Cheat codes were a byproduct of flimsier game development standards.

No, they're either remnant of beta testing or just recognition that playing game with cheats is just fun for significant part of the audience

Which I really hate, by the way. What even is the point in trying out different weapons, if you can't find one that's just stupidly overpowered?

actually i think the standards have lowered, because there is an expectation that if a game is unbalanced, it will be fixed via a patch.

in the past if a game was going to be unbalanced it would always be unbalanced, and so the pressures were higher to get it right the first time.

its problem better to assume that the arms race in graphics and features is more to blame. yet with all that extra time and money indie games still rise above.

cheat code prevalence is fad that comes and goes.

It was the equivalent of console.log everywhere.

We have better debuggers now.

They still have the QA stuff, it's just done differently. An in-game terminal that's disabled for the release build, for instance.

Also journalists, many of whom didn't grow up with videogames.

Difficulty used to be seen as a way to adjust the play time, which was tied to the value proposition for the customer. A lot of older games used to have a gigantic difficulty spike 3 or 4 levels in specifically for rental markets. The Lion King and Battletoads are famous examples. The idea is you get the players hooked with a couple of reasonably challenging levels, then put in a wall that eats up the whole weekend they rented the game for so they want to rent it again next weekend to try to get past it.

If you give journalists cheat codes then they can go and get screenshots of the later levels and write about how cool they are, further incentivizing players to keep renting or jjsy buy the game outright and push past.

Cool! Always wondered if a fun solution were ever found for the Monster Rancher PS games where you'd put arbitrary CDs/DVDs in to see what monster was generated.

Can't a phone with NFC and an app send any Amiibo's signal? I'm pretty sure I've done that before.

I bought blank NFC tokens that you can flash any amibo to from your phone via an app. Worked great raining down chests of meat on links head in BOTW lol.

Also some of the creative and fun codes that did things like altering models in a comical way orreplaceing gunfire with cows mooing just aren't added as part of development anymore.

cheat codes were development / QA tools to make testing the game easier. They got left in because they were behind hidden, strange button sequences etc, removing the code risked breaking something that would be harder to test without the codes, and they can be fun.

That's maybe how they started, but between then and now was a time when developers would very specifically add in cheat codes that had nothing to do with development or debugging, and were often just extra things added in to make the game more fun to play. (See 'paintball mode' in Goldeneye N64 for a prime example of that.) But those kinds of cheat codes seem to have fallen out of fashion.

The rich kid solution. Just SMH when I play against some super-low level player with all the skins and kit that normally take months to acquire - if they can even be earned in the first place, some items are cash only. Usually huge tryhards too with other “skill assists”.

I remember star wars battlefront 2, which was remastered a few years ago, was the first game where I saw paid progression and loot boxes.

Or worse, its a super hard to gain item.. and after the first few people spend months earning it, which increases demand via jealousy and envy, THEN they release a paid dlc of the same damn thing with a different name, that the credit card warriors can purchase and have immediately.

No longer produced, not removed from existing content. Very few games have cheat codes now. Only thing I can think of is Lego games via code, and even those cheats are available through progress in the game.

Publishers are always the biggest cunts in any industry. Personnel managers, record labels, game publishers, book publishers, movie distributors. Of course they'd do their best to remove fun from the entertainment.