Let me regale a story for you, from an event that occurred before I was born. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean government was overthrown. Sitting president Salvador Allende was ousted in a military coup, and was replaced with military leader General Augusto Pinochet. Despite Allende's refusal to step down, power was seized, and he was effectively removed from office. During the period of military occupation, famously, the Estadio Nacional de Chile, Santiago's giant sports arena and complex, was used as a detention center for civilians, Allende supporters, and ultimately, anyone seen as a dissident of the military coup.




What does any of this have to do with gaming, you ask? Very little, in fact. At least, that's the way it appears on the surface. Truth be told, my primary reason for bringing it up is the stream of consciousness that happens when you read or hear something, and it sparks a memory, or triggers a thought. When I heard the title of Google's new game streaming service, STADIA, it didn't immediately strike me as anything particularly interesting. The next day, however, I read it again, and I went right to getting a song stuck in my head: "Estadium Nacional" by the now-defunct progressive rock band, Magellan (R.I.P. Trent Gardner). It's a great anthem that tells some of the story of the Allende overthrow, and a fine slice of prog rock in its own right, even without the trappings of the tragic story as the lyrical focus.


If you think, at this early point in the article, that I've completely lost the plot, bear with me. I'm merely setting up a discussion on the coup that is taking place within the world of video games. It's not a sudden, violent conflict; no, it's a slow burn. As the saying goes, rather than throw the frog in a pot of boiling water, it's easier to turn up the heat slowly, so the front doesn't even realize he's being boiled to death, until it's too late. In this scenario, we're the frogs, and the gaming industry at large is the cook.

Allow me to cut through the imagery, and get right to the point. Gaming, as we know it, is changing. It has been, for many years. Most gamers my age have probably lamented the things which have become common occurrences over the last few years, within the industry. We know that, as game development becomes increasingly more complex, more and more games are released in broken and unfinished states, only to be patched later (or often, on day one), to fix all the problems that weren't discovered with a game prior to it's release. We're also in the age of "games as a service" - you don't buy a game that gets small iterative updates over time. Instead, you pay a subscription fee for a game that is constantly changing. The experience you have with the game today won't be the same experience tomorrow, because there's no guarantee that the environment you're in will look the same from session to session.

What's becoming more prevalent are the "freemium" titles, that take after mobile games. Rather than paying a premium price for a new game, many games are free to play, or free to start, or occasionally there's a small charge to buy in, but then the company makes their money through "lootboxes" and various in-game transactions. Want to change the way your character looks? $5 please! Like your buddy's bazooka more than yours? That'll be $3.50. Custom hairdo? All yours, for a measly $0.99 - what a bargain! Sarcasm aside, this is the direction the industry appears to be heading for large game releases.


All hope is not lost, however. Despite the gaming industry telling consumers that we don't want single player experiences, some of the best-selling and most well loved games in the last few years have been large-scale, single player affairs. The latest God of War game, for example, or Horizon Zero Dawn are both solitary experiences of different stripes. The former is a largely linear affair, guiding the player on their quest, whereas the latter takes a more open approach, with the game more subtly nudging the player forward, and hinting at where you're supposed to go, hoping you'll oblige. And on Nintendo's Switch, two of the biggest sellers have been single player campaigns as well. Both [/i]Super Mario Odyssey[/i] and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have embraced the story-driven, single player narrative as their approach, and it has paid off handsomely for them.

More than just single-player games, indie developers have also answered the call, providing all kinds of interesting experiences, short and long, that are well crafted, and generally finished when they release. Sure, sometimes games have bugs, and that's hard to avoid them completely. But patching a few minor issues in an otherwise perfectly playable game is quite some distance away from knowingly releasing a game that is a buggy mess, and must be patched on the day of release in order to be at least marginally playable. That seems to be where the industry is headed. At that point, your game disc or card becomes merely a token - something that signifies physically that you paid for a game, or have a license to play it.

The irony isn't lost on me that many companies released buggy, barely playable games during the height of the "console wars" era, with 8 and 16-bit releases sometimes being so riddled with bugs, you'd think it's time to call the exterminator. But those scenarios were often the exception, rather than the norm. And enterprising players often found fun ways to use those tricks to their own advantage, clipping through walls or floors, glitching items for more health or ammo, performing impossible jumps to skip over difficult sections of a level, and so on. Today's games seem to be prone to more serious glitches, with characters getting stuck, graphics glitching out to the point of being indecipherable, or often a game locking up tighter than a rusted nut on an old bolt. And when a publisher releases a game in today's market that is decidedly unfinished, despite user outcry, they often give their mea culpas and everyone moves on. In a world of constant internet chatter and a 24-hour news cycle, one can only be upset about any one thing for a little while, before the next aggravation comes along.


All of this to say that Google's newly unveiled STADIA service is the way that the gaming industry has been moving for some time. Previous attempts at streaming services have been attempted, with products like PlayStation Now, or the ill-fated OnLive, have shown. But a company like Google can pull it off, and make it successful. Anyone with a device that can get to the internet and play games has the potential to use a service like this. Putting aside the issues of slow Internet connections in rural areas and developing nations, Google has the money to make a venture like this profitable, and as technology continues to advance, this kind of service will become more viable for smaller enterprises to attempt, especially as services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services become less expensive, and more competitive. This way, companies can get in on this space without having to build out large infrastructure.

The IT professional in me is excited about the prospect of this kind of thing: seeing all this technology pushed to the limit, to provide new experiences for people at a moment's notice, is a pretty awesome prospect. But the old-school gamer in me balks at it, simultaneously. The experiences gained from a "games as a service" platform are no less important or relevant than those gained from blowing out a Nintendo cartridge and fiddling with the console to get it to boot up. However, the more ephemeral nature of the former certainly makes recapturing those experiences later, a much more difficult prospect. I can walk into my game room now and pull a cart off the shelf, and play any number of games I experienced as a kid, and go right back to childhood. I can fire up Super Mario Bros. 2, and be instantly transported to the basement of my childhood best friend's house, him slouched over in the bean bag next to me, already asleep at 12:30 or 1 AM, as I frantically control Princess Peach to jump and float to new areas, trying not to wake up my friend. In 10 the span of the next 10 years, will any of us be able to go back and experience a major 2018 or 2019 game in the same form we did on day one, in a console that isn't connected to the Internet? Chances are becoming more slim that such is the case.


The death of the physical game release has been widely proclaimed, and we've been seeing those signs for years. Customer backlash against the lack of physical games with the Xbox One was enough to send Microsoft back to the drawing board to rectify that prior to the release of the console in 2013. But 6 years later, with everyone having giant libraries of Steam games that we never play, and large libraries of "free" games, thanks to services like Microsoft's "Games With Gold" or Sony's PlayStation Plus offering, the reality of an all-digital future isn't as far fetched as we perhaps thought just a half decade ago. There's still a contingent of folks, like myself, who champion physical media, and thankfully, there are still publishers who continue to meet the demand, with smaller companies like Limited Run Games and Strictly Limited Games filling those small niches here and there. The Nintendo Switch, with a more permanent type of storage medium, continues to maintain a physical media presence as well, since those games you buy at retail for the console still require the game to be plugged into the card slot in order to play, versus merely an install for many disc-based games.

I'm old enough now, where, I don't have to worry as much about what's going to happen with gaming over the next couple decades. I've collected enough games to the point that, I have more than I could ever play. And even if I did manage to get through everything in my library, by the time I made the journey all the way through, it will have taken long enough that, assuming the hardware all works, or I can emulate somehow, I can go back and do it all again, since the oldest of those experiences would likely feel more fresh years later. But I'm aware of the changes taking place, and I need to keep those in mind, as I continue to engage in the hobby. Such things will continue to inform my purchase decisions for new hardware and software, and may lead me to focus more on what I've missed out on thus far, rather than pushing forward with the latest and greatest. The industry may yet surprise me, and for that, I am hopeful.

But I, for one, welcome our new gaming as a service overlords...if only to make me glad I grew up in the era I did, so I can still relive the memories of games long past, and have "new to me" experiences that give me the same feelings I had as a kid. For that, I can be grateful.

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