By Chris Cucinelli

Throughout the past hundred years, technology has advanced well beyond its years while also gaining enough popularity to revolutionize the entire world. Sadly, this has also happened with video games. At first glance, this may seem like a positive influence for the industry and at first it was. Video games started out and continued, for the most part, as an enjoyable hobby. Video game’s increasing popularity helped increase the quality of the games and rate of production, but eventually it got too popular, and has now turned into a profitable industry.

Starting when video games were first released, they were only simple programs capable of very simple pixel graphics. Since video games were a brand new concept, there was also very little to no dedicated producers and distributors. It all started when several companies decided to try small arcade machines, eventually leading to consoles people could use at home. From that moment on, video games grew both number-wise and technology-wise, expanding on old concepts, creating new systems, new genres of games, creating communities for gaming enthusiasts, and everything in between.

Like most other things, video games grew first from a small, respectable community to a major form of entertainment. Throughout the whole time, there was always a mutual respect between people in that community, as everyone shared the same passion. All of this gave gaming a nice and enjoyable environment where you could relax, forget about all your problems, and just play.

Over time, video game popularity kept rising and rising, and rose to a point where the gaming industry was profitable. Beforehand, businesses could still make money by making games, but they couldn’t just sloppily throw out a game and expect a profit. Creating a profitable game required care and time to be put into it making a memorable and enjoyable game people would want to pay for. This was also a main factor in keeping up the gaming environment because game producers could never get away with taking advantage of their consumers. After time though, enough popularity was gained and some businesses had a good enough reputation where this could happen. It was about that time where you could say that gaming, both as an industry and a hobby had peaked.

From that moment on, video games started revolving more around money as more profit orientated businesses started taking over as well as older business leaning more towards profit. For instance, one gaming company, Electronics Arts (EA), has been trying to monopolize the gaming industry by buying out other companies. EA used to be a decent game producer and could’ve continued making games but instead they decided to maximize their profits. It wouldn’t be as bad though if the majority of companies EA bought didn’t shut down shortly after. EA finds smaller companies that have made a successful game and buy them out. Since they are a smaller company they have no option but to accept it. EA then tries to get all the money it can out of the business until eventually running it into the ground. This is only one of the hundreds of examples of companies ignoring everything but profits currently going on.

Even though incidents like this happen, video game popularity continues to go up only furthering these problems. Things like this ruin the environment video games have built up throughout the years. The worst part is that its popularity will only continue to rise either continually getting worse forever, or pile up eventually ruining the industry altogether.

Header photo by K Putt (flickr creative commons)