People frequently have trouble understanding the word “tradeoff”, sure enough it’s easy enough to comprehend as exchange however in today’s corporate parlance it really is meant as exchange of 1 commodity as a cost for another. I was playing Final Fantasy’s Dissidia on the nice old PSP yesterday when I marveled at the game’s replay value, yes I’ve spent over 50 hours onto it already, which is what this entire topic is about.

Normally if you go through the oldest games like Mario and Dave, they had a very important factor unanimously common, dependence on it. Not that I am propagating obsession towards anything, however this is what the current paradigm of gaming has come down to; a commodity. I’ve been a gamer, I am going to not deny that and this is exactly what my contention with gaming today is. The initial games had a lot of things that hooked people up but most of all it was concerning the level of engagement that the ball player had with the overall game environment or the “world” of the game. Which popularwin has little to do with the 3D graphics or the extensive possibilities.

Let us take a look at the progression; first it was the advent of the simple arcade type games that have been phenomenal to a certain point. Kept players hooked and introduced a complete new boom of media into the world. This was where literally every child was begging for the Atari systems and your Pentium II and III machines had Sega and NeoGeo emulators installed (mine still has both installed by the way) and action elements were about difficult commands mixed in with clever sequences. Take this forward a bit further and exactly the same two systems incorporated decent mixed stories and continuity in the games enhance the media capabilities being explored in the two avenues. The fighting game series KOF can be an ardent testament to that and from there came the further boom of turn based strategy and role doing offers which became akin to “user controlled novels” on computers. This adaptability of both game-play and media can be called because the turning curve of the gaming industry.

Because this was where a lot of business heads realized that the games could possibly be used to simulate a lot of things, pretty much everything therefore the potential as a small business commodity was obvious even from then on. The progress from then on was about enhancing the visual ramifications of the game, the additives were obvious the visuals needed more work so in came the influx of investment in gaming studios and the push for 3d graphics into gaming. That apex can be called because the secondary curve because once that was established, the potential for business gain via games became second to almost none. Hollywood movies will tell you the story of boom and fall unfailingly but games have the replay factor attached to them regardless of their audience size that guarantees reward.

Which replay factor was cashed in next. We all can see the web capabilities being offered by games which as also paved way to players just buying the next powerup or update online. The concept of “buying all” is where we can point and say that gaming has devolved. So at a point where gaming was fun with added complexity like Baldur’s Gate, Ys, Metal Gear Solid, the games went on to are more about commodity value.

The biggest element in all of this is mobile gaming of course and here I point at the smartphone games which are purely devoted to time killing. The issue occurs when the most the smartphone gamers aren’t regular gamers but way more there to just kill time. When you provide a game like Subway Surfers online buying advantages for the “normal” people, some degree of competition envelopes between the console/PC games and the telephone games. The niches are different, the categories are different, and the size differs. A game like Temple Run can’t be compared to Farcry 3 but ultimately when the games become about money then these things sidetrack and mix in.