Ladies and gentlemen, the games industry is dead. But who is responsible for this decay and despair that surrounds us, the true gamers? In this article I will discuss the current state of the industry, as well as point out the ones guilty for things reaching such a sorry state.

Dear fellow gamers, the apocalypse has come, and as predicted by T.S. Elliot it came not with a bang, but with a whimper. The game industry now lies dead, its final agonies still felt by us all. Do not let yourself be fooled by all the companies still making games today or the profits they report; these games are berefit of any zest, any vitality, any life at all. Today’s games are nothing but shadows of games, pale mockeries of what they used to be. They are shambling zombies that refuse to die, even long after they’ve become the bane of what they once used to be. You think that the abundance of zombie games lately is a coincidence ? Think again. Games today are like zombies, without love or even respect for you, all they seek is to drain you (of your money) and move on when you are done.

If you need any proof just look at the latest games piling up on plastic shelves of the stores worldwide. The mechanics will be dumbed down, if they were ever complex in the first place, and the developers will hold your hand through the whole game with no penalties if you screw up or die. It’s easy mode forever, with the skilled and competent having their games dumbed down for the sake of the masses and left without any challenge in what once were their favorite genres, their favorite games. Without any difficult challenges or hard-earned rankings how will gamers boast to their friends and prove their skills? How will they inflate their ego and prove their worth as human beings if modern games offer them no decent challenge to separate them from the unskilled and the amateurs?

Fortunately for those there are multiplayer games. There you can find a decent challenge from fellow experts and members of the gaming elite. But then you face another problem with games today: the players. Not only are the most foul-mouthed antisocial and downright unpleasant members of the human race that otherwise you would never have to even see tromping around online games as if they were born there, but many of the players are simply awful. They have no sense of coordination or team spirit and would just as soon shoot their own team mates because of a disagreement rather than help a fellow team member in need. So the problem we face is that multiplayer gamers today are all without exception attrocious, immature, impatient, unskilled, petty, greedy and irritating creatures that do nothing but breathe on mics, swear and kill others by accident (except you, of course, dear reader. It goes without saying that you are flawless in all multiplayer games you play).

Then there are indy games, that many hail as the only light in this dark and foetid swamp that is modern gaming. However they are merely another sign of the end, one more omen in the sky that nobody could read. Half of the so-called indy games are nothing more that causal games for the mass market, another sign of the dumbing down promoted by companies to cash in on people with too much money and spare time (that’s the casual gamers, real gamers are completely different in that we spend MUCH more time and money on our games, which are better than theirs).

These problems are endemic and dangerous; faced with them there is only one thing to be done: blaming people. After all what will we do if we cannot blame somebody for all these bad things happening? So to answer that question, who should we blame?

We should blame the publishers, with their greed and narrow-mindedness, seeing only short term profits and cutting anything that seems remotely risky or original, spawning sequel upon sequel and milking honest customers with their greed for profits.

The delopers should be blamed, for caving in to pressure and lowering the standards of games to the lowest common denominator, for avoiding risks and developing cookie-cutter games, flooding the market with so much drivel whatever brave game that tries to do something different is innevitably drowned out by the noise of hundreds of horrible titles. And that’s when they don’t do vanity titles and horrible games that no one wants to play, and yet they ignore the consumer or even blame them for not understanding their work, when it’s their own fault such a horrible game never sold well.

The consumers and gamers should be blamed, for accepting every bone tossed in their direction and being content with such low-quality products, for shunning any title with innovation while clinging to their favorite games and arrogantly demanding the developers to recreate the same game over and over again, as if paying for a product entitled them to control over an entire gaming company. If you want to play CEO then you’d better rise to the position or buy the stocks yourself, otherwise you’re not entitled anything except the game you bought.

The game bloggers, critics and journalists should be blamed, mouthing off about games for a living while most have never even made a single game. It’s so easy to criticize and complain about the state of gaming today, but when the time comes to actually do something about it how many would even bother? Can they do anything useful except complain? The answer is no, because if they could they would not be writting about it.

The non-gamers are to blame, refusing to play any games in their narrow-mindedness while at the same time criticizing violence in games and making them the scapegoat of anything they feel is wrong with the world or with their own lives. From child obesity to violence and rape to falling grades, all of these have been blamed on games even with no real study or evidence behind them. If you want to blame somebody so hard for the world being what it is just look in the mirror.

The whole game industry is to blame. Let an economic crisis crumble it, let the flamewars rage and let it burn all communities into ash, let the flood of shovelware rise and submerge this whole bug-infested industry into oblivion.