The great divide: How yellow sparks controversy in the gaming community

The release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the latest installment from the venerable Square Enix video game creator, aims to captivate its loyal gamer community with its new role-playing challenge. With over 100 million units sold across its various releases, the game’s playable demo for the PlayStation 5 stirred up significant excitement ahead of its late February launch, akin to a teaser trailer in the film industry. However, the presence of digital yellow paint marks in certain areas of the game sparked controversy in the gaming community.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an open-world video game where players explore vast environments, seeking adventure and following a storyline. With current technology advancements, the game’s environments are becoming more immersive, detailed and realistic. However, making all environments fully interactive remains costly and impractical. A video game like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth can recreate intricate details of a cliff by a beach, but only a specific area is climbable by characters. To enhance the gaming experience, developers marked these climbable elements with digital yellow paint for player convenience. For many gamers, the growing use of yellow highlights in video games can ruin the immersive experience and goes against the essence of the game. Damion Schubert, creative director at Capcom, defended using these cues in its recent Resident Evil 4 remake. “Imagine trying to open 30 doors just to find the one you can actually go through. It totally breaks the immersion when the experience gets so boring that the whole simulation fails.”

The number of video game players has surged by over one billion in a decade, now standing at 3.32 billion globally. This shift indicates that major games are no longer just for hardcore gamers — they cater to a diverse audience seeking entertainment without overly challenging their skills.

Elena Flores, the editorial and production director at Raiser Games, highlights another key point: the rising number of younger players from Gen Z and Gen Alpha who have distinct gaming habits and platform preferences. To adjust, the industry is focusing on this evolving demographic. “Video games have become a universal cultural artifact. Gen Z now spends more time gaming than on social media — it’s their virtual hangout.” This requires understanding and adapting to new patterns and habits. “We’ve seen the industry grow in pursuit of technical excellence, yet younger players don’t care as much about this in their gaming experience,” said Flores, who estimates that Gen Z’s potential purchasing power is $360 billion. Such massive disposable income is forcing the video game sector to reckon with this younger audience. “For every person annoyed by yellow paint, there are 500 others who are totally fine with it,” said Flores. “Traditional video games are not going to disappear, but we’re going to need a paradigm shift.”

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