These days, the production of a video game might take several years. Certainly, those so-called Premium AAA games will have years of production, pre-production, editing, script editing, rewrites, music editing, and more. The effort that goes into them might be greater than what it takes to shoot a movie, and it can often be much more expensive. The publishers are, of course, serving a global gaming market with 100s of millions of players, all of whom are hungry to explore new virtual worlds and experiences.
And yet, there is something to be said for the continuing allure of simple games. To Indians, games like chess, pachisi and chaupar need very little introduction, but there are countless other examples. Of course, chess can be considered complex and sophisticated, but referring to its simplicity is not a contradiction. It is simple in the sense of the focus on a single activity and not, you know, blasting aliens and exploring open worlds like you might experience in a PlayStation game.
Simple Casino Games Have Remained Popular For Decades
One of the areas where you’ll often see the juxtaposition between simple and complex games is in the casino industry. A modern online casino will offer a wide range of sophisticated slots and live casino games, some of which will have incredible graphics and gameplay options. But the classics – most of which are simple – have been dominating casinos for decades. Games like blackjack, poker, roulette, and baccarat are still the headliners at casinos, including land-based casinos.
Again, if we take a game like a poker, it has the same pseudo-contradiction as chess in that it is both simple and complex. Poker variants can be played without employing too many complicated strategies. Games like Teen Patti are popular at online casinos, as are digital variants like video poker. Teen Patti is a variant of three-card poker, and it is well-liked partly due to the fact it is incredibly easy to play and strategize compared with regular poker. Video poker, of course, requires no strategy, given the outcome is decided by an RNG (random number generator).
The Surprising Longevity Of Simple Video Games
As for video games, it’s interesting to see that many of the games that go viral online are also relatively simple. Titles like Candy Crush, Farmville, and Among Us rely on simple ‘hook’ to get players interested. Often they are repetitious, but that in itself forms part of the allure.
Tetris was created in 1985. It was a smash hit at the time, representing the perfect type of game to be played on the nascent 4-bit and 8-bit gaming consoles of the 1980s. Almost 30 years later, a study in 2014 found that the game had been downloaded 425 million times. Each download required payment. It’s an incredible commendation for a game to be so popular decades after its release that people are still willing to pay for it.
Of course, mobile gaming has, in general, become more sophisticated since 2014, and Tetris might find itself up against it when a smartphone user is choosing between the classic block game and something like Call of Duty Mobile. But broadly speaking, our point still stands. If you have a genius ‘hook’ like Tetris, Candy Crush, or Poker, the games will remain popular entertainment options in perpetuity.
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