Videogames have been a hobby of mine for many years. I first started playing on a Gameboy when I was 5 years old. From then on, I've bought multiple games and gaming consoles. Over the years I began paying closer attention to how these games were made as the technology to play them and create them became more advanced. Today, the videogame industry is a hollow shell of what it once was.

In 2009, the sequel to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released. It boasted a more action-packed plot and gameplay features that seemed to take away from the realism of “modern warfare.” Regardless, it is currently the second-best selling videogame of all time in America and the UK. Since then, I have noticed every other game trying to emulate what this particular sequel brought to the table, and these games generally lack the quality that’s expected from consumers. Gaming publishers and developers seemed to be more interested in making money than they did trying to make a good game. One day I was reading an article in a gaming magazine about Dead Space, one of my favorite games. Its developers were making a sequel and talking about how the first game was “too scary” to play. They were even quoted as saying they wanted to match the level of action that Modern Warfare 2 offered to attract fans of that franchise. To me, the quality of the game was going to suffer because these companies were more interested in making a quick buck and catering to others that they lost touch with their core fans. All of this led up to a conversation I had with a programmer who was working on Dead Space 2. I pressed him on why the developers toned down the horror aspects of the game. He replied, in short, that in the West, game developers were more concerned about the money aspect of the business. Developers in countries like Japan, meanwhile, were more concerned about the artistic aspect of their product. The latter did not perform as well as Western videogames did in the marketplace. Now I understand that this is a money-making business in the end, but some, not all, but some games have companies that truly care about their product and really take their time working on developing a good game.