Why did you stop buying games?

[Ian C]

If it's a third down, then my own take is this: people are much more shrewd when it comes to purchasing.
The trend in companies releasing unfinished games has altered buying trends. I think people now wait off on a day-one purchase, read the reviews from the public and then make a decision.
Case in point: Dishonoured 2. I was ready to make a day-one purchase but read the reviews. Still not bought it.

[Destraex]

I did not get whether they included steam or other digital sales in that video. If not then I don't care as they don't know anything worth a damn.

As for my take. They can freakin buy the game and review it when it comes out with everybody else. That way they might actually play it before judging it. The smart people will wait until after release for a proper view point from real gamers.

My take though is that AAA titles have stagnated Hollywood style and people are just bored of the reskins. That is the yearly titles in a franchise that are not actually introducing anything new to play with. The experience is exactly the same as it was 15 years ago.

Having said that I got so bored this year while waiting for the likes of star citizen I did buy more games than I normally would and more games like battlefront and battlefield I would not normally bother with.

The everything seems to be a walkthrough instead of a game comment I agree with.

[Gusington]

The games most often accused of a lack of innovation I have never played anyway, like GTA, Mafia, etc. so maybe that has made me immune to the malaise to some extent. If I played any of those games now they would blow my mind because I have never played any iteration of them ever.

[undercovergeek]

I don't this has happened to me - yet

It's taken awhile but I liken my gaming to a teenager drinking, anything, everything, cheap, expensive, big ones at Christmas and birthdays

But as I've got older it's refined itself into what I know and what I like and that inherently reduces intake and if there is nothing that ticks the right boxes coming over the horizon than reach into the cupboard for comfortable classics until there is - again guaranteeing a reduction in purchasing

[airboy]

My limitation is time.  It takes time to learn a game system.  I tend to purchase only 4-6 game systems a year. 

Example: I've been playing a lot of Order of Battle.  I learned the system and then have been playing the various campaigns.  I can get into the campaign without having to dig through yet another system.  I'm a lot more likely to play a system I know (Strategic Command, Fallout, gold box D&D, etc....) than learning an entire new system.  It took me 6 months to a year to get to my level of understanding of the Dominions games.

They are as big of a blast as they always have been.  But I've never been one to even buy a game a month of a new system.  Who can learn and really enjoy playing that many systems?  And I have a bunch of great systems that I have not learned how to play yet (Twilight Struggle, Pathfinder, etc....).

[Rayfer]

The games most often accused of a lack of innovation I have never played anyway, like GTA, Mafia, etc. so maybe that has made me immune to the malaise to some extent. If I played any of those games now they would blow my mind because I have never played any iteration of them ever.

Finally got to watch the two videos. I found both to be very interesting. But like Gus, I don't play the type of game they mention most. My interest in pc gaming remains strong.

[Gusington]

^Yes...feel the gaming energy flow through you!

[demjansk1942]

A lot of you talked about learning a new game system.  I totally agree, I bought games during the Steam sale.  I still play Panzer Corps all the time - love it.  I was into the Battlefield series quite a bit, bought the last one and poof, lost all interest in fps games.  Now, I am back into slow paced strategy games. I will tend to stay away from full priced games plus I also don't have the time to play everything.

[MengJiao]

I view this problem as almost exclusively with the "big budget" releases.  As the video points out, "indie" developers are keeping the flame alive.

  Perhaps its the uncanny wall that an academic British game research team has postulated.  Their theory is that you never get over the uncanny valley because the uncanny wall just gets higher and higher.  They also postulate that the Japanese term shaine-wan (something like "not strange") that the originator of the term uncanny valley in 1970 has been mistranslated.
  Anyway, so what happens is that the big budget releases pour more and more money into making "Human" seeming actors/agents in their games BUT these trigger a progressively more and more insidious disgust response (so in my case in the Mordor game I came to hate the human agents and prefer the Orcs because the Orcs stayed away from the uncanny wall while the human forms violated it more and more disgustingly) while Indie games like Invisible have cartoon agents -- these don't have the uncanny wall problem.  Measurements of human brain responses to uncanny wall effects suggest that it is the repeditive action predictor neuronal networks that get progressively fed up with uncanny wall problems and that more technically sophisticated viewers just get more and more disgusted with the violations of the predictor networks.
  So 1) the money AAA games spend just makes players more and more subliminally disgusted (and burnt out)
2) the more sophisticated players get burned out faster (due to uncanny predictor violations)
3) so gradually the more money the AAA games spend, the more subliminially disgusting they become (due to predictor violations)

[FarAway Sooner]

MengJiao, can you define those terms?  Your explanation seems... uncanny.

;)

[Rayfer]

MengJiao, can you define those terms?  Your explanation seems... uncanny.

;)

+1

[Nefaro]

I usually enjoy learning a new system.  It's probably the reason I purchased so many.

When the game starts getting bogged down in micro-hell, or I feel like I've figured out the mechanics enough to easily beat the AI, or I keep jumping around to learning other games and forget what I was doing in my Saved game, are the points I just move on and put it back in "the stack".


Learning a new system is usually fun and fairly easy to me, but it's not always the case.  Such as flight sims where you have to do a bunch of mind-numbing hardware setup, and documentation of your setup, long before actually getting to the enjoyable learning bits.  Wish they each came with full HOTAS presets, of all the popular ones, built in.  Then it would just be a matter of writing it all down.

It's also annoying having to dig around internet searches to figure out how a game works.  In-game documentation, you bastids!  And, at the least, useful tooltips for everything.

[MengJiao]

MengJiao, can you define those terms?  Your explanation seems... uncanny.

;)

  In 1970 a Japanese guy working on robots postulated that as robots became more humanoid there would be a stage where they were not-quite human and this would cause people to find them more disturbing than machine-like robots or perfectly human robots.  This notion has been codified as the "uncanny valley" and in neurobiology the theory is that the human brain automatically and subliminally models bodily motions (of its own body and others) and robots tend to violate the brain's predictive models of body motion. -- triggering the uncanny feeling of disgust or disturbance. 
  The assumption has been that as robots or game models of human forms improve, the uncanny valley response will go away, but recently academic researchers on games have proposed that there is an uncanny wall and as games get better at modeling people the subliminal feeling of disturbance just gets worse.  It seems like this would be especially true of all the human drama heavy stuff that AAA games work at so hard with the result that they burn out their players with subliminal disgust based on violations of the predictive models in player's brains.

[FarAway Sooner]

Meaning our brain doesn't expect perfection from Minecraft characters, but as they start to look more person-like, our brain's expectations grow, and this leads to rejection of the cut scenes, etc.?  Interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's the primary factor at work here.  Not for me, anyways...

[Rayfer]

MengJiao, can you define those terms?  Your explanation seems... uncanny.

;)

  In 1970 a Japanese guy working on robots postulated that as robots became more humanoid there would be a stage where they were not-quite human and this would cause people to find them more disturbing than machine-like robots or perfectly human robots.  This notion has been codified as the "uncanny valley" and in neurobiology the theory is that the human brain automatically and subliminally models bodily motions (of its own body and others) and robots tend to violate the brain's predictive models of body motion. -- triggering the uncanny feeling of disgust or disturbance. 
  The assumption has been that as robots or game models of human forms improve, the uncanny valley response will go away, but recently academic researchers on games have proposed that there is an uncanny wall and as games get better at modeling people the subliminal feeling of disturbance just gets worse.  It seems like this would be especially true of all the human drama heavy stuff that AAA games work at so hard with the result that they burn out their players with subliminal disgust based on violations of the predictive models in player's brains.

Thanks for the clarification MJ. You're earlier post makes sense now. Perhaps we subconsciously prefer abstraction over ultra-realism?