Let's Talk About Why Kids Hate Your Favourite Franchise
If you've been browsing the gaming sphere lately you might've noticed a ton of posts like this one where older developers pontificate about why the youth just aren't that into old, prestigious RPG institutions, eventually settling on the massive gaps between mainline releases as being one of the main reasons.
Problem is, they're all wrong.
Most of the dudes saying this are either childless and/or unmarried, which is pretty important to know. Me? I'm an aunt several times over. Most of my siblings are gamers (as our parents were) and all of my stepsiblings are gamers (as their fathers were) and this is a passion that got passed onto their kids. Likewise, two of my best friends are guardians of children. All of this, and my own involvement with those groups, makes me feel pretty qualified to say what I'm about to say. To say that these industry titans are, for once, completely out of their depth in this discussion.
What must be internalized about the current generation of kids and their relationship to games is that the economy is in tatters. 'Prestige' franchises like yer Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Silent Hill, and so on? They've been hit with the £60/$70 bug. Even the ones that have remained uninfected are still a tall ask given that £40-50 just isn't as much money on current wages as it was when most of us were weans. Now remember - and if you don't, you had a privileged upbringing - that children don't have financial freedom or like... Most of the time they don't have finances at all, bro. Nobody's buying fuckin' Monster Hunter Wilds on pocket money. With these in mind, the simplest and most digestable reason for kids not caring about Final Fantasy or whatever is that they're just too expensive to justify in our current market. They could fund billion-dollar studies for the development of FF17 as a game for kids and it'd still miss its target demographic because children are not paying £70 for Final Fantasy in the first place.
But there's a secondary economic problem here, mind you. My generation and the one preceeding us were born into a gaming landscape where the trade-in and second-hand games were supreme. In return for merely waiting a day or a week, any game we wanted would be on GAME or Gamestation's pre-owned shelf at a startling discount. Of all the Halo and Gears of War games I came into possession of, the only one I paid full price for was Halo 4. The rest? Discount shelf, baby. Unfortunately for subsequent generations that luxury was already eroding by the time they were conceived and had pretty much vanished entirely a few years later. Publishers didn't like all that imagined lost income, so the physical store was strangled until it became impotent and everyone was shuffled onto the loathsome Storefront, where discounts aren't as easy to come by. Britain has access to CEX (pronounced exactly how you think) but that's a company of vultures who are unfortunately online enough to actually know the value of what they sell. So, sorry kids, you're not getting Halo 3 ODST at a 60% discount that soon after launch.
It is, admittedly, not that simple. I think, even were these games to be cheaper, you wouldn't see much mass adoption by the youth. Price and release cadence are one thing, but I think something else has slipped under the rug: Games previously 'for kids' are elbowing them out of the target demographic. Monster Hunter Stories went from a charming subseries for little kids to nu-Fire Emblem, talking about climate refugees and feudal politics and Sins of the Father. Final Fantasy went from sprite-based bleeps and bloops to chasing Game of Thrones' Tits 'n' Talking coattails. Crash Bandicoot, one of the foundational 'children's platformers', reinvented itself as a chain of Kaizo Marios. Lego games continually market themselves on having Content and Mechanics. Nintendo aren't even immune to this! Breath of the Wild and its superior sequel are more akin to Jetix Presents: Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl than anything truly child-friendly. Fantasy Life i initially seems to a game made for kids' sensibilities only to inundate the player with tutorials and demand they mash out buttons to an extent that makes even I, former fighting game player, need to do hand exercises. Sonic Crossworlds has everyone's favourite mascots and is also one of the most mechanically demanding kart racers on the market. Now, all of this is good for us adults who love shoving mediocre pablum with franchise branding down our gullets, but - and this may strike some viewers as controversial - kids deserve to have games too. They deserve games with some depth, but their current paid offerings are almost exclusively either games that're abandoning them or games that're a stepping stone to predatory microtransactions.
SPEAKING OF WHICH!
In the leadup to Final Fantasy XIV's big glamour unlocking, Naoki Yoshida revealed he'd dived into a ton of mobile RPGs to see how they were handling things, and his fear at how far ahead they were compelled him to smother his previous apprehensions around unlocking glamour. So, him repeating the "it's the release schedule innit" party line in the linked article is really funny, because mobile games are both problem and answer here. Well, not specifically mobile games, but rather Free-to-Play titles. If you've been following along intently you're probably having thoughts like "well, the parents could buy them a game" or "Ham you fucking hack fraud you are 700 words into a micro-essay about why kids don't care about big IPs and you haven't mentioned Those Two Games". Those are very valid thoughts, and you're right to think them. Let's just get into the meat here: Yes, kids could ask their parents to buy them a game, but in Ham's experience kids are often more aware of money than you think. They know that asking their parents for a game that costs about 4-5 dinners is a really big ask, and most of them feel some form of guilt over this. Even at Christmas. Especially Christmas. Oh my god, buying kids games at Christmas is so depressing if you care at all about children's mental health.
But that's where free games come in: Everyone has a phone. You unfortunately need one of the hell-rectangles to function in modern life, and kids are getting them at distressingly young ages. They have phones, so ergo they have access to a ton of games they can play for no real cost besides SD card space. By sheer presence alone this removes a lot of pressures associated with gaming as a child: There's no need to ask your parent or guardian to pony up money, you don't need to potentially borrow said parent or guardian's console, and if you hate the game or just don't get it, you can simply uninstall it and fuck off. It's frankly maddening value for a child who doesn't have any financial freedom or wasn't born into wealth. I'm sure your brain is abuzz with all the ways this sucks, and I absolutely agree but we'll get to that later. If you take anything away from this essay, let it be this: Kids are playing F2P titles because the economy is in the shitter.
Let's double back a bit, though. Let's really examine the idea that release cadence is what's stopped Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest from taking route amongst the youth. 1987-1989 sees both FF1 and FF2. There's a year's gap, and then starting with FF3 we get a new game every year for three years, starting in 1990 and ending in 1992. There's a year gap, FF6, before a ludicrous (for the time) two year gap culminating in FF7. Another gap, then we have another game-a-year period with FF8, 9, 10 and 11. From here, we stop having mainlines so regularly and start having more spinoffs, with the main series disappearing until 2006 with FF12, before another two year gap that ends in 2009 with FF13, whereupon we don't get another non-MMO mainline until 2016. After that, the mainline series is silent until 2023.
You may wonder what the point of expositing the FF release order graphic on Wikipedia to you is, and it's to make a simple point: There is no point in time, no form FF's release cadence has ever taken, that can compete with the games that're sponging up kids' time. Roblox is an infinite well of predatio- er, games to play. Fortnite updates weekly or thereabouts. There's mascot horror games and videos basically every other minute. Mihoyo games update regularly enough, and so does every other F2P game that isn't a passion project or abandoned roguelike from 2009. One FF or DQ game a year wouldn't cut it. Wouldn't pull them away from their Honkais and Disney shite and Robloxes and all that. No, you'd need to release a new FF or DQ every month to keep up. Now, I know Square Enix management would love for this to happen, but it's never going to and no amount of money sunk into abominable tech scams is going to fix this. The race is over and the horse hasn't even galloped. Roll credits. This isn't just my cynicism about SE peeking out, either; almost every FF mobile game is overly self-referential wank. They're not hitting that mobile game goldmine because they rely on existing fanbases, which ensures only a modest cashflow (absolutely far less than the insane amount of money needed to maintain, market and develop a live service game) because like... You think teenagers give a fuck about Garland, who will knock you all down? Can you imagine targeting young adults with a Vayne Solidor banner?
In the middle of all this, I feel compelled to reiterate an age-old problem: When your kid starts socializing, they're basically out of your hands. When it comes to games, and specifically the games children engage with, I feel like a lot of my peers and people older than me forget about the social element behind their choices. You could shell out on Animal Crossing New Horizons, yeah, but when their besties say "hop on roblox bro" they're gonna comply. That was always the case - my early Steam library is awash with absolute shite that my friends and I played out of compulsion - but has arguably gotten even worse in a world where Spaces For Kids have been utterly annihilated. Speaking exclusively from my working class Scottish point of view here: Uh, there aren't any. Nobody visits the parks because the police don't patrol that way so they're pretty unsafe for kids, community centers and play spaces are just outright gone or replaced for more adult ventures, libraries are shutting down or being centralized in such a way that excludes people who can't make the journey to the newer and shinier ones, parks get vandalized by shitebags and ignored by the council, so on so forth. Games like Roblox and Fortnite fill that gap. You can hang out in Roblox games or Fortnite customs. You can laugh in call about how funny it was when Vegeta hit the griddy over Kafka Honkai's corpse while Rick Astley got into a sword fight with Sabrina Carpenter. You can go on Twitter and be really annoying about Honkai Star Rail. Why? Because all of these are (theoretically) free. They're a place to hang out. All of these platforms have issues with child safety, but even those are tame compared to getting a bottle smashed over your head or having to avoid an entire road because some dickheads started a gang fight.
We're all adults here so I don't need to tell you that the youth of today being hooked to F2P games is bad. I'm gonna pass on preaching to the choir and share with you an uncomfortable truth. You've almost certainly seen a clip from a mobile game somewhere that looks a lot like this clip of Disney Solitaire. You already know it's bad, we can skip that part, but the truth that's likely going to make you sit in the bathtub for an hour is that children aren't just being trained to accept shit like this as normal. They're not just having their brains rewired by an endless loop of retention mechanics, carrot-stick login bonuses, and the whole gamut of F2P shite. No, they're enjoying it.
They might even love it.
One of the most harrowing experiences in my adult life occurred during the winter of 2023. My step-siblings, keenly aware that I'm infinitely more Plugged In when it comes to new game releases and games in general, asked me if I could make a list of games for their kids to play. New ones, they specified, because the weans just weren't interested in pixel graphics or retro 3D looks. Already a red flag - and huge roadblock - but manageable. I took stock of their consoles, did my research, compiled a list (with headers!) and sent it off. Clean, easy, simple. Job well done, Ham.
Yeah so they didn't play any of them. Well, they did, but not for long. The one that had the most staying power was Crash 4 (almost certainly due to it dangling unlocks in front of you at the end of each level) but even it was thrown to the wayside. Now, trying to get reasoned critique out of actual children is a fool's errand, but in this intance we (my step-siblings and I) succeeded: They weren't told what to do. There were no challenge screens offering currency for character pulls in exchange for doing the story, no capacity for co-op, no markers saying "btw this is the material for [character] :)", and uhm. No rewards for "just playing". Yes, they meant the login bonuses. Yeah, those ones you hate. It was unfortunately pointless to explain to them that yes there are rewards and that sometimes games are just meant to be played for yourself and the joy of it. The end result was a whole lot of wasted money - thankfully covered by their dad - and a whole lot more hours on Robloxnitefort.
I wish I could end on a hopeful note. The games my stepsiblings bought were given to my da's pal Derek who then punted them to his grandkids, and they love them, at least. My stepsister, who we'll pseudonymously refer to as Carla, is a tyrant whose parenting has its own issues, but she's limited screentime pretty heavily and introduced her kids to games via actual titles from her own PS2 collection. I wish I could say these are hope for the future, but they're exceptions: The former children are disconnected from their peers for reasons that'll go undisclosed for their privacy, and the latter is wealthy in her own way. The stories you see online of modern kids "experiencing the joys of the N64 again!" are almost certainly either fabricated, staged, or done by people wealthy enough to procure N64 games or hardware without spending a frustrating sum, or were otherwise lucky enough to still have them in pristine condition. These are, in every sense of the word, privileges.
Do I think it'll get better? Do I think kids will swing back and fall really in love with Final Fantasy? Maybe. I think, at least, the current situation will end. Probably not anytime soon, but if it does, I do not see the current titans being the ones left standing as the champions of kid's media. Mascot Horror is already sweeping that demographic like the whooping cough and I suspect that the next big Thing for kids, on par with the titans of my generation, will be either Five Nights at Freddy's or a spiritual offshoot of that. There's a higher chance of a Poppy Playtime RPG taking hold of the youth than there is of a 12 year old knowing who the fuck Solus zos Galvus is. The most boring truth of the matter is that kids have stopped seeing games as things to Play and, by and large, seen them as another arm of socialization. If there's nothing to Partake In when they play Chrono Trigger, why even play it? They can just go onto Twitter and start screaming at people for shipping Stelle/Kafka because they perceive it to be pedophilic. I wish this was an anecdote I made up for a joke, but the only silver lining is that it's not any of the children I know doing it.
...I hope.