Tech Is Getting Worse Vol. 11 - Saints Row-Ification + Valve’s New Pet Store
AN INTRODUCTION TO SAINTS ROW-IFICATION
Saints Row (2006): Gritty, grounded street-gang turf war.
Saints Row 2 (2008): Ruthless gang vengeance blended with chaotic, dark humor.
Saints Row: The Third (2011): Glossy, Hollywood-style celebrity absurdity and mayhem.
Saints Row IV (2013): Matrix-inspired, superhero sci-fi farce.
Saints Row: Gat out of Hell (2015): Supernatural slapstick and literal underworld musical theater.
Saints Row (2022 Reboot): Millennial startup culture meets quirky criminal rebellion.
This is Saints Row-ification - not to be confused with enshittification, though both are two trees in the same forest. One important distinction is that enshittification means something got worse. Saints Row-ification means something got worse with prettier colors. Saints Row-ification means the game sold its soul and subsequently turned itself into a clown fiesta.
You know that trope where a perfectly sane character drops all self-respect, shame, and dignity out of sheer desperation to accomplish a goal, get help, or convince someone to do something? They make a complete and utter fool of themselves - the shameful grovel. The “I’ll eat your fucking shit” in gaming industry form. That’s what Saints Row-ification is. It’ll eat your fucking shit.
The game becomes everything in order to try to appeal to everyone. Look deep into its soul, and it has effectively become nothing. It may have done so for several reasons. Maybe times are tough and they need a way to make a quick buck, so they jingle keys in front of the normies. Maybe it’s a bunch of new guys who took the place of the devs and completely lost the plot. Who knows. Either way, such a phenomenon has infected the industry, and I don’t like it. Let’s take a look at our victims, shall we?
GTA Online (GTA V’s Multiplayer)
What started as an online multiplayer “build your underground criminal empire” quickly became riddled with flying bikes, laser guns, ray guns, and bullshit. People oftentimes trashed Saints Row as the lesser “GTA clone”, yet both poetically suffered the same fate in the end.
The Call of Duty Series
Quite possibly the biggest fall from grace. Call of Duty once consisted of dark and gritty tales centered around the historic battles of WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam, etc.Even when it turned to fiction, such as a hypothetical WW3 - Russia VS. America, it felt grounded.
Then the clown show started. Epic Cyber/Futurism was the least to be concerned about. You can now breach an authentic, photorealistic Ukrainian-style apartment complex as Nicki Minaj, dual-wielding glowing anime laser SMGs with pink heart tracer fire, only to get drop-shotted by Homelander, executed by Skeletor, and teabagged by a squad of operators wearing literal plush cat heads and glowing pumpkin helmets. Just utterly cannibalization into pop-culture detritus.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
Operators were grounded in real-world special forces units (SAS, GIGN, GSG 9). Ubisoft realized that unique gadgets and character silhouetting sold better if operators had “personalities.” Tactical operators gave way to superhero-style gadgets (hologram clones, nanobots, cyber-traps), and Ubisoft's monetization department discovered the power of the “quirky” cosmetic.
Within a few years, tactical swat operatives were dressed in plushie pink fursuits, alongside official crossover skins such as Rick and Morty, Master Chief, and WWE wrestlers.
The Far Cry Series
Far Cry 3 struck gold with Vaas and the theme of “insanity”… but Ubisoft completely misunderstood why it worked. They thought audiences just wanted wacky antics. Each successive entry progressively stripped away survival grit in favor of arcade dopamine and meme fodder.
By Far Cry 6, you are treated to serious, prestige-TV cutscenes about the brutality of fascism and modern imperialist exploitation starring Giancarlo Esposito... only to immediately cut back to gameplay where you fire a CD launcher that plays the "Macarena" on loop, backed up by an attack rooster in a gold chain and Chorizo, a paraplegic dachshund in a wheelchair with toolboxes strapped to his ribs. Lethal amounts of cognitive dissonance.
The Battlefield Series
Large-scale, authentic, and immersive combined-arms warfare. Battlefield 1 famously treated World War I with blood-soaked reverence, opening with a prologue where every time you died, you stepped into the boots of another real soldier with their birth and death years stamped on the screen. EA looked across the fence, saw Fortnite and Apex Legends printing billions on hero skins and seasonal battle passes, and decided Battlefield needed to join the circus.
The game’s premise was supposed to be a grim dystopia: climate collapse, refugee stateless armies ("No-Pats"), and proxy world war. Yet at launch, you played as named "Specialists" who dropped smug, Disney-Marvel one-liners at the end of bloody skirmishes.
The Payday Series
Payday: The Heist… a love letter to the 1995 movie Heat… heavily influenced by Left 4 Dead’s co-op elements and Counter-Strike/Modern Warfare 2 gunplay. You were four professional criminals in suits and clown masks. Ammo was scarce, health was scarce, enemies were deadly, and cover was life. If you played recklessly, you went down mercilessly. It took itself deadly seriously, and Payday 2 did it’s best to carry that torch…
…but it wasn’t pretty in the end.
Starbreeze and Overkill experienced a financial disaster. They realized an infinite drip-feed of DLC could keep the studio afloat. The threshold for what belonged in the game was obliterated.
They traded their (and the game’s) soul for a contemptible meme-fest, with the introduction of a “Goat Simulator” type tribute mission, as well as the introduction of Ethan and Hila from h3h3Productions as actual in-game characters. The co-op element was destroyed - players could just sprint around without armor or punishment. You could run a four-man crew consisting of John Wick, Jacket from Hotline Miami, and Scarface.
But it didn’t stop there. More off-the-rails heists and characters were being added faster than Overkill could write a decent story, thus what started as stealing cash from a bank vault ended as a supernatural conspiracy thriller. The “true” “ending” of Payday 2 requires players to solve ancient Mayan wheel puzzles in an underground temple beneath the White House, find an ancient alien artifact, and perform a ritual where Bain (your mission handler) swaps souls with the literal President of the United States to pardon the Payday gang.
Counter-Strike 2
See below.
Team Fortress 2
Of course, the first “Team Fortress” was its own thing. Team Fortress 2 was another thing entirely, but it still took itself somewhat seriously. Okay, not really… but hear me out:
Team Fortress 2 was put together by a team of professionals who ensured all stylistic and gameplay elements remained in harmony. Valve designed the nine classes so that a player could identify who an enemy was, what weapon they were holding, and what direction they were moving in under 200 milliseconds from a pure black shadow silhouette alone. The Heavy was big and imposing, the Spy was thin and slippery. You could never confused on who or what, thanks to the strict color and character design philosophy.
Then Valve decided to haphazardly start flooding the game with things that completely defecated on said elements.
Valve introduced paint cans. Suddenly, players could lather themselves in eye-searing, neon radioactive sludge such as lime and pink. Valve abandoned period-accurate 1960s aesthetics entirely in favor of unregulated community workshop memes, such as a giant, bright yellow peeled banana wrapped around the mercenary’s head.
Entire matches can come to a stop because half the server is busy dancing or driving around in miniature cars.
The team-coordinated objective shooter evaporated into a glorified 3D chatroom where people trade gambling crates and flexed glowing particle effects.
You may argue there was always absurdity - yes, but there was art to the absurdity. Much of the absurdity now is crowdsourced to the reddit crowd, and carries no meaning beyond a post with a thousand upvotes.
Summary
My condolences to everyone whose favorite game or franchise ended up on this list - I know that feeling, as a lifelong TF2/Payday fan myself. It’s a fate worse than death. It’s like dressing your grandpa up as a clown just to help him be hip with the kids again.
But then again… maybe we should follow the advice of some diehard fans, such as Mr. @Smol_ducc here.
Maybe we should just bend over and let it happen. All that stress is bad for you. Just be a wholesome little chungus, bend over, and let it happen. Let reddit infect your favorite franchise. Let it die. Do you just hate fun or something?
VALVE’S NEW PET STORE
Haven’t you heard?
Counter-Strike now has pets. Pet chickens, to be precise.
Rather than fixing the copious amounts of cheaters, Valve has added chickens as pets, obtainable via the Prime Weekly Care Package. There is now even a photo mode, so you can show off your character in wacky poses with said chickens. Caked on top of the clown fiesta of quirky gun skins, comprising the most putrescent mound of graveolent, maggoty dog shit one can guzzle down their windpipe, you can now get chickens as pets in Counter-Strike 2.
Rather than fixing the copious amounts of cheaters, Valve has added pet chickens to Counter-Strike 2.
Valve has added pet chickens to Counter-Strike 2
I feel like I’m writing fiction by even typing that out again and again. It’s so far into the realm of absurdity - so far into the realm of “what the fuck are we doing” - it doesn’t even feel like an observation. The entirety of the internet took a massive shit on EA for less.
But Valve can get away with it. The pet chickens will give players a sense of pride and accomplishment as they leave their hundredth match thanks to the hundreds of cheaters that infect each server.
Valve will do nothing.
They will not ship games. They will not count after 3. They will not give the players what they want.
Cheaters run rampant in CS2, and Valve adds pet chickens.
Hardware prices are soaring because of AI, and Valve decides now is a perfect time to ship out hardware.
The gaming industry remains in its stagnant state, catering to what’s “safe” over experimentation. Valve decides now is a perfect time to try and convince the gaming industry that VR is a thing they should experiment with.
Valve, who was once known as being the harbinger of greatness in the gaming industry, has long stopped paving the way, and now spends much of their time filling potholes at a missile range - just bullshitting in general. And people defend them for it.
My favorite part about the discussion surrounding the new (as of writing this) Steam Frame is that people will say “Poor Valve, they can’t catch a break!”
Yeah, woe to Valve, right? They just couldn’t stop it. This stuff just magically put itself together on the conveyer belt. They just couldn’t stop it. If only the same black magic applied to those dozens of games they’ve swept under the rug over the past decade and a half, eh?
It’s crazy, right? Like… Valve? Of all people? Making video games?
They were once considered king when it came to that stuff… then they filled their game up with slop as they realized their fans will pay them regardless.
Valve’s entire schtick at the moment is that they have a good following, NOT that they are actually “good”.
As of 09/23/26, Valve shut down the Steam API endpoint that community tracking websites (tfservers.com, teamwork.tf, and playercount.tf) used to query official Valve server information. These tracking sites are now completely non-functional.
As a Left 4 Dead 2 player, finding a game through the matchmaker is now (mostly) broken (again) (and likely to never be fixed) (again).
Totally not to hide the true extent of TF2's botting problem, guys. Don’t worry about that. You should be paying attention to the chickens instead. Buy them. Open your wallets and buy them, and froth at the mouth, and clap your hands like a seal. Another decade passes, and Valve continues to do… nothing.
