– [Falcon] Nothing lasts forever,
especially in video games.
But it’s not just trends.
Sometimes it is long-running stuff
that just has to die a quick
and painless death, right?
Always quick and painless.
It’s not always quick and painless.
All right folks, it’s Falcon
and today on “Gameranx”,
10 video game things
that died in 2022.
Starting off with number 10,
it’s video game NFTs.
You know, NFTs, Non Fungible Tokens.
Basically Hyper DLC, unique DLC
that can’t be copied or something.
I don’t really know
how you would incorporate
NFTs in the games.
It seems like a bad idea all around.
Hey, we got video games.
They exist electronically now.
You digitally download them and play them
and there’s no problem
in terms of shortage
of physical materials to distribute games.
Let’s create scarcity,
so stuff becomes more expensive.
Yeah, everybody hated that.
I mean, there’s a lot
of other concerns regarding NFTs.
Some people talk about
environmental impact.
A lot of people reminding everybody
about the overall kind of grifty nature
of the NFT in every
other instance of NFTs.
I mean, ultimately the real problem
with NFTs is the same
problem people have had
with over monetization from the start
of over monetization.
It took a while for publishers to put
out DLC that wasn’t
just universally hated.
And while there’s an
entire cottage industry
of making videos dunking
on how bad monetization is in games,
the NFT is the logical progression of that
and also just an obvious step too far.
That 10 steps too far.
Whenever a public entity, be it a company,
somebody who works for the company,
a spokesperson or even a lot
of voice actors voiced any kind of support
for NFTs, they were
roundly attacked and hard,
probably harder than I
can remember any kind
of monetization since the loot box.
And now it’s the opposite.
Big names and big companies are trying
to distance themselves.
Like when Gabe Newell
banned NFTs from Steam.
Directors have hit games, like Josef Fares
of “It Takes Two” saying,
“I’d rather get shot in the knee
than include NFTs in future games.”
And Mojang, the developers of “Minecraft”
banned NFTs and blockchains as well.
I mean that’s big when
a company with something
like Minecraft is like,
“No, we’re not doing that,”
that pretty much shoots it dead
in the water, thankfully so.
And number nine is G4TV
which has been dead before
and was brought back
in 2021 due to a series
of absolutely hilarious oversights,
like allowing content
creators to charge them
between 25 and $30,000 per day to appear.
Now, when it came back,
it came back to not only television,
but on Twitch.
And as you know, small scale television
and I guess medium sized Twitch channels
aren’t exactly the most
profitable thing to run.
Paying out that kind of money
while taking in way less,
it was bound to happen.
But beyond financial mistakes,
they made a few other ones.
First, they were not targeting the group
of people that originally liked G4.
Instead, they were
attempting to target people
who well, really don’t
use cable and never have
because they’ve always had YouTube.
That’s not a sustainable audience
for a cable channel which would be
where the most of the money would come in,
to be clear, you’re not gonna bring
in 25, $30,000 a day
to have a literal single personality
on once taken in Twitch (indistinct).
I guess they thought
eSports was gonna be big
for the channel, which
people who are interested
in eSports are more than
capable of finding ways
to watch eSports without cable,
which again would be the main place
where money would come
in and clearly wasn’t.
And number eight, it’s Google Stadia.
I mean, the thing that was really
just never going to be big.
It just didn’t have
anything that made sense
for it to exist.
Like it had a few big
games like “Destiny Two”,
which you could play anywhere else
and it would play way better
because playing it locally
just works compared
to streaming it on Stadia.
Another aspect of the
problem with Stadia is
it really didn’t work well.
Like, I don’t know if
you’ve ever used Luna,
the Amazon competitor for Stadia,
that’s still around,
but it works way better.
So between the fact that
it didn’t work great
and the library sucked, it’s not shocking
that Stadia was canceled.
If you’re not gonna have
a significant number
of original titles coming
out for the platform,
then you’re gonna have
to have an incredible lineup of games
that while you can get them elsewhere
for a low cost monthly, you can play all
of ’em on Stadia.
You know, like Xbox Game Pass.
I mean they were just out planked
on every single possible front.
And number seven,
we lost some pretty high profile games
to being delisted, not necessarily
because they were good.
In fact, most people did
not hold favorable opinions
of the games that we’re
about to talk about.
Firstly, “Babylon’s Fall”.
Platinum Games attempted a live service.
Oof, no one was happy with that.
Kind of an ugly game that sucked.
Started as an attempt to expand
on near Automata’s Combat
and integrate multiplayer.
Basically, games as a service is a thing
that people don’t like.
And when you make them,
people don’t like your game.
Weird.
But a more traditional game game
was also delisted.
Again, not a good one.
“Postal III” was taken down
and even the developers themselves
who developed all of
the Postal games except
for “Postal III” were quite
happy that it came down
because they didn’t have any control
over the page.
And while the game had a lot of problems,
their response was at least no one will
be able to buy that trash.
At number six, “Saints Row” and Volition.
Now, Volition isn’t entirely gone,
but Saints Row, it’s hard to imagine
that they’re going to bother
with another one of those for a while.
While “Saints Row” met
financial expectations
and apparently helped bring in profits
for Volition’s parent company,
it did literally nothing
for the “Saints Row” brain.
In fact, it tanked it.
Terrible reviews.
Fans were not happy with it.
There’s basically no reason to assume
that they’re gonna do another one
of those for quite a while, if at all.
Volition, on the other hand,
got moved to Gearbox presumably
so that they will be
under a more watchful eye.
On account, Gearbox is
also in the United States
and apparently has an
experienced management team
that can pay a little
closer attention to them.
“Deep Silver” was who they
were originally working with.
I’m happy they didn’t
just disband Volition,
if I’m honest.
Great developer, just really big misstep
with “Saints Row”.
The way they rebooted it was just wrong.
And number five is the Bethesda Launcher.
What else do I need to say?
Thank you, Bethesda.
Back in February,
they said “Attention PC players!
We’re retiring with the Bethesda Launcher,
moving to Steam.”
And everybody was like,
“Why didn’t you do this
a very long time ago?”
The Bethesda Launcher is terrible.
I mean, everybody was happy
about this development.
Everybody.
There’s not much else to say.
RIP.
And number four is cheap games.
Wow, everything is $70.
We had a lot of games that released prior
to fall that were less than $60.
But starting in the fall,
we basically started getting games
that are 70 bucks.
And as far as I’m concerned,
this move is very strange.
They’re starting to sell the PS4
and Xbox One versions of new games
that are gonna cost 70 bucks
on the Next-Gen platform
at 70 bucks as well.
So that sucks big time.
I mean, that’s a pretty steep price.
I mean, yes, inflation exists
and money is worth less
than it used to be.
And yes, the development cycles
of games have been vastly expanded
and there’s far more money put
into them than ever before.
But wow, that’s a lot of money for a game
and it’s gonna be the new normal.
That’s pretty much what they’re gonna
be charging people for
games and wow, just sucks.
At number three, RIP PC
Graphics card scalpers.
The RTX 4080 really rained
on their parade, so to speak.
The ants came to the
picnic, they showed up.
Here’s the problem, the 4080 while better
than the 3080 MSRP at 1200 bucks,
the 3080 still nothing to spit
at is only 900 bucks.
Quite a bit lower actually.
Now the 4090 is
significantly more powerful
than the 4080 and it retails at 1599.
Scalpers were trying to sell the 4080,
the less powerful one that retails
at $1,200, at $1,400.
And that $200 gap between the 4090’s MSRP
and the scalped 4080
price really looks bad
when you consider how
much better the 4090 is.
I’m not gonna get into technical talk
but the 4080 was just roundly rejected.
And Scalpers are trying
to sell the 4080 at MSRP
which is really a sign
of failure for the card.
The worst, at least for Scalpers.
It’s really a sign of
failure for Scalpers.
And number two,
a Marvel MMO that was in development
from the creators of DC
Universe online got canceled.
And well, that’s that
for a massively multiplayer Marvel game.
Do we know for sure that
there will never be one?
No, but this would’ve been a good one
cause DC Universe online
is pretty well liked
and is gonna get a visual
overhaul next year.
Obviously, Marvel fans
have wanted an equivalent
but at least for the foreseeable future,
it’s pretty doubtful that’s gonna happen.
And finally, at number one,
we had some studio closures.
Firstly Square Enix Montreal,
who made the actually
pretty darn good “GO” series
with “Hitman GO”, “Lara
Croft GO”, “Deus ex Go”.
Pretty fun mobile games, honestly,
that took those popular IPs
and made something
completely new with them.
Basically board game type games
and were really actually pretty cool.
I enjoyed those games.
Anyway, Square Enix Montreal was sold
off to CDE Entertainment
and Embracer Group.
Now the real reason this deal went
down was likely to acquire Eidos Montreal
and Crystal Dynamics
and these mobile studios
just got shut down and
they shuffled the employees
to the larger AAA studios.
Now, Vicarious Visions is also no more.
Back in 2021, Blizzard Activision
made them a subsidiary of Blizzard,
and in April of this year was fully shut
down and merged into Blizzard.
So to all these things that are now gone,
consigned to the dustbin
of history in 2022,
RIP.
What do you think?
Leave us a comment.
Let us know if you like
this video look like.
If you’re not subscribed,
now is a great time to do so.
We upload brand new videos
every day of the week.
Best way to see them first is of course,
subscription, so click subscribe.
Don’t forget to enable notifications.
And as always, we thank you very much
for watching this video.
I’m Falcon.
You can follow me on
Twitter at Falcon, The Hero.
We’ll see you next time
right here on “Gameranx”.
Top 10 video games disappearing in 2022
– [Falcon] Nothing lasts forever,
especially in video games.
But it’s not just trends.
Sometimes it is long-running stuff
that just has to die a quick
and painless death, right?
Always quick and painless.
It’s not always quick and painless.
All right folks, it’s Falcon
and today on “Gameranx”,
10 video game things
that died in 2022.
Starting off with number 10,
it’s video game NFTs.
You know, NFTs, Non Fungible Tokens.
Basically Hyper DLC, unique DLC
that can’t be copied or something.
I don’t really know
how you would incorporate
NFTs in the games.
It seems like a bad idea all around.
Hey, we got video games.
They exist electronically now.
You digitally download them and play them
and there’s no problem
in terms of shortage
of physical materials to distribute games.
Let’s create scarcity,
so stuff becomes more expensive.
Yeah, everybody hated that.
I mean, there’s a lot
of other concerns regarding NFTs.
Some people talk about
environmental impact.
A lot of people reminding everybody
about the overall kind of grifty nature
of the NFT in every
other instance of NFTs.
I mean, ultimately the real problem
with NFTs is the same
problem people have had
with over monetization from the start
of over monetization.
It took a while for publishers to put
out DLC that wasn’t
just universally hated.
And while there’s an
entire cottage industry
of making videos dunking
on how bad monetization is in games,
the NFT is the logical progression of that
and also just an obvious step too far.
That 10 steps too far.
Whenever a public entity, be it a company,
somebody who works for the company,
a spokesperson or even a lot
of voice actors voiced any kind of support
for NFTs, they were
roundly attacked and hard,
probably harder than I
can remember any kind
of monetization since the loot box.
And now it’s the opposite.
Big names and big companies are trying
to distance themselves.
Like when Gabe Newell
banned NFTs from Steam.
Directors have hit games, like Josef Fares
of “It Takes Two” saying,
“I’d rather get shot in the knee
than include NFTs in future games.”
And Mojang, the developers of “Minecraft”
banned NFTs and blockchains as well.
I mean that’s big when
a company with something
like Minecraft is like,
“No, we’re not doing that,”
that pretty much shoots it dead
in the water, thankfully so.
And number nine is G4TV
which has been dead before
and was brought back
in 2021 due to a series
of absolutely hilarious oversights,
like allowing content
creators to charge them
between 25 and $30,000 per day to appear.
Now, when it came back,
it came back to not only television,
but on Twitch.
And as you know, small scale television
and I guess medium sized Twitch channels
aren’t exactly the most
profitable thing to run.
Paying out that kind of money
while taking in way less,
it was bound to happen.
But beyond financial mistakes,
they made a few other ones.
First, they were not targeting the group
of people that originally liked G4.
Instead, they were
attempting to target people
who well, really don’t
use cable and never have
because they’ve always had YouTube.
That’s not a sustainable audience
for a cable channel which would be
where the most of the money would come in,
to be clear, you’re not gonna bring
in 25, $30,000 a day
to have a literal single personality
on once taken in Twitch (indistinct).
I guess they thought
eSports was gonna be big
for the channel, which
people who are interested
in eSports are more than
capable of finding ways
to watch eSports without cable,
which again would be the main place
where money would come
in and clearly wasn’t.
And number eight, it’s Google Stadia.
I mean, the thing that was really
just never going to be big.
It just didn’t have
anything that made sense
for it to exist.
Like it had a few big
games like “Destiny Two”,
which you could play anywhere else
and it would play way better
because playing it locally
just works compared
to streaming it on Stadia.
Another aspect of the
problem with Stadia is
it really didn’t work well.
Like, I don’t know if
you’ve ever used Luna,
the Amazon competitor for Stadia,
that’s still around,
but it works way better.
So between the fact that
it didn’t work great
and the library sucked, it’s not shocking
that Stadia was canceled.
If you’re not gonna have
a significant number
of original titles coming
out for the platform,
then you’re gonna have
to have an incredible lineup of games
that while you can get them elsewhere
for a low cost monthly, you can play all
of ’em on Stadia.
You know, like Xbox Game Pass.
I mean they were just out planked
on every single possible front.
And number seven,
we lost some pretty high profile games
to being delisted, not necessarily
because they were good.
In fact, most people did
not hold favorable opinions
of the games that we’re
about to talk about.
Firstly, “Babylon’s Fall”.
Platinum Games attempted a live service.
Oof, no one was happy with that.
Kind of an ugly game that sucked.
Started as an attempt to expand
on near Automata’s Combat
and integrate multiplayer.
Basically, games as a service is a thing
that people don’t like.
And when you make them,
people don’t like your game.
Weird.
But a more traditional game game
was also delisted.
Again, not a good one.
“Postal III” was taken down
and even the developers themselves
who developed all of
the Postal games except
for “Postal III” were quite
happy that it came down
because they didn’t have any control
over the page.
And while the game had a lot of problems,
their response was at least no one will
be able to buy that trash.
At number six, “Saints Row” and Volition.
Now, Volition isn’t entirely gone,
but Saints Row, it’s hard to imagine
that they’re going to bother
with another one of those for a while.
While “Saints Row” met
financial expectations
and apparently helped bring in profits
for Volition’s parent company,
it did literally nothing
for the “Saints Row” brain.
In fact, it tanked it.
Terrible reviews.
Fans were not happy with it.
There’s basically no reason to assume
that they’re gonna do another one
of those for quite a while, if at all.
Volition, on the other hand,
got moved to Gearbox presumably
so that they will be
under a more watchful eye.
On account, Gearbox is
also in the United States
and apparently has an
experienced management team
that can pay a little
closer attention to them.
“Deep Silver” was who they
were originally working with.
I’m happy they didn’t
just disband Volition,
if I’m honest.
Great developer, just really big misstep
with “Saints Row”.
The way they rebooted it was just wrong.
And number five is the Bethesda Launcher.
What else do I need to say?
Thank you, Bethesda.
Back in February,
they said “Attention PC players!
We’re retiring with the Bethesda Launcher,
moving to Steam.”
And everybody was like,
“Why didn’t you do this
a very long time ago?”
The Bethesda Launcher is terrible.
I mean, everybody was happy
about this development.
Everybody.
There’s not much else to say.
RIP.
And number four is cheap games.
Wow, everything is $70.
We had a lot of games that released prior
to fall that were less than $60.
But starting in the fall,
we basically started getting games
that are 70 bucks.
And as far as I’m concerned,
this move is very strange.
They’re starting to sell the PS4
and Xbox One versions of new games
that are gonna cost 70 bucks
on the Next-Gen platform
at 70 bucks as well.
So that sucks big time.
I mean, that’s a pretty steep price.
I mean, yes, inflation exists
and money is worth less
than it used to be.
And yes, the development cycles
of games have been vastly expanded
and there’s far more money put
into them than ever before.
But wow, that’s a lot of money for a game
and it’s gonna be the new normal.
That’s pretty much what they’re gonna
be charging people for
games and wow, just sucks.
At number three, RIP PC
Graphics card scalpers.
The RTX 4080 really rained
on their parade, so to speak.
The ants came to the
picnic, they showed up.
Here’s the problem, the 4080 while better
than the 3080 MSRP at 1200 bucks,
the 3080 still nothing to spit
at is only 900 bucks.
Quite a bit lower actually.
Now the 4090 is
significantly more powerful
than the 4080 and it retails at 1599.
Scalpers were trying to sell the 4080,
the less powerful one that retails
at $1,200, at $1,400.
And that $200 gap between the 4090’s MSRP
and the scalped 4080
price really looks bad
when you consider how
much better the 4090 is.
I’m not gonna get into technical talk
but the 4080 was just roundly rejected.
And Scalpers are trying
to sell the 4080 at MSRP
which is really a sign
of failure for the card.
The worst, at least for Scalpers.
It’s really a sign of
failure for Scalpers.
And number two,
a Marvel MMO that was in development
from the creators of DC
Universe online got canceled.
And well, that’s that
for a massively multiplayer Marvel game.
Do we know for sure that
there will never be one?
No, but this would’ve been a good one
cause DC Universe online
is pretty well liked
and is gonna get a visual
overhaul next year.
Obviously, Marvel fans
have wanted an equivalent
but at least for the foreseeable future,
it’s pretty doubtful that’s gonna happen.
And finally, at number one,
we had some studio closures.
Firstly Square Enix Montreal,
who made the actually
pretty darn good “GO” series
with “Hitman GO”, “Lara
Croft GO”, “Deus ex Go”.
Pretty fun mobile games, honestly,
that took those popular IPs
and made something
completely new with them.
Basically board game type games
and were really actually pretty cool.
I enjoyed those games.
Anyway, Square Enix Montreal was sold
off to CDE Entertainment
and Embracer Group.
Now the real reason this deal went
down was likely to acquire Eidos Montreal
and Crystal Dynamics
and these mobile studios
just got shut down and
they shuffled the employees
to the larger AAA studios.
Now, Vicarious Visions is also no more.
Back in 2021, Blizzard Activision
made them a subsidiary of Blizzard,
and in April of this year was fully shut
down and merged into Blizzard.
So to all these things that are now gone,
consigned to the dustbin
of history in 2022,
RIP.
What do you think?
Leave us a comment.
Let us know if you like
this video look like.
If you’re not subscribed,
now is a great time to do so.
We upload brand new videos
every day of the week.
Best way to see them first is of course,
subscription, so click subscribe.
Don’t forget to enable notifications.
And as always, we thank you very much
for watching this video.
I’m Falcon.
You can follow me on
Twitter at Falcon, The Hero.
We’ll see you next time
right here on “Gameranx”.
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