Will there be a decrease/increase in the making/selling of modern military shooters during Trump? - General

In all too many games you're playing as an agent for the US government, often on foreign soil. But few times is that brought up as a point of ethics, but with US politics becoming an even more hot button and devisive topic, do you think the change in administration will have an effect on the gaming habits of those who do play those sort of games, or perhaps the game studios themselves? Or is perhaps gaming so removed from reality that there's no cognitive connection between the ins and outs of real world US Governmental policies, and the fiction operations of CIA Agent Gruff McTacticool and Private Baldy O'Bulletsponge? Just a thought I had... Do you think there will be any significant effect on the production or sales of modern military games set or released during Trump's presidency? Because you'd be esentially working for Trump in those games. Some people might not be too comfortable with that idea. I don't know.

I never thought to myself when playing a shooter "huh, I'm working for Bush/Obama". I doubt it will make a difference.

Unless Trump/Congress/government officials or the developers themselves somehow make a huge stink about everything, I doubt there will be any significant effect on the production of military-styled shooters. A majority of the games that follow suit with having the player take the role of some random agent/soldier that works for the US don't even follow along with actual political figures on a named basis, and the few that do usually replace the individual with another fictitious individual that's usually only sporting the title of president and nothing more.

[QUOTE=DiscoInferno;52033916]In all too many games you're playing as an agent for the US government, often on foreign soil. But few times is that brought up as a point of ethics, but with US politics becoming an even more hot button and devisive topic, do you think the change in administration will have an effect on the gaming habits of those who do play those sort of games, or perhaps the game studios themselves? Or is perhaps gaming so removed from reality that there's no cognitive connection between the ins and outs of real world US Governmental policies, and the fiction operations of CIA Agent Gruff McTacticool and Private Baldy O'Bulletsponge? Just a thought I had... Do you think there will be any significant effect on the production or sales of modern military games set or released during Trump's presidency? Because you'd be esentially working for Trump in those games. Some people might not be too comfortable with that idea. I don't know.[/QUOTE] Well either way there's been a very strong swerve away from modern military shooters and towards near-future and historical ones since quite a while before his presidency, so even if it might have had an effect I doubt it will.

[QUOTE=Snowmew;52033963]I never thought to myself when playing a shooter "huh, I'm working for Bush/Obama". I doubt it will make a difference.[/QUOTE] Despite this I think there will be drop just because of how tired the genre is in the eyes of the audience and a lot of games coming out nowadays being far from "cod clones", unrelated to Trump.

While I think most major, AAA-level games of that type won't change much, I could see some smaller titles and/or newer studios taking the initiative to spin the current discontent with how things are into a game. Sure, it'd likely be extremely polarizing and controversial, but games have always been good at doing that.

Modern military shooters are starting to disappear already, and it has nothing to do with Trump or politics, it's just that the genre went out of style like WW2 shooters did before

So, I think best answer is, "there will be a decrease," but not because of Trump. And it's kind of straightforward. To really grip it, we've got to go back to where shooters as we understand them come in to play. The early Medals of Honors and Calls of Duties. Those games were riding the much bigger wave of public sentiment that an explosion of WW2 interest had generated. In part, because of the momentous 50-year anniversary of the war that the late 80's and 90's marked, and in part because of real breakthroughs in story telling and technology that facilitated these celebrations. We got about 10 to 20 years of WW2 shoots, give or take how you count it. If you start from the oldest WW2 themed shooter I can think of, Castle Wolfenstein, which came out in 1981 then right up to 2001 makes exactly 20 years. Then, well, 2001 happened. More specifically 9/11. Game devs have always been trying to push the envelope for public attention. That's a pretty solid fact. In an endless sea of WW2 shooters, it was getting harder and harder to make a WW2 shooter stand out. Finally, in 2007, Infinity Ward breaks through with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This isn't to say that there weren't "modern military shooters," before COD4. However, by and large CoD4 dropped it's dick on the table and set the tone with a definitive thud. This lead to an explosion of interest in, well, Modern Military shooters. Game devs were eager to make their games relatable, topical, and fundamentally understandable in the same way that they had with WW2 shooters, where everyone knew that Nazis=Bad and Allies=Good. Nothing was more understandable in the years between 2007 and 2017 than the gritty, sand-and-beige-and-brown, confused nonsense of the Middle Eastern conflict. That was all just about 10 years ago. Are you seeing a pattern? Advances in Gaming technology allow for more exploration of game mechanics and quicker game development cycles than ever before. It's become quite easy to churn out a bullet-hallway, but something much more difficult to make a game that will be "good" and somehow different from a sea of seemingly endless knock offs. So companies are turning toward more fantastical options. Sci-Fi, Speculative-Near-Future, Romanticized accounts of the Past and more are starting to crowd their way on to the field. At some point soon, there's probably going to be a huge, breakaway success story that will define the next decade or two of shooters. It may have even already happened. Battlefield 1, for instance, was pretty popular and influential. Though I personally doubt it's going to launch a cavalcade of WW1 themed shooters, but I could be wrong. Of course, there's also the fact that Video Games in general are more politicized and crafted with more "artistry" than they have been before as well. Maybe we'll see an unexpected return to the earth browns and blinding yellows of the middle east for reasons we don't know yet. My money's on the future though. Sci-Fi and Near-Future are a genre that seems to be bulking up, particularly as old giants begin to show their age (Halo, I'm looking at you.) That, and the fact that every day it's very easy to find some new and unimaginable science breakthrough in the real world, it seems like the public's attention is turning toward Futurism, and some canny game dev will be the first to really nail it.

[QUOTE=Crazy Ivan;52037612]~snip~[/QUOTE] Yeah, I agree on that note- especially with the success of games like Destiny and Titanfall 2 (though TF2 has had some issues due to bad marketing) that people's interests do seems leaning towards futurism. Additionally, I think there will be some higher-quality historical FPSes in the next few years riding off BF1's hype train (maybe not WW1 games, but WW2/Korea/etc. more likely).