This sort of thing seems to have really fallen off after the Grand Theft Auto "Hot Coffee" scandal. Having hidden stuff in a game went from being a fun thing to a potential liability.
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I think the other big thing that killed in game cheats and debug screens was Xbox and Steam Achievements/PlayStation Trophies. Some of the "value" in such tokens of game completion are the "skill checks" it takes to complete them. If a game provides cheats inside of it, it either needs to disable those Achievement systems, or it loses the ability to unlock them, and that's platform enforced by Xbox/Steam/PlayStation. So it's easier for most games to just not include cheats so they don't have to worry about accidentally violating platform terms on Xbox/Steam/PlayStation should players discover and "abuse" the cheat systems.
Similarly PC games with mod support often have to disable Achievement systems as soon as any mod is installed just in case the mod happens to offer cheats. Which also seems to have impacted mod culture to some extent with entire classes of gamers not installing mods ever to make sure that they still win Achievements.
It's an interesting social dynamic and I think one of the clearest lines in the sand for when cheat codes disappeared, especially in genres like the FPS where "God Mode" and "noclip" codes were genre staples until Achievements. (Because DOOM offered them, every FPS offered them. Until they stopped.)
PC games don't have to do this. Steam doesn't have a policy that achievements must prevent cheating. This is entirely a developer choice.
The main reason cheats have disappeared from mainstream games is because many of them prefer to sell them to you as micro-transactions, item pack DLCs, etc.
Steam has the weakest enforced terms of all the three that I mentioned, but it does have terms in its contract with developers for how Achievements are supposed to unlock.
But most "triple A" games don't just release under Steam's weaker terms, they also want Xbox and PlayStation certification, which have been strongly enforced.
I don't know how common it is, but Control (PS4 era) has an extensive cheat system accessible from the options menu, and Saros (PS5 era) has a wide variety of settings to make the game more or less difficult.
Yeah, I think overall it is trending better again, with the strictest terms being the Xbox 360/PS3 era. (Especially under the banner of Accessibility.)
Celeste (a difficult 2D platformer) has accessibility options that include invincibility, no fall deaths, etc. At least on Xbox using them does not turn off achievements, so I thought the choice to do so was left to the developers.
Yeah, it is starting to become more acceptable again, which is great. I think the "accessibility options" phrasing has been a key to why Xbox relaxed a lot of their earlier, harher standards on it. Which is a great thing, I appreciate Xbox's commitment to accessibility in the last several years as it has done some neat things.
Steam Achievements are trivially to cheat at for most games, especially single-player like Ecco, for example via SAM.
My theory is that it's more boring. Debugging tools got better where those were the ways to work around and get to testing stuff in old console era.
But now game development has much better tooling and SDK kits for a while in consoles. So I suspect there wasn't a need to spend extra development cycle implementing custom debug menus and stuff.
My theory is that cheat codes disappeared when developers discovered that they could have their effects as microtransactions instead, and then they just never came back because, as you say, SDKs are pretty good about not needing them.
Yeah I remember when Hot Coffee happened I was working at a studio owned by THQ and a message came down from the executive level basically warning us not to put in anything hidden like that. All secrets had to be disclosed and known by the executive team. Something like that anyway.
It's more than just that...
Over the last 20 years, much of the major game industry has become yet another 'project management' pipeline rather than a creative art, to where at most an 'easter egg' for a non indie title is most likely the result of some story on the board to include a 'throwback to other title' type nod.
Indie games still often have their own easter eggs or hidden scenes, even the more polished ones (Selaco comes to mind) so that's where I base my thoughts.
1. I think it's more about microtransactions than Hot Coffee. Why put cheats for free if you can monetize them.
2. Cheats don't make sense in the age of abundance of games. Previously you'd have 3 games on your PC and you'd try to extract as much fun out of them as possible, so you'd just dick around and do silly stuff, and cheats were helpful in that. Now most gamers literally have a backlog of games, there's no time for that style of gameplay. You're done with the campaign, next game.
3. "Fun" has always been a liability, it's just that previously companies saw that as cost of doing business while nowadays all risks need to be avoided. Doing borderline illegal marketing campaigns was actually normal for many companies. When Burnout 2 was being released in 2002, Acclaim wanted to reimburse speeding tickets in the UK. Think about it for a second.
4. Children playing a literal gang member simulator with all types of violent crimes built in? Business as usual. Penis into vagina? That's a step too far you monster! I never really understood this moral panic about sex. In Europe GTA games are labeled 18+ so Hot Coffee scandal was contained to last pages of video game magazines.
"Hot Coffee" wasn't even an easter egg, it was something you got to through the normal in-game dialog in the dating minigame. You're treated to watching two polygonal adults dry-humping each other fully clothed, and for this one publicity-seeking soon-to-be-disbarred lawyer got the country clutching its collective pearls for a moment.
I'm pretty sure the industry and the general public are long over it. It's just that AAA game production has become such an assembly-line industrial corporate process that no one involved has the independence or remaining soul to write such things anymore.
Never has anything been blown out of proportion more than this Hot Coffee nothingburger. It astounds me that anyone took this seriously at the time.
While I understand why they would want to avoid that scandal happening, it's really ludicrous that it was ever a scandal. Murdering tons of innocent people and committing all sorts of crimes is totally fine to depict, but god forbid you show sex.