Guest Writer: My Problem with the Industry

My name is Tom Butto, and this is my first post on this blog. Matt has been kind enough to let me contribute, and I thank him for how wonderful of a person he is on a daily basis. Matt and I have been friends since high school, and we have many things in common. We both like sports, trolling, drinking beer, and of course, video games. You put the both of us in front of a video game we both like, and we will play that game for hours upon hours without stopping. That’s how we are; we are bingers, especially when it comes to video games. We love video games, we love to play video games, we love to beat each other in Madden or The Show, we have been playing the same Madden franchise in Madden 2011, and during the Halo 3 days, we loved to jump in a Hog and trash talk people while mowing them down with machine gun bullets and some sweet driving. I have never had a problem with video games, or the video game industry, until now.

I have a problem because the video game industry is killing itself. Facebook, mobile phone games, free-to-play are threatening the industry because they are as popular as ever, and yet the video game industry and the companies who make the console, I’m looking at Microsoft, seem like they are trying to distance themselves from their consumers. They are becoming greedier as the years go on, and seemingly keep shooting themselves in the foot. With the announcement of the new Xbox One, this was the final straw for me. The system has to be connected to the Internet at all times? Game prices are going to go up? If you borrow a game from a friend, it will cost you five dollars? This is all ridiculous. They want people to only buy new games, and subscribe to Xbox Live, which costs people more money. Either these people who came up with all these ideas for the new Xbox are so disillusioned and detached from society because of how successful the Xbox 360 was, or they simply don’t care. Last time I checked, people are still struggling to make ends meet. People do not have money to have subscriptions to Xbox Live, and pay 70 or 80 dollars for a video game.

Add this to downloadable content getting more and more ridiculous, and I want the video game industry to fail. I want people to stop buying video games and consoles when the new generation of systems comes out. Or at the very least, people stop buying the Xbox One, because the PlayStation 4 seems fine from what I have heard. Maybe if people go on a little unofficial boycott, the suits at these companies will have to change some ideas and actually look like they care about their customers. Because at this rate, you will have to pay an entry fee to get into a video game store, and have to put a strand of your hair in your console so they know your DNA and where you are at all times. Maybe if the industry collapses on itself, real, innovative ideas will come to the forefront. Until then, I will be content playing my Xbox 360, working on the fifth or sixth season of our Madden franchise.