What is the worst thing about video gaming right now?

Rising prices, at least in the periphery country I live. It's also sad to see the $70 bullshit price tag get normalized in other places, as if videogames weren't already expensive enough.

I didn't vote for anything because I would like to vote for everything

Having no time for gaming.

All of the above.
main reason I went back to being a primarily Nintendo gamer(and some indies). very hard to get excited for a AAA game these days.

Corporations are ruining gaming. Originally most of them started as just a bunch of people with a passion to make games and then slowly taken over by people who care only about profits. Thanks to games like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 setting examples that you can just release any hot garbage and then fix it over time, we now have corporations rushing to release "Triple A" games with horrible optimization and lots of bugs with the excuse that they'll fix it later, which often never comes.

There's a lot of other issues with corporations, such as no innovation, trying to be very safe for profits, hand-holding games, plain copies of games, re-releases/remakes that have no real effort put into them, hiring people that don't actually know how to do their job and trying to insert their agenda into everything. Corporations in general are like a plague, a couple of bad eggs are enough to start a wave of good workers quitting and being replaced by more bad eggs, until there's just nothing but trash left at the company. People who value marketing over the quality of the product, care only about profits, have no idea what they're doing, aren't in touch at all with their customers, trying to pander to random demographics instead of the original fanbases, managers that care only about looking good in front of their bosses and don't understand the importance of doing things right so they prioritize progress instead of solidifying the foundation by fixing some critical bugs.

Lots of gaming clients are annoying as fuck, every big company tries to capitalize on making their own launchers and not being dependent on Steam, because of Steam's 30% cut, but the reality is if I don't own a game on Steam it's like I don't own the game at all. The 30% cut is worth it for the extra features you get from Steam and the extra sales you'll get from your game being on Steam will more than cover that 30% loss. You would also end up wasting a ton of money to develop that pointless client in the first place, losing even more money. So many features on Steam are integral to gaming experience at this point, while the other bare bones launchers other companies make are messy, buggy, horrible, lackluster and quite a few of them had security breaches and exposed account passwords.

Of course bad online play is also an annoying thing, people cheat in games, even if it's PVE games, they bring their cheats into coop sessions and ruin the fun. I think PVP cheating is self explanatory so no need to go over that.

Microtransactions are also horrible, especially in the mobile market. Mobile game devs end up making games that aren't fun to play on purpose and the only way you can have "fun" is if you pay for the fun. In many mobile games the fun you pay for is very limited and if you want more fun you need to keep paying(for stuff like skipping timers or gacha pulls or other various predatory mechanics). A good experiment is downloading hacked mobile games and seeing how much fun you have with unlimited paid currency. Spoiler: you will quickly realize the games aren't fun at all and the real name for microtransactions should just be "paid cheats"

I could talk about these things for hours, each sentence can be expanded into full blown articles here, gaming is in a pathetic state these days. Even when you have successful titles like TOTK, there's a bunch of things that just aren't good surrounding them. Like Nintendo being a horrible company that has always been out of touch with their audiences and they've always been like 10 years behind everyone in adopting certain practices. TOTK being forced into unstable 30 fps is downright criminal at this point, I'm so glad I got to experience it in 60 fps, no thanks to Nintendo.

Hardware is also in a sorry state, especially GPUs. Nvidia during this 40X0 gen makes overpriced GPUs, while simultaneously trying to pass off weaker hardware as higher tier and in general trying to make weaker cards with less memory and less bandwidth. They're probably trying to make people buy weaker hardware and be forced to upgrade again very soon. Meanwhile AMD is constantly hyping up their GPUs and then they release underwhelming GPUs that are even worse than Nvidia's GPUs and that means there's no real competition in the field, it's so bad that I'm questioning now whether Nvidia and AMD have an agreement to keep releasing trash to not upstage each other and make money off of weak hardware.

Aggressive DRM in single-player games can be really annoying but at least there's the hope that it might get patched out at some point in the future. No such luck with microtransactions tho, once they screwed the game design and balance it tends to stay that way forever, so those got my vote.

Indie games: Quality control.
AAA games: Being too risk averse resulting in creative stagnation. I miss the days when highly unusual and creative games could get big budgets, now such games are basically stuck with small indie budgets.

To be fair, it's the combination of almost all of the above nowadays. However DRM is still the most evil thing on gaming today. Microtransactions is possible thanks to DRM. And then we have games as a service bullshit going on (and not just games). The game is an art piece, a living book, an interactive toy; once I buy it it should be mine forever.

I guess I've always looked at the price of games, and gone "yeah, nah", and waited for a sale.
Because of this, games either get fixed up, or trashed, so I hardly ever get the chance to experience the day-one crap some do.

Back to the point - I guess my biggest gripe is the high system requirements of games, even ones that shouldn't need them. And even then, they still run like crap. DRM is usually not a big issue for me cos I don't often play AAA games.

• DRM - Getting treated like a criminal for playing games I own
• Microtransations - Constantly getting nickeled and dimed
• Poor quality control - Too many bad games drowning out the good
• Other - Please explain

For the others, I would say stuff like broken/bad at launch, way to many DLCs, the asking price, system requirement, etc.

I am obvious not saying this counts for every game but there are plenty, with DRM I mean either when you buy a game on Steam and then need to install a launcher and/or make an account for a 2nd party or Denuvo which is like Schrödinger cat, it either ruins it, or not or maybe it will, who knows. Though to be fair, I wish if we bought a game physical we could just play it, nowaday you just buy a box with a code, miss the time where it wasn't all such a hassle and you didn't need accounts/launchers for everything!!

The worst thing in gaming imo is that corporate greed is resulting in new models of video cards coming out so overpriced, sometimes even to the point of being blatant ripoffs with little improvement over the previous generation. Especially Nvidia but also AMD.

I've never seen so many people stop gaming on pc as I have in the last year or so because of this, in combination with how long prices were inflated during the pandemic. Even some curators I used to find very valuable for determining what's good or not in some genres I like have dropped pc gaming because of video card prices. It's terrible to see people to see people leaving pc for consoles, not because they prefer consoles, but because of this. It shouldn't be like this now that the shortage is over.

I think at the core of everything it that it is being turned into money milking source. And that has affect on everything. We are seeing cutbacks on quality to save money, seeing customer unfriendly practices like 10 editions, rising base price, 100 DLCs, microtransactions. Multiplayer games awarding those who spend RL money. Making poor quality remakes. Concentrating on what is in hype at the current moment (for example basically every decent game ruined because every dev wanted to jump on battle royal hypetrain). Exclusives for the platform which pays more.

Business and making money of course will always be an important factor. You can't run a company on well-wishes alone. But greed starts to seep in once big corporate sees how much money for example GTA5 is milking in from kids and every game will be tailored so it is perfect for earning money and completely losing on quality and fun.

I voted microtransactions, but inflating prices of games (which I don't think is highly justifiable given a) quality control and b) ever-increasing market size) is a close second.

all games are broken day one. again i broke my rule about not buying a game month one and again i got another game that doesnt work. dont buy the new system shock game, it has a fuck ton of bugs. the biggest bug it l click doesnt always register.

Personally, bad optimization & performance. The requirements of the game compared to how the game runs is just insane.
I don't mind the price cause I can't afford it anyway but at least there was a chance of buying it few years later with a discount. Now it doesn't matter. I am never going to be afford a decent pc in my country to run the current games. Most games if not almost all of my owned games are either indie games or really old games with low requirements.

Including DLCs of any kind... The absolute worst is day 1 (release day) DLC... Like if it's part of the game, just let it be part of the game... Or just don't release games without all the content you want them to have.

Would have voted for microtransactions but I tend not to play those games so it doesn't affect me as much.
I picked poor quality control just for The Last of Us screwing with my mood in March but really it seems to be all over, every time a AAA game releases these days.

No new ideas though that mostly relates to AAA's. Indies can still put out some originality every now and then.

Games have lost it's innosence in terms of being "fun". Today it's mostly about the participant having to be "the best" hardcore elitist schmuck with a natural affinity to step on others for personal gain.

Does not hurt to have a big credit card either.

View attached image.

Limited time events

All the big video games are soo obsessed with user retention that they keep bombarding you with seasonal events, seasons / battlepasses that it's impossible to play more than one game at a time.
They use FOMO and OCD tendencies against their players and in the process over engage and turn playing games into a chore 🙁 In a constant strife for more content they require a degree of commitment that ironically usually hurts them in the long run.

It has become extremely rare when a company simply adds content to their game and that content is there to stay and users can experience it at their own pace.

There's hardly any games that don't do this nowadays but the ones where I witnessed it personally are

• GTA Online (they have a somewhat balanced approach to this)
• Destiny 2 (they are the extreme when it comes to this practice because it's not just seasonal events and battlepasses - they even put expansions you paid for into the content vault)
• FIFA
• Division 2

There are probably more but those are the ones I can think of the top of my head.

I wish there'd be more games like Terraria 😔 Missed the Halloween event because you were busy?
Simply change your system time to late October and you can get those goodies whenever you choose.

As someone who has been gaming for more than 25 years, I have never seen more corporate ass-kissing like from the latest gaming generation. Making excuses and justifications for AAA being priced starting at $80, for microtransactions, unfinished games, games that are almost unplayable on release, rehashes, lazy remasters, and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JmVjdYE7qY

I'm divided between three big things:

• DRM - launcher over launcher over launcher, account linked to newly created account, just to play a single player game... People who pirate games have it easier.
• DLCs - you get the skeleton of a game and if you want to flesh it a bit you end spending tenfold if you're lucky, or more if you're under some of the worse companies who regularly break games in parts to sell them one by one.
• Release state - big budget games with prepurchase and hype, released unoptimized, or full of bugs, or with missing features which were announced, or all at once. Not to talk about the Early Access games which are released in a 0% unplayable state with the remaining 100% as "plans & promises, you decide how to interpret it, we signed no contract" and never get updates or be abandoned halfway.

Regarding the last part - I do get games in EA, but only if I see they're already playable and the devs appear active through the history of the game. And that they don't have abandoned EA games in their history either. There are many examples of successful and greatly rated games in EA for years, but you always have to be careful with choices, EA or not.

Maybe it is because the older we get the less time we have for gaming but more and more games are either open-world or live-service/GaaS, meaning that they suck every second of leisure time they can get. I feel like there's a lack of AA games and shorter story games and with games getting more expensive people often don't feel like buying shorter games for a similar price.

Gamers are "the worst thing about video gaming right now".
By far. No DRM, bug, microtransaction, DLC or price comes even close to being as annoying. Both in quantity and quality.