What sucks is that that doesn't apply to the game industry for whatever reason. Maybe I didn't elaborate earlier, but are you denying that its bad that the public isn't intelligent enough to support innovation and expansion in the game industry? Sounds like you just want to argue

This doesn't just apply to games, it applies to all products.

McDonalds spends more money on tricking the public into buying their (inferior) products, than they do actually creating their products. It's a big business, and their biggest task is not making products, but selling them. Hence they spend an unimaginable amount of money on marketing and "public relations" (a term that was coined by propagandists post-war, because 'propaganda' had bad connotations).

Likewise, big Hollywood studios will spend more money on marketing their new reel of poop than they did on the production crew and EA will spend more money on marketing their new 'AAA' rail-fest than they did on the developers...

It's just a fact of big business that hiring psychologists to trick people into buying shit is more profitable than building a better product.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, and I'm not saying that I like marketing or the facts of business, but that's just the way the world is right now. This is not at all isolated to games.

I'm with you on angry birds, but then I feel like I just don't "get" that game. Casual games feel like a total time sink to me and while I feel angry birds certainly got something right, it just hasn't reeled me in at all. Some casual games do suck me in, bit by bit, until I snap, utter "what am I doing with my life?!" and quit them.

Somehow, I'm OK with pissing away 40+ hours on large RPGs. Hmm... but that brings me to my second point: Oblivion. What the feck? I thought Morrowind was neat after the insanely boring Daggerfall, but Oblivion took a step back in presenting us with one of the most banal RPG worlds yet. Sure, it looked great at first, but that was before you spent some time exploring and realised that the combat was poor, the countryside boring, and not a single interesting character in sight. It's not that the game was that bad, but I just could not understand where all the acclaim came from!

It's kinda like CoD too... CoD1 was a wonderful game after Medal of honour went down the toilet, and CoD4 was a gem because of the level of polish and refined gameplay. But MW2 and 3 have brought nothing new to the table. Meh!

...ok so that's my rant.

Not everyone is the same (which is good), you just aren't part of those game's audience. Just because you don't like a game doesn't mean other people don't. Now that doesn't mean you're in the wrong - in fact I tend to stay away from mainstream, high-audience games like Angry Birds of CoD or etc.. because of how obvious those games are. There's no depth, nothing - just point and shoot, point and shoot, point and shoot, die, spawn, point and shoot all the way.

Also, it's been proven time and again that when good game companies which bring something new to the table are overrun by the unwashed masses because their first game was a hit, they immediately become lazy and unoriginal because of the sheer amount of money pouring in - so they just iterate the same game (often dumbing it down every time because, you know, people might quit if it's too hard) every six months because they can get away with it, milking the masses away as much they can. Then people eventually get bored of the same stuff, company attempts a move but "too little, too late" and dies off. History repeats itself. It's happened with CoD, it's happened with Battlefield, it's happened with TES, it's happened with many MMORPG's (WoW is the most obvious of all, and then you have all the copycats), it's happened with Minecraft. Valve seems to be one of the few game companies that still has some integrity but I suspect this shall change in due time.

This is, as Hodgman shows, done because molding the public to fit the game is cheaper than molding the game to fit the public. People (in general) are incredibly easy to manipulate and are (usually) quite dumb and uneducated. Have a walk around your neighbourhood one day, just knocking to doors and saying hello. It says a lot. So the obvious "profitable" method for game companies is to churn out crap and (somehow) convince people to buy it than to sell good games to a public that is now too brainwashed to appreciate anything more complicated than "point and shoot".

Also check out our "society": go on your favorite game's forums and try and raise an issue or suggest an improvement or show something is not working (you know, what forums are for) and you will get flamed, marked as troll, made fun of, mocked, shot down, censured, threatened and/or banned. If you're not part of the hivemind, which has apparently decided that forums should, in fact, only be used for praise and trolling, then your opinion doesn't even count. The most common advice they will give you is either "don't like it don't use it" or "make your own game". Nothing more to say there, then.

There you have it. It all comes down to human nature, capitalism, effort/reward and peer pressure. Almost everybody you walk past in the streets would gladly knife you in the back if it was legal and there was profit in it for them - think about that. It's only natural they'd want to rip you off by selling you the same thing you've already played, just rebranded and marketed as something different when in fact it's the same product. I suspect there's game sequels out there that are actually *exactly* the same game, just with different models and textures. And people would still buy it.

Life sucks, but it still beats the alternative.

Just avoid these kind of high-audience games, try and find low-population games (which is where you usually find nice people who enjoy a good laugh), or just create a LAN with your like-minded friends. You'll also get less hackers (if any) and in general you'll be far happier than trying to stick with the mainstream. Stay away from all that crap and play the games you like. It doesn't take an AAA game with multimillion budgets for you to have fun, seriously. In 1985 people were playing text games and having a blast, and today many people still practice pen and paper roleplaying games. Perhaps you're just looking in the wrong places for good games for you.

/rant

I'm with you on angry birds, but then I feel like I just don't "get" that game. Casual games feel like a total time sink to me and while I feel angry birds certainly got something right, it just hasn't reeled me in at all. Some casual games do suck me in, bit by bit, until I snap, utter "what am I doing with my life?!" and quit them.

Somehow, I'm OK with pissing away 40+ hours on large RPGs. Hmm... but that brings me to my second point: Oblivion. What the feck? I thought Morrowind was neat after the insanely boring Daggerfall, but Oblivion took a step back in presenting us with one of the most banal RPG worlds yet. Sure, it looked great at first, but that was before you spent some time exploring and realised that the combat was poor, the countryside boring, and not a single interesting character in sight. It's not that the game was that bad, but I just could not understand where all the acclaim came from!

It's kinda like CoD too... CoD1 was a wonderful game after Medal of honour went down the toilet, and CoD4 was a gem because of the level of polish and refined gameplay. But MW2 and 3 have brought nothing new to the table. Meh!

...ok so that's my rant.

I actually loved MW2. Could be that it came at the right time, but I don't personally feel it was too overrated. MW3 and Black Ops on the other hand are just more of the same to me though -- so I wholeheartedly believe that they were definitely overrated (I still don't understand why I have so many friends praising Black Ops.. I feel like EA was just riding on the pigtails of MW2).

I loved Skyrim as well (still do, and I'm still playing it), but I can't but feel it was a tad overrated. Seems like any Elder Scrolls release since Oblivion gets this treatment though. Skyrim was a great improvement over Oblivion though, in my opinion.

Most of these overrated threads suggest the same thing though. I think that any game that gets a bunch of attention at any point in time will receive a lot of complaints as being "overrated". Especially with sequels to games that made a fairly large impact. These games target a specific market, and anyone on the sidelines of this market will comment about how "it was great, but it's not as great as everyone is making it out to be". You see this with movies as well. I remember when The Dark Knight came out I read tons of reviews suggesting that the movie was overrated and overhyped (in comparison to it's predecessor Batman Begins) but honestly, I think that TDK was a far better movie than BB and kept my interest throughout the entire flick, something which BB failed to do for me personally.

I will say though, I do not understand the appeal of Angry Birds. I've played it and most of it's re-incarnations, it's fun, but seriously... I just don't understand the lasting appeal that it's had. And "Draw Something".. well that's just right place, right time in my eyes.

And "Draw Something".. well that's just right place, right time in my eyes.

"Right time, right place" is everything, especially in the mobile market. Draw Something isn't even a new concept - it's pretty much identical to Yahoo Graffiti, iSketch, and a host of other Pictionary knock-offs.

But Draw Something does one thing very, very right: they eliminated the timer. Pretty much every other Pictionary clone keeps the 2 minute timer in place, and guesses occur synchronously. That just isn't a a good fit for mobile, or for a casual time sink - adopting the 'With Friends' model of asynchronous moves and no time limits is a stroke of genius.