the plot you don't understand why people are playing GTA to begin with now it's totally fine if you don't like GTA that's great for you but a lot of people like these kinds of games people like the ability to do horrible stuff in games that they can't do in real life another situation that just popped into my head was the famous no Russian mission in Modern Warfare 2 in this Mission you play as the role of a terrorist and the game literally asks you to kill innocent people this mission was groundbreaking as a piece of art for video games do I perform the action the game is asking me to do because I am the character who would do this or do I not perform the action because it's wrong Modern Warfare 2 reminded me that games are art because it asks questions but if we sanitize games and completely remove player agency games just become indoctrination video games just become a morality sermon spec Ops the Line was another such game the first half of the game forces you to do actions that you think are morally right you find out halfway through the game you are the bad guy and you're actually doing bad stuff spec Ops the Line couldn't exist in 2024 because somebody would get their feelings hurt but there's no doubt that this game is Art and is asking interesting questions about agency and player control okay Andrew so why do games need to be edgy are we really losing anything by losing edgy games so first off let me just say that I love non- edgy games I love Zelda and Mario and Banjo Kazooie and Resident Evil I love non-controversial and non-offensive games I'm glad these games exist nowhere would I say that games have to be controversial or offensive to to be fun I just think it's a shame more from a free speech point of view that video games have become so sanitized that we've lost the ability to be edgy and offensive at all in games uh I was talking with a buddy about this and he brought up that edgy movies and books are some of the most popular media these days so why have video games become so soft and inoffensive and Bland and not controversial for the rest of this video I want to talk about why video games have become soft I have a smaller Theory Which is less likely and then a bigger Theory which is more likely my smaller theory is that artists in the Western World meaning America and Europe tend to be more Progressive as video games and gaming has grown in popularity as a hobby more people have entered this field through art schools and schools like full sale now if you think about the actual people making these games people who go into the Arts tend to be more Progressive more sensitive and less tolerant of hurting people's feelings now you might ask well why were games in the '90s and the 2000s offensives in the 9s and 2000s you mostly had header heterosexual dudes making games who hadn't gone to any kind of an art school and also culture was just really different back then I would imagine today in video games you have way more women way more Progressive people and with these people in positions of power now you have much less masculine games last night I was playing Far Cry 1 from 2004 and it is the most broy most masculine game I have ever played there's nothing like this today because video game developers have become much more feminine and sanitized than they were 20 years ago okay but that's just my small Theory my bigger Theory and much more likely theory for the change in games is because of a the rise of cell phone games and B Co this chart on the screen here has helped me understand games better than anything else ever could in 2007 $22 billion were spent on all console games so that's Nintendo Sony and Xbox now in 2022 about $25 billion were spent on all console games so every single dollar spent on Nintendo Xbox and Playstation accounted for 22 billion in 2007 and 25 billion in 2022 in case you don't know that's not good because the population is going up and yet console games are not growing there's literally no growth in the console Market the number has barely even gone up for inflation so now let's look at cell phone games in 2007 about $5 billion were spent on cell phone games in 2022 about hundred billion dollar were spent on cell phone games Phil Spencer the head of Xbox has been saying this a lot when everyone games we all win is it beginning to make sense why he said this the console Market has stagnated and there's no growth in it meanwhile cell phone game Revenue keeps climbing and climbing and climbing us people who love consoles may have been happy to see Phil Spencer buying up a bunch of Studios who make games like Call of Duty but the really funny thing is he didn't buy Activision for Call of Duty he bought bought it for their cell phone games mobile Gaming revenue is what CEOs want to get in on these days us console Gamers have become second class or third class citizens we aren't really driving the market anymore okay so in light of all this is it beginning to make sense why edgy games are becoming a thing of the past Microsoft and Sony think by watering games down and making them less offensive they can get more players but it's my theory that they're actually accomplishing the opposite while I agree it's mostly guzzy 40-year-old Boomers like myself who even play on Console anymore I can guarantee console makers that even the gamers you had are going to start Vanishing if you make shitty games as a side discussion to all of this console game creators began closely eyeing the rise of cell phone game monetization tactics and began introducing them into console games around 2017 and 2018 fortnite bursting onto the scene in 2018 is a great example of this fortnite introduced every shitty tactic from every cell phone game game and people gobbled it down and paid more for it so now companies like Microsoft are mostly interested in trying to find the next fortnite before it blows up again how this ties into Co is that Co brought about a Changing of the Guard in the video game industry there was a massive uptick in video game spending during that year and a lot of people were hired and fired a lot of the Old Guard I.E the people who actually made good games were pushed out by a younger gen Z Workforce willing to work for less money this acceler at the decay of the video game industry and making games safe for the whole family super sensitive and deathly afraid to offend anyone so just to wrap this video up yes I'm old yes I'm a boomer and yes I sometimes want to play my Edge Lord games the closest thing we've gotten recently with cyberpunk 2077 the game was super edgy had tons of hot women you could romance had suicide dark humor etc etc but again this is because a European developer did it and not a useless sensitive American developer I will be very disappointed if GTA 6 comes out and is super politically correct I honestly think nobody would play it but Rockstar generally doesn't give a [ __ ] about offending people so I'm optimistic about it fellas all we can do at the end of the day is buy games that give you the freedom to let you play whatever way you want to play stop buying this water down trash with unfunny NPCs all right I'm out of here

Channel: AndyPants Gaming

Views: 245,017

Keywords: gta, gta 5, gta san andreas, gta 4, gta 6, saints row, saints row 2, saints row reboot, fallout, fallout new vegas, fallout 76

Id: 4AXq4qz4Kx0

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024