There’s a really interesting market report from Qutee covering the topic of “Gaming Today”. The report was published recently, consisting of more than 10,427 poll votes analyzed by Qutee’s data discussions.

There are a lot of interesting responses from the survey, including that 37.3% of gamers feel games are less innovative these days than in generations past. There were 31.69% of games who were unsure if games were less innovative, and only 31.3% felt that games were not becoming less innovative. The report quotes one gamer who seems like he came right out of the comment section of OAG, he wrote…

“There isn’t much innovation to get out a genre. There’s little innovation with the FPS genre too. So CoD just stays the same but rolls out a new title over and over like Hollywood does with movies.”

Another user also chimed in, writing…

“I feel like games have not broken that wall of innovation in a while a lot of things feel like they’ve become copies of concepts already existing but not bettered in anyway or remakes of the same game.”

No arguments here.

Gamers definitely enjoy games and feel as if they get their money’s worth, according to the Qutee report, but they just aren’t fond of the stagnation coming from the AAA publishers. In fact, other than Riot Games and Nintendo, most of the publishers had rather unimpressive feedback from gamers when it came to how they felt about them during 2017.

41.8% of gamers actually preferred the indie, single-A and double AA outings during 2017 compared to the major AAA players. This would include games like A Hat In Time, Cuphead or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Riot came in just under the other category with 29% of the vote, while Nintendo was third with 17.1% of the vote.

The reason for the low scores on the other publishers? Well, it fits in with the lack of innovation, the anti-consumer schemes, and all that microtransaction nonsense. The report quotes one gamer who stated…

“Smaller developers are able to make games that rival the quality of AAA titles, and the fanbase is starting to reject the parasitic business practices holding us down.”

These aren’t just fringe views. The core gamer market have mostly rejected a lot of the AAA publishers and their attempts to maintain player engagement. In fact, in 2016 a lot of the games that gamers preferred playing were older games and indie titles not released in 2016.

In another market report, it was stated that 13% of gamers spent less money on new games to focus on their growing back catalog of games.

AAA publishers are basically losing out on the hardcore gamer’s dollar value, but I suppose so long as they can keep fooling casual gamers to hop on board the microtransaction train, they likely don’t care.

Then again, a sizable portion of hardcore gamers also don’t mind microtransactions. Many core gamers have defended that cosmetic loot boxes are fine… in fact 68.6% find cosmetic loot boxes to be “ok”. Only 5.8% said that they don’t buy microtransactions, and 2.4% said they would rather pay up front. Even more depressing is that 1.3% were the only ones to reject microtransactions, while 22% said they were fine with microtransactions so long as they weren’t pay-to-win.

So don’t expect microtransactions to go anywhere as it seems to be a form of cancer gamers are willing to tolerate so long as it’s cosmetic and not pay-to-win.