The corporate goons on Wall Street never paid gaming no mind until the success of GTA. World of Warcrack impressed those lowlifes too. And they've been muscling in for the last decade.
And it's the international market too, lowest common denominator. 31 flavors of vanilla. China's market is ruining movies, and to some extent video games.
So, about the time of the of success of GTA III, and WoW is when the big finance industries starting investing in gaming? That sounds about right. GTA IV was a huge event-game. I remember those, places like GameStop had big midnight game-selling events for different titles. I don't think that happens anymore because of digital downloading.
Fortunately, "games as a service", specifically where the game itself is a persistent environment the company can keep adding to and scoring sales, turned out not to be the ruin of games as many of us thought in about 2017. Funny how fast that changed. Fallout 76 has been a dud, but at the same time, GTA Online has been a pretty successful example of GaaS, so... it's there are no simple laws or dire predictions. Good games will still come out.
I hadn't thought about China affecting games the way it affects movies. A lot of garbage movies get made for the international market. It makes sense games would follow. I wonder if that has anything to do with Blizzard's involvement in the China market, I heard about that controversy about Bliz and China, some well-known competitive gamer got squelched by Blizzard because he said something bad about serving China or something like that. I didn't pay much attention because I don't care for WoW, but I did play the original Warcraft, I loved ... I think it was Warcraft3 with the Frozen Throne expansion that introduced heroes. That was a cool game. I also played quite a bit of Starcraft 2, but never got out of the Bronze league except for a couple of time I'd touch Silver for a bit then start losing. I never really dug into that game very far. My son plays that one now, he's much better than I ever was. He used to watch me play it when he was too young to be very good at it, but he did get good eventually.
I've been playing a LOT of a game called Conan Exiles, mainly creating a clan of two with a friend, but honestly, that game in PvP is too much of a time commitment for long-term play. If you're not totally dedicated to being on every night in PvP your base is going to be toast after you logon after a multi-day absence. But after awhile PvE games get kind of boring because there's no stress once you get to a certain level and the environment just isn't as much of a threat anymore.
I've taken a break from CE so I can finally finish Red Dead Redemption 2. That's a great game but it saddens me that there will never be DLC for the single player mode. They're more focused on further development only for RDR2 Online.
