4 Worst Gaming Trends Of 2024 And How To Spot Them

Whether you game as a career (be it on stream, reviewing games, or otherwise) or indulge in the hobby a lot, it becomes easy to spot the spot the worst gaming trends the publishers keep trying to push. It seems there is never a year without some trend that’s seemingly doing the most it can to make the hobby a lot more annoying, and here, we’re going to look at how you can recognize them.

Generative AI

One of the most controversial topics in modern technology, many people suggest that generative AI is not just a threat to creative careers but also risks reducing and homogenizing the quality of games. Already, games with generative AI art, assets, writing, and translations are appearing on store shelves, and there are even concerns that digital storefronts might get flooded with games entirely made by generative AI, which will make it challenging to pick out the games that people put real work and time into.

The mobile-to-console pipeline

Mobile gaming has been massive for a long time, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of people game on their phones, and plenty of games work better on phones than on other platforms. However, there is also an increasing trend of games designed for mobile, making it to consoles. Aside from simplified controls that can be a little dull, the bigger issue is the constant feed of microtransactions that are much more normalized in the mobile space suddenly getting much more crossover potential.

The forever game

Nowadays, a lot of companies are trying to follow the Fortnite road to success. It’s not enough to sell a good, complete game that you spend a finite amount of hours on, you have to play them forever to keep their in-game economies going. This is infecting a lot of legacy franchises, too. Thankfully, there are ways around it, with options like purchasable COD MW3 accounts allowing you to skip the grind. Typically, these are much more cost-effective than the various boosts and season passes that these forever games have built into them, as well.

Blockchain

Another example of a largely unwanted technology that is trying to encroach its way into gaming. Blockchain is the ultimate example of a solution in need of a problem and with the failure of NFTs and the widespread apathy to crypto as anything other than a speculative investment, it has been making its way into games, turning the idea of play-to-win into play-to-earn. Needless to say, it’s not making any headway yet, with projects like the NFT game Symbiogenesis totally failing to launch, but it’s something we ought to keep an eye out for and speak out vocally against.

Know the bad practices that our favorite video game companies get up to, how to recognize them, and how to deal with them. Some of them are easy to deal with if you know how, but otherwise, you might want to skip out on them.