Summary

• Unfinished and broken PC ports are the norm now; scam games like The Day Before are targeting easy money.
• PC hardware manufacturers are constantly trying to push terrible products and see what sticks.
• Gaming publishers are ignoring customer-friendly practices, shutting down promising studios, and laying off employees.

For most of us, PC gaming has been a huge part of our lives since we were kids. I grew up playing demos of AAA games on a Pentium 3 PC, experiencing Dead Space and Crysis 2 on a sub-$100 graphics card, and struggling with Cyberpunk 2077 on an RTX 3080. While my hardware has become more high-end in recent years, the games I've played seem to be going in the opposite direction. And it's not just the games — even the hardware and the industry at large are regressing into self-defeating practices.

What once felt like exciting new launches now feel like unfinished projects or shameless cash grabs, on both the hardware and software side. Even the questionable work culture and HR practices that have always existed seem to get worse every year. With very little hope in sight, I feel we're on the cusp of another dark age of PC gaming. We might even be living in it already.

1 Broken PC ports don't surprise anyone

A fully functioning game at launch is a rare gem

At this point, everyone knows the dismal state of PC ports over the past few years. From complete disasters like Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man's Sky that had great redemption arcs, to titles like The Last of Us Part 1, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy, and Starfield that performed far below expectations, you can pick out any big-budget game from the last 5-7 years, and chances are it was released as a broken, unfinished mess.

Paying $60-$70 for a multi-million-dollar IP doesn't guarantee you a playable game anymore.

Things have gotten so bad that expecting a AAA game to play as advertised on day one is a luxury. And when something actually manages to do that, we shower it with praise and glowing reviews. That's how starved we are for just our bare minimum expectations to be met: great, the game works. Whether the reasons behind this trend stem from the growing reliance on upscaling, increasing studio meddling, or the truncated development cycles, the fact is that paying $60-$70 for a multi-million-dollar IP doesn't guarantee you a playable game anymore, even on the best graphics cards the world has ever seen.

2 The New Age of Gotcha Games

If it can be turned into a scam, someone will do it

Half-baked games are still somewhat understandable, though disappointing. Maybe the developers were rushed into shipping a sub-par product. But, some "games" have actually turned out to be downright scams. I'm talking about The Day Before and The Quinfall. While the former promised a rich, zombie-apocalypse world with gorgeous visuals and engrossing gameplay, the latter had lofty claims of being the largest MMORPG ever.

You might already know what The Day Before turned out to be: a plain-and-simple scam. Instead of an open-world zombie shooter, it was a bland-looking extraction shooter with store-bought assets, massively reduced world size, tons of bugs, and unimpressive gameplay. What's more, days after the game's release, the studio closed shop and abandoned the game. The Quinfall isn't quite at that level (yet) but it has also received allegations of being an asset flip and showing doctored screenshots in game previews.

Studios feel they can promise the moon, collect money from thousands of gamers, then disappear when the complaints roll in.

This trend might not be as rare as just the few popular cases would indicate — The Day Before and The Quinfall situations blew up, but many similar scams by smaller developers may have gone unnoticed. What's troubling is that studios are feeling increasingly confident that they can promise the moon, collect money from thousands of gamers, then disappear when the complaints roll in.

3 We're also seeing new lows with PC hardware

Manufacturers are launching sub-par products and expecting to get away with it

The PC hardware world isn't free from shady shenanigans either. You only need to look back at Nvidia's "unlaunched" RTX 4080 12GB or the more recent RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti graphics cards to realize the depths to which hardware manufacturers are stooping these days. When Nvidia isn't disguising a lower-tier GPU with misleading packaging, or launching GPUs with barely any gen-on-gen gains, it's busy skimping on VRAM on $500+ graphics cards. But they certainly aren't the only culprit behind this money-grubbing trend.

AMD has thrown its hat in the ring as well by releasing products like the Radeon RX 7600 which couldn't even beat the older and cheaper RX 6650 XT. Plus, its Ryzen 9 7900X3D is still one of the worst-value CPUs the company has ever launched. It costs more than both the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X without offering any boost in gaming or productivity performance respectively.

Even Intel's 14th Gen refresh was largely unnecessary. It seems like CPU and GPU manufacturers are testing the patience of consumers with every generation, observing how far they can push them before the inevitable backlash.

4 Publishers aren't even pretending to care anymore

Customer-friendly practices? What's that?

For example, there was a recent stunt Sony tried to pull with Helldrivers 2 by forcing PC users to link their Steam accounts with a PSN account. Is this just the latest in a long line of dubious corporate decisions that reek of opportunism? Earlier this year, Ubisoft shut down the online servers for The Crew and then proceeded to revoke people's licenses to the game — a game they had already paid for. By doing this, they shut down any hope of keeping the game alive through private servers.

Players have strongly protested publishers who were arbitrarily removing access to not just online multiplayer features but even the single-player elements of their games. Even more troubling was a statement earlier this year by a senior Ubisoft executive suggesting that "gamers should be comfortable not owning" their games. This "subscription vs. ownership" debate isn't limited to the videogame industry, and it needs to receive a lot more attention than it's getting right now.

Companies shouldn't be allowed to tweak the rules however and whenever it suits them.

The fundamental issue at the heart of the matter is that companies shouldn't be allowed to tweak the rules however and whenever it suits them. They should be bound by the terms and conditions in place when the user bought the game, and not deny access to titles or particular features that were always promised. The growing trend of always-online, live-service games needs to be adapted in favor of the consumer, so that players are not the only ones left holding the bag.

5 Rewarding good games with studio closures

Game development is the worst place to be right now

Against all odds and after outmaneuvering all that is wrong with the industry, if a studio comes out with a great title, it often gets inexplicably axed. It happened recently with Tango Gameworks, the studio behind the widely acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush, when Microsoft shut it down along with Arkane Austin (Redfall) and Alpha Dog Games (Wraithborne).

EA has previously shut down Visceral Studios (Dead Space), BioWare Montreal (Mass Effect: Andromeda), and Black Box Games (Need for Speed: Underground), among many others. But, more recently, it has also laid off huge teams from studios like Codemasters. Layoffs have also been prevalent in Activision Blizzard, Riot Games, and Amazon's gaming division.

Gaming companies are especially guilty of chasing trends instead of nurturing quality studios producing critically acclaimed titles.

While layoffs are affecting every industry, gaming companies are especially guilty of chasing trends instead of nurturing quality studios which produce critically acclaimed titles. The culture of overworking employees, forcing unrealistic deadlines, and offering terribly low compensation in return, further makes game development one of the worst industries to work in right now.

Follow the light, if you see one

It's hard to be hopeful in the wake of these disturbing trends. On the one hand, the biggest and most expensive titles are coming out half-baked while the publishers are busy extracting the most dollars out of gamers. And on the other hand, PC hardware is just going through the motions, throwing mediocre products at the wall and hoping that something sticks.

The indie gaming scene might be the only holdout against the corporate takeover of the gaming industry. But, gamers will need to support independent studios and games in large numbers to force AAA publishers to take notice.