When did games become jobs, and why are we still pretending that’s fun?
At some point, video games stopped ending. You used to play a campaign, beat the boss, watch the credits, and walk away feeling like you’d done something. Now? You log in for the tenth time this week to shoot the same enemies in the same map so you can earn a new hat. It’s not a finale. It’s a treadmill.
Games are no longer games. They’re chores with a loot table.
Content is just a fancy word for repetition
Live service games love to talk about content. Seasonal content. New content drops. Hundreds of hours of content. It all sounds impressive until you realise it’s the same three missions recycled with slightly different objectives and a colour-swapped enemy.
Destiny 2 is the obvious offender. They give you a new gun with a new name that works exactly like the old gun with the old name. You run the same strike for the fifth year in a row, but now there’s a time limit and a new vendor who grunts differently. You’re not building a legacy. You’re polishing the same floor over and over.
Or Call of Duty: Warzone. New map. New skins. Same gun balance problems. And just enough tweaks to make it feel like this season matters more than the last. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
This is not depth. It’s maintenance.
Remember when games had credits?
A good single-player game gives you a start, a middle, and an end. You play. You finish. You move on. There’s a shape to the experience. A sense of progression that leads somewhere.
Look at Dead Space (the remake or the original). It doesn’t ask you to grind. You play through the campaign, survive the nightmare, and when it’s done, it’s done. Or Titanfall 2, a campaign so well-paced and well-designed that it feels like a statement. No filler. No fetch quests. No daily objectives from some bored robot.
Even Doom Eternal, for all its chaos, has a clear beginning, a big finish, and the decency to get off the stage when it’s done. That’s what a proper game looks like.
Compare that to The Division 2, where finishing the campaign is just the game unlocking its real goal: keeping you inside it until you forget what sunlight feels like. There’s no end. There’s just gear scores and seasonal ladders. You win nothing. You just keep going until you burn out or uninstall.
This isn’t addiction. It’s obligation.
People say live service games are addictive. Most of them aren’t. They’re just demanding. You log in because you feel like you have to. You don’t want to miss the event, the bonus, the limited-time currency. And once you’re in, you just go through the motions.
You finish the dailies. You collect the reward. You log out. Nothing memorable happens. You’re not entertained. You’re just up to date.
Genshin Impact is the worst for this. Gated progression. Timed events. Resin systems. It actively punishes you for wanting to play it on your own terms. You miss a day, you fall behind. You miss a week, you may as well not come back.
That’s not fun. That’s a job with worse benefits.
Grind is not gameplay
Grinding used to be a symptom of bad design. Now it’s sold as a feature. You’ll hear people talk about how a game has longevity, how it gives you something to work toward. What that usually means is it makes you repeat tasks until your brain goes quiet.
You’re not building skill. You’re chasing a number. The only challenge is your tolerance for boredom.
It’s why something like Portal still works. You play it, you finish it, and you remember it. You don’t get asked to come back for seasonal cubes. You’re not farming cake tokens. You’re done. And it’s enough.
It’s time to admit that some games should end. Not after season eight. Not when the servers shut down. Just… end. Tell the story. Let you win. Let you stop.
You don’t need an endless reward loop. You need closure.
What’s the last game you finished that didn’t immediately ask you to come back tomorrow?
