Category: 2024

It was with sadness that I saw an article recently stating “Embracer has closed Alone in the Dark studio Pieces Interactive“. The amount of layoffs within the video game industry currently is, quite frankly, disgusting and it’s sad to see the effort to revive an important franchise destroy an entire studio. However, I will admit that I had a problem with the way the game was marketed, that being with such an intense focus on the celebrities starring in it. Besides the fact that I didn’t immediately know who David Harbour or Jodie Comer were, I have problems with this strategy and the mindset in general. Therefore, I thought that I should take this opportunity to discuss my issue with celebrities in video games and why I think it’s a much bigger problem than most people realise.

The first time I ever thought about this issue was when I played Dishonored for the first time back in 2019. I knew that there were at least a few celebrities in the cast but I was quite surprised when I reached the credits and saw how many of them there were. However, a particular part of the credits ended up rubbing me the wrong way, that being the mention of a company called Blindlight and the specific term “Celebrity Acquisition, Casting And Voice Production”. When I saw this, it made me think about how these people had been sought out rather than being cast in a more typical manner. What did this mean? How much were they paid to star and, more importantly, how much did they ultimately contribute to the experience?

I was perusing the news recently when I saw a headline from PC Gamer called “Oof: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League lost Warner Bros. $200 million—which is $25 million more than the original 2016 movie cost to make“. This didn’t really surprise me as I could tell player enthusiasm was poor and that the game felt like a malicious attempt to milk consumers for money but there was one particular quote that stood out to me as being particularly infuriating. In the last paragraph, it notes “Despite the internal concerns among frontline workers, executives from Warner Bros. kept reviewing demonstrations of the game and sending laudatory feedback, praising the graphics and saying they expected Suicide Squad to become a billion-dollar franchise.” While I’ve touched on the topic in the past, I’ve felt compelled to write about how I feel the video game industry has an unhealthy obsession with video game graphics and why they need to stop!

Let me start with my personal issue with this quote and what it represents. I’ve found that when it comes to video game criticism, one of the easiest topics to discuss is the visual presentation. Ask nearly anyone who has only a passing interest in video games about their thoughts on a particular title and, in all likelihood, the first thing they’ll bring up will be the graphics. To some degree, this is understandable. You don’t even need to play the game in order to comment about its visuals and there exists an unfortunate tendency to break the old proverb “don’t judge a book by its cover” by judging games purely by graphics. If the biggest takeaway that these executives had was that they liked the graphics then it signals to me that they don’t have any clue when it comes to game design or what people look for in games.