Basically, take a bunch of idealistic hipster bloggers (or industry writers that have grown old and jaded enough to hate their audience...see: Ben Kuchera), give them a videogame beat and watch the stupidity develop into what Polygon is. Also see: Kotaku.
It's a slow, agonizing, painful death for videogame writing sites that are losing ground to both streamers and Youtubers by the day. in terms of coverage. Those cheesy clickbait blogs are the only way to generate quick clicks for their parent companies (Polygon is run by Vox Media, Kotaku is run by Gawker Media, both of which are unshy about trying to shoehorn left wing politics into videogames when they aren't needed or wanted). The sooner they finally die out, the better.
Not surprisingly, this guy is trying to push the indie scene in the article and is whining about the high cost of entry for console games.
"Development is still typically the most expensive part of releasing a new video game creation, but the licensing fee or royalties paid to any platform holder (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony) remains a high cost of entry.
This fee is one of the reasons indie development, which blossoms so easily on the personal computer and mobile, still lags behind on console. And that despite recent push by console makers to pull in more indies."
"But it was Nintendo that helped create today's concept of game publishing, forced platform exclusivity and royalties, and it would be fitting for Nintendo to be the one that kills it and the console, too."
Like I said in the other thread, the indie scene is great if you have the time to wade through a TON of garbage to find a couple games worth playing. But I can't imagine ever taking it seriously enough (similar to how I never could take overclockedremix seriously, despite some gems coming out of the efforts there) and I personally think flooding the market with subpar games is a huge deterrent to a lot of consumers. That is exactly what happened with the Atari 2600 and we got the great videogame crash of 1983 as a result...Which Nintendo rescued the industry from. Not surprisingly, there's no mention of this in the article...It goes against the narrative.*
As an older gamer, the better argument AGAINST consoles right now is the number of larger companies that have gone under (particularly of the Japanese variety). But this writer wasn't smart enough to talk about things like the financial problems of Sega, Konami and Capcom (and Nintendo, to an extent) and the general demise of the Japanese console market. He's too intent on pushing his agenda.
*I stand corrected:
"In the '80s there was the video game crash, caused by an abundance of bad games, and then the rebirth of home gaming with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Single-handedly, Nintendo and its NES revitalized home gaming and the game console. But the NES brought with it a new sort of third-party licensing that included strict anti-competition rules and licensing fees. While some of that was tossed out following an FTC investigation, it set the tone for all future major game consoles."
That strict licensing was to keep people from flooding the market with garbage. Remove it and you have the same "abundance of bad games" scenario.
