I am furious about the state of my hobby

This week may well go down in history as one of the bleakest the world of video games has ever seen, with the biggest news being the impending record layoffs at Microsoft, and Sony announcing that it is both closing the digital PS3 and Vita stores and stopping the production of physical discs.

These are not signs of a healthy industry! And while Nintendo appears to be hanging in there with a tad more goodwill than other companies, they’re not exactly blameless in all this, either, as the continued existence of Game Key Cards continues to loom, unwelcome, over the collectors’ market, and their hardware prices are not exactly welcoming to those new to the hobby.

I am angry. Really angry. Because the stuff this week is just one example of a whole heap of things that have been going horribly for video games as a medium in the last few… weeks, months, probably even years. And it all feels like it could have been so avoidable. Let’s chat a bit about that after the jump.

With these latest woes, people are quick to point to some combination of the Business Idiots of the world, private equity and corporate desires to appease shareholders rather than their actual customers. People aren’t wrong to point this out, but it’s not really anything new. The degree to which an entire creative medium — and the people who work with that medium — is suffering, however, is unprecedented.

Look back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Atari was just starting to pick up steam with its arcade games and its home console, the Video Computer System, aka the Atari 2600. Dickheads in suits were causing trouble even back then, refusing to credit programmers and pay them royalties on particularly successful products. One of Atari’s numerous CEOs from the period, Ray Kassar, memorably compared the pioneering game programmers of the period to “towel designers”, noting that he believed “anyone can make a video game” and the staff of programmers were therefore disposable, easily replaceable.

The late Ray Kassar, circa 2016. Photo: 8bit Generation

Kassar, notably, never made a video game, and many of Atari’s most successful programmers left the company to form third-party developers such as Activision and Imagic, quickly beating Atari at their own game (pun fully intended) in terms of product quality and crediting their creators appropriately for their hard work.

The difference between then and now is that back then, the nerds won. The success of Activision and Imagic doing what they did back then helped demonstrate that treating your creative and technically skilled people with respect led to better products and better sales. Business and creativity could coexist, and everyone could be a winner as a result — including the customers.

Of course, things went horribly wrong a few years later, at least in North America, but that wasn’t because of what we’ve just described. The causes of the notorious “crash” were numerous, but among them were greed and arrogance from the business end of things; the assumption that perpetual growth was both desirable and possible. Sound familiar?

The kids aren’t all right.

Today, the Business Idiots are very much winning. Huge corporations hoover up studios to add to their portfolio, then completely squander the talent at those studios, completely failing to understand why the end users loved their old games so much, but don’t resonate with their new, corporate-owned stuff. Project budgets and team sizes spiral out of control as corporate-mandated scope creep and the desire to chase trends that are already in their death throes become more important than actually doing something innovative or even just plain interesting. And new projects fail to attract the younger generation away from the predatory, exploitative monetisation and addictive dark patterns of titles like Fortnite and Roblox. Eventually, those studios that were sucked up are spat out again, completely broken in every way.

Amid all that there is the ludicrous spending on a technology that everyone hates: AI. The virtual dumbass that gets things wrong all the time, puts creative and technically skilled people out of work, does a significantly worse job than the people it was supposed to replace, ruins the environment, completely fucks the economy, prices regular people out of the technology market and puts prospective customers off projects that should have been an absolute shoe-in for success. Supposedly “the shareholders” want to see AI. Do they? Do they really? Have you asked them? Quick follow-up: did you also ask any of them if they have any understanding whatsoever of the video games medium, and the real reasons said medium has created such a passionate subculture over the course of the last 50+ years?

Meme by reefsnax.pikaparty.social (Bluesky)

I’m pissed off because the entire industry appears to be aflame right now. Not just the people making games, who are losing their jobs by the thousands seemingly every week. But also the sectors that sprang up around the games themselves, and, for a while, thrived. Video game magazines! Video game websites! Both of those have been systematically ruined over the course of the past few decades, with magazines initially gutted in favour of websites, websites gutted in favour of an ill-advised “pivot to video”, and the few surviving websites destroyed in the name of… well, nothing at all really. Talented, experienced people whom I would have once described as “games industry veterans” are struggling to find work! Apparently we just don’t need a functioning specialist games press any more. (Except we really do — just no-one is willing to pay for its continued existence.)

It’s worse for the end user, too. The death of physical media for games is not a “win for convenience”, as some people like to put it; it is the death of being able to lend a game to a friend, trade it in to a shop, sell it privately, borrow it from a library — or even access it at all if you live in a territory that is unable to access the Internet or online services like PSN reliably.

Owning stuff is fun!

It’s also the death of just being able to enjoy having an actual collection of things that you own and can’t have taken away from you. Just in the last week, Sony completely removed a huge number of movies that people may have bought on their digital accounts, with no refunds or compensation for those affected by this. They can’t do that with physical media; no-one’s coming over to your house to snap your discs or take a sledgehammer to your cartridges.

And the kicker for all this is that it’s not resulting in better games. In fact, it’s resulting in significantly less interesting games from the big corpos than I think we’ve ever had before, with the highest profile projects inevitably being safe, predictable and downright boring affairs that are deeply, deeply symptomatic of a business terrified to do anything the slightest bit risky just in case their stock price goes down a little bit. This has been a problem for a while, of course — people have been complaining about this since at least the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era — but the triple-A end of the market has never felt more utterly stagnant than it is right now.

Games like Esoteric Ebb are incredible, but it’s a crime there’s no way to have a boxed version on your shelf today.

It is important to acknowledge, of course, that this is not the whole story. If the entire corporate video game sector were to completely collapse tomorrow, there would still be video games — and those video games will always be orders of magnitude more interesting and creative than anything developed under the yoke of corporate oppression. We might not have video game consoles any more, and that would be sad, as that is the sole vector for the few physical releases that still exist today, but people would still be making games: as a means of working out and showing off their technical skills; as a means of experimenting with what it means to “play”; as a means of expressing themselves; as a way to tell their own, individual, special stories.

Without those physical releases, though, we run the risk of video games becoming just like all the other forms of media that have become completely commodified today: music, film, TV; so much of it transient, disposable, forgettable the moment you disengage from it — and without a tangible thing on your shelf to occasionally spot out of the corner of your eye and think “oh yeah, I do like Project Gotham Racing, I’ll pull that down for an evening of fun”, I feel an important part of engaging with the medium as a whole, in depth, will be lost.

What do we do? Vote with our wallets? Well, we can try, but sadly there are enough apathetic people out there who just don’t care that it is going to be difficult — perhaps even impossible — to get the industry to course-correct at this point. I think Grand Theft Auto VI and the fact that is releasing a “physical” version that is not “physical” at all is going to be something of a bellwether; I fear that game is going to sell like gangbusters regardless of the 81 pages (and counting) of universally negative comments on Sony’s announcement about ending physical media, and that thought is immensely depressing. After all, a lot of capital-G Gamers™ are, unfortunately, not great at sticking to their supposed principles when presented with the latest set of jangling keys. And Grand Theft Auto VI has been jangling its keys for a very long time now.

This odious game is going to have a lot to answer for.

The only real answer, I fear, is for people to just take matters into their own hands, because, as archivist Alice Averlong describes in this excellent thread, we are otherwise headed straight for a future in which chronicling the history of a wonderful, incredible, expressive, engaging and truly magical medium becomes literally impossible beyond a certain point outside of unofficial and technically illegal methods. Is that really what we want? For art to just be lost because it has “expired” unless we are willing to get our hands dirty?

I certainly don’t.

I am furious. Furious for those of us who have followed gaming pretty much since its inception. Furious for those who first came to gaming with its explosion in popularity with the first PlayStation. Furious for those who, at any point, discovered video games thanks to one particularly special experience. Furious for those who once had a career that they thought would be stable and set for life, but no longer. And furious for those who will never be able to understand quite how good we once had it as a defined, passionate subculture.

Every one, a memory attached. Photo by Viktorya Sergeeva 🫂 on Pexels.com

I will never abandon gaming completely. It has been such a core part of my life for so long that it is impossible for that to happen. But it’s looking increasingly likely that from the next few years onwards, the entirety of my gaming will consist of looking backwards at things that have come before, not looking forward to things that are yet to come. I won’t be short of things to experience at any point, but it’ll still be a sad transition to have to make… unless something truly wonderful — and, frankly, completely unexpected at this point — happens in the next couple of years.

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Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.

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