Are Prestige Videogames the Future?

The video game industry has been made up of all kinds of trends since its inception, but one of the longest-lasting, and potentially troublesome trend, happened in the 2000s. As technology finally caught up with the scope designers wanted to go for, there has been this push by both AAA and indie into making cinematic or “prestige” games — titles that feel less like a videogame and more of an attempt at securing an Oscar nom. But where these games fail for me, is that they tend to forget at the end of the day that they are games, and I wanted to explore this further. <h1>Movie Games or Game Movies?</h1> We could certainly argue that the beginning of this trend came with Hideo Kojima and the success of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, and of course lately with Death Stranding. A noted lover of cinematography and film, there is as much to watching one of his games and absorbing it as there is to play it. Each one of his games, even the entirety of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, is a one-off in some capacity in terms of design. They are very much “his games” — you couldn’t find another designer doing something else exactly like that. Then in the 2000s, more and more studios started looking at bringing Hollywood into the game industry. There was the big one with Rockstar Studios and the GTA series, but also this approach to making “blockbuster” games like Uncharted, The Tomb Raider reboots, and many others. From the indie side, they decided to go the “arthouse” route, with games that have very minimalist UIs, or no UIs at all and could be about literally any subject. One of the most notable in this respect was Tale of Tales with each game being more like an interactable art piece. <a href="https://medium.com/@GWBycer/are-prestige-videogames-the-future-1d035ea45b54">Read More</a>