Real Life Highscore

Lately, the video game community has been plagued by the mentality that games are only worth playing if they are popular. The phrases “dying” and “dead” have no place in the video game community vernacular, even though they’re possibly the most popularly used words to describe games these days. 

A few months back I made a video about gamers jumping ship and abandoning games that they don’t think are popular enough to make their personal investments worth while. Sadly, this problem has not gone away and is, in some cases, even worse than before.

As I stated in my most recent blog, Stop Liking What I Don’t Like, a lot of the problems with the video game community revolve around the idea that gaming is an investment. Players validate their investments in games by focusing on how popular their game is, even though they fail to realize that popularity does not guarantee quality.

What I would suggest to any gamers who are worried about their game ‘dying’ is to find a game that they enjoy and then show their friends why they should like the game, too. If you play games with friends, then the general popularity of the game shouldn’t matter. Instead of pumping money into advertising campaigns and tournament funding, companies will actually have to put their money towards making good games that are worthy of their increasingly large mainstream audiences if we start actually basing our opinions of games on their gameplay. Promoting games based on their actual game play mechanics and quality over their mass appeal and popularity can only help to strengthen the video game community and promote innovation and quality assurance within the video game industry. The only way to accomplish this as a community is to encourage other games to form their own opinions rather than following the lowest common denominator dominated crowd.

As for myself, I’m constantly doing my best to promote good games and preach their value to other games through blogs like this, twitter and through my youtube channels. If you have friends who are looking for games to play, suggest they play with you and tell them why you like certain games. Support game companies that put hard work into their good games by buying them and promoting them as much as you can. Sadly, as gamers, we are limited in our influence over the rest of the video game community, but, hopefully, if we all work together, we may be able to sway the opinion of the masses through qualitative reasoning and community promotion.

Good luck and best wishes,

Tom