Some people say that whenever something hits a certain threshold, it becomes popular with the masses and its quality declines to appeal for a wider demographic. I can’t deny that can be true in some cases, but what motivates this sort of thinking is what feels more interesting to me.

The old ‘popular = bad’ slowclone meme is used often by people that don’t have anything better to do, but I don’t really think that’s the case. My real thoughts on the subject are a little different. For me, content is content, no matter where it came from. ‘Master Detective Archives: RAINCODE’ from Spike Chunsoft and Too Kyo Games is no less of a game than ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’ from Activision Publishing and Treyarch (plus a bunch of other studios). But that means we can judge it from its merits and lack thereof.

I’d love to out in a limb and say that “more equals better”, but that doesn’t seem to be the case entirely. We’ve been used to get games with larger areas to explore and discover secrets, but recently, smaller but more dense worlds have made their ways back towards gaming, meaning that it’s better to pick more meaningful content than something that is essentially pointless.

Meaningful content has been lacking for many years into games and it’s only natural to assume that game developers don’t seem to go fully towards one direction or another. But in reality, game development is only as good as you can make it, and due to secrecy and NDAs, it’s impossible to get a real good state of the game, like if something is missing.

Take as an example: Grand Theft Auto 5. One of the world’s top sellers in 2024 (!), GTA5 nowadays is an entry point to the GTA Online experience. After a decade of playing the game, you can see what Rockstar originally intended with the singleplayer component, but with its 1000 pages script, there’s a big lack of meaningful content to it. The game doesn’t go all the way as it should. There’s multiple threads that get dropped midway, and although ending C is most meaningful one, it just ends the game by having the characters kill their nemesis in the most meaningless way possible, eg. Michael killing Franklin’s nemesis, Stretch in what could be seen as a drive-by shooting. It’s so pointless and defeats the whole struggle that the character had.

Another example: Fallout 4. I call these BGS-made games nowadays as the “Hot Air Balloon Syndrome”, for obvious reasons. Fallout 4 isn’t the start of the downfall, Skyrim was, but Fallout 4 was the company’s transition to having the syndrome at full effect. Fallout 4 promised a lot, showed a lot. In the end, it was very shallow, with the game stopping several threads for the sake of ‘get over with it already’ feels that make the meaningful content feel rather pointless.

One more example would be Starfield, who took that idea and ran to the ground with a faceplant, where they would make the biggest game ever, while making a bland game that feels like you could explore plenty of places but you really can’t. Several planets are just as explorable as the ones from Mass Effect 2 with the probe mechanic.

Somehow we’re getting bigger games in storage space that don’t justify it, so like… Could you devs stop it? It’s getting annoying.