(ps apologies for the Rookie interactive CSS stuff, trying to make my large posts easier to consume + do some gags. my first time so go easy on me)
so i genuinely enjoy Chet's takes, I like him a lot precisely because he challenges me. he's a seasoned writer, designer, etc and has been a part of making many things I like a lot. he's a little bit like Video Games Robert Reich- in that he will explicitly state "I am going to tell you how things are, not because that's the way it should be- but as an explanation so you know where we're at. understanding is not endorsement."
(I'll give you a minute to watch this even if you skim it)
tl;dr vid spoilers for the busy:
a recent vlog response of his (shout out to bringing back video replies) touched on the topic that, like it or not, not owning your games is the future at least as far as Above Indie is concerned (Ubisoft, et al) due to an increasing degree of technological interdependences (as short term cost-cutting measures) to keep games effective.
first, he's not wrong- but the fact that this is happening is wrong and is also a good, and really bad.
there's a few things at play here, imho, which I'll illustrate before the cut.
- inflation has reduced the values of game. Games have held at a $60 pricepoint until recently for an absurdly long time
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it also distorts our own wages, leading us to think they're more value-stable than they really are and that money is an on-demand system (the less money you have, the faster you lose it. the end result being you learn to really resent price hikes because your wages never go up- funny how that monetary policy works..)
interest rates are fucked, and they're extra fucked because we got used to cheap money that is likely never coming back (without a 2008 style global financial crisis, which spurred us on to lower rates in the first place to stimulate spending, problem is that's just kicking the can down the road)
- so games become a refuge for many reasons, it's not just the contemporary entertainment medium- it allows us to live out comforting fantasies or strategically simulate that of economic ladder climbing, home ownership, friendship, romance, purpose, etc. Games are both joy & training under the right circumstances. People come to them for different things.
Chess, at the end of the day, is a Kriegspiel- a sort of war play.
plus without getting into it...
(see: interest rates, inflationary pressure, and using stocks/pension funds to evade your savings devaluing. It's not just enough to Make A Lot Of Money, you also have to preserve it. Investments are like vinyl records, somewhat durable and sometimes even increase in value your bank is more like 8-track tapes that disintegrate in a decade and have no after-market value, even as a collectible)so, what does all this socioeconomic rambling have to do with the video & the idea of not owning your games? why is what Chet is talking about really bad? yet also good??
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there's a few things I'd like to address from the above:
why games should cost (more, not less) / aka "chet is right"
games are expensive to make, he goes into this at length. the truth is, what we once paid $60 for (and got a whole hell of a lot LESS for) was truly independent (beyond software + operating costs) that can stand the test of time with access to either the hardware or the emulation of said hardware. I do not think closed source executable running on proprietary, undocumented reverse engineered hardware is great for preservation or culture, but it is a relatively solved problem we've learn to overcome in massive strides.
to have worked on a semi-successful or obscure cult hit prior to 2001 is to have effectively become immortal on some kind of timescale / hit the cultural killscreen. your songs will be sung for generations, congradulations, you got the high score and "ASS" will remain on our collective attract mode for eons- yet another perk of having gotten to this over-exploited chronically ill biomass we all hail from prior to the Finding out part of our collective Fucking Around in the 20th century. I do not resent you, but I resent the systems that created you. It's not your fault, but you also didn't notice until it was too late. please realize you got a rare privilege of being beloved in your own time, a privilege known to few in prior generations and likely after (if you are of this cohort, please go join Third Act and use your privilege to save the rest of us)
you were the Most Special, good for you i guess. pay it forward if that makes you feel guilty.
for those of us left behind, do not resent them and understand you would probably wind up the same in their shoes. the systems make us- all we can do is direct our anger to the system and dismantle it for those that come later. "Fuck you got mine" will never work in the long term, speaking of...
why technological interdependence in the short hand is setting ourselves up for culture failure on a geological scale
chet makes a meaningful case for this here. he argues that because of the above, the higher value received to companies for making games in the past is no longer there to utilize as a collective group, let alone as an individual. this is a very wordy way of saying "games dont make as much money as they used to, which means you have to cut corners and rely on stuff other people have made and maintain in exchange for compensation."
if you're wondering why we're not all rocking electric flying cars down boston megastructure superhighways, showing up in monolithic offices with AT&T videophones & Sun Microsystem thin clients with our portable desktops stored on our sunblade cards, it's because *proprietary infrastructure* inherently has a short shelf life by design & intentional obsolescence. why solve tomorrow's problems today, when you can simply recreate yesterday's problems now?
arguably, the internet we enjoy today was literally only possible due to a short (but surprisingly long) lived dedication to open source technology prior to the 'net experiencing a cognitive collapse (as defined in the 2008 military research paper, Cognitive Collapse: Recognizing and Addressing the Hidden Threat in Collaborative Technologies, I may not like military research but sometimes they explain stuff ok) (a short summary is, we're all getting flattened into a cognitive blank slate if we're not careful by the very technology we use to stay in sync / communicate. the 'down time' of waiting for communication allows us time to process & think, we've turned ourselves into regurgitative nodes of information with no time to reflect thanks to how our economy works)
the problem is, that 'one guy maintaining the thing that the modern internet relies on' is going away, especially as we neglect public health we're going to lose those guys faster. billions & trillions made off of someone's solo-maintained script without the maintainer or creator seeing much in return. what do you think happens when that maintainer stops working on the thing that makes our world work? god exists and they are underpaid. instead, various nebulous opportunists will fill the gap by offering rental solutions that won't exist or will be dysfunctionally unrecognizable in ten years (or less, this interval tightens at the global collective network accelerates the bandwidth / transfer of information)
bonus rant cw: gloomy / depressing / climate change / capitalism / stuff you can't change fast or individually
take rant alert ymmv
depending on how we respond to this collectively, true scarcity is probably manifesting itself to some degree by the next century and onwards unless there is some Miracle innovation which is a gambling fantasy we absolutely cannot invest (also gambling) (not bank, heh) on. we had a good thing and we made it worse, but today we decide how bad that worse gets. (kind of the running theme of this whole piece)
takes over
GaaS, SaaS, and all the other things you get from eating really bad fast food are inherently a part of 'making yesterday's problems today' disguised as comfort / junk food solutions. just in the way that highly processed slurry from 7/11 doesn't actually provide me nutrients effectively in the way a homegrown potato could, services & proprietary gun-for-hire tech keeps you alive for another day at the cost of the future. companies fail, acquisitions happen (see: just now, Notions calendar acquisition) and eventually you realize you've been subsidizing the product by being the product. for a while this has been happening to individuals, now it's happening to companies and eventually states (which it has, at different times of recent history)
yes, this technically means games, as they're made now are sustainable in the present economically speaking, but ultimately are now subject to a whole new degredational force beyond bitrot or faulty archival practices. now that we have the means to archive games properly for once (see: https://gamehistory.org/ amongst many others like Internet archive) our games literally get designed to be non-durable on purpose.
Not because the studios aren't interested in preservation, but simply because it makes very little short-term economic sense to do so. There simply aren't enough resources stacked against the low-rank of preservation on the minds of shareholders & executives who set the studio's priorities.
This is a really big problem, it's also an opportunity. It's an issue I don't think can be rectified without a massive cultural sea change (which may be ushered on from the consequences of losing so much media) or regulation. Getting the senate and congress to grasp the meaningful complexity & importance of this to the united states let alone the world is.. it's not impossible, but I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.
I do genuinely feel this is a critical issue, because games are now a form of popular media on par with movies or books, whether we like it or not THIS is the mode of fiction which each future generation will be partially educated from. there is a reason media tropes are so influential and must be wielded effectively. Fantasy does not exist in a vacuum, and while we should not seek to censor fiction, we do need to encourage a culture of using it responsibly to some extent.
The more free compulsory education you get, the more you're free to do pretty much whatever with media. If media becomes a sole or major source of education, you're in trouble. Especially when that media self-destructs and the people producing it do not see the cultural or ethical value of said storylines & ideas it propagates into the future.
why this is bad for game creators
this one is fairly straight forward:
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your portfolio can't be touched, played, or interacted with. if you are lucky you will have launch trailers or possibly "let's play" footage. all those systems your company used to make the concept viable at all have now shut down, every game has all the downsides of an MMORPG with none of the up sides or necessities.
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while a minor risk, this also means more possibility for fraud in people's background. I think it's pretty straightforward to sus out fraudulent backgrounds, but giant corporations have less time (or incentive) to follow-up on someone's portfolio. this is good for people wanting to break in with less formal experience, but this is bad because it means the levers of cultural power are feasibly gameable by sketchy actors.
I think the odds of this becoming a problem is low, but the second it does in a notable way, you will see the gates of institutions slam shut even harder than they already are starting to. meaning, as games become a more 'formal' medium it will become increasingly difficult to break in without putting yourself in deep debt or having social privileges / support systems. (we're sort of already there, but I'm talking film world bad)
- you will have to essentially pick your future roles (a herculean task as is, given financial scarcity driving difficult to get into roles even for seasoned devs) to ensure your portfolio will even be known or remembered. this will shut doors to you if your portfolio is self-destructing! this effect may not show itself for a decade or more.
this means people who are lucky or privileged enough to work on games that get famous, rereleased, remastered etc will grow their desirability & value, and people who had to break in on budget titles where the opportunities were more accessible will have a less memorable portfolio that won't carry them as far to success.
once again, just like the stock market and money devaluation, we turn everything into gambling & chance. the industry becomes its own lootcrate.
- as software becomes increasingly paywalled, commercially licensed, I don't think any amount of Free Unreal Engine will save us from the need for an entry level candidate to require YEARS of experience in obtuse corporate software these self-destructing games rely on. It's hard enough as is, and if game prices continue to remain stable while budgets soar, then especially in this harsh investment market, we're going to see less-and-less time invested in training.
That means, as someone trying to break in- it's now a house with no doors. either you were in before the walls got built or you're out. With how much talent the industry loses to attrition, this is a huge problem for everyone inside too. Experienced talent stretched thin until they break out the ground floor window and leave for better industries.
This increasing reliance on SaaS to make GaaS means eventually, the only people making games will be the kids of the wealthy or the downright lucky, and the lens of which our most popular storytelling medium will grow increasingly narrow. This will cast a myopic vision onto the youth, which then carry the cycle forward..
this isn't even getting to the mess that is multiplayer. ill say this much: who would win, multiple Major billion dollar Multiplayer franchises
or a bunch of funny little space men betraying each other, people screaming into their mics as they're silenced by a mimic on a derelict space rig, and two people making a lego-lookin-ass knockoff of war games with a grappling hook.
i dont know, but i can tell you who out of those groups got to see a hell of a lot more of the returns on that money
It's important to future proof games as a part of cultural heritage, and also to prevent brain drain, to increase the robustness of the stories told, and to create a more fair & equitable society whose participants had media open their eyes to the optimistic possibilities, and warned them of the dangers.
(plus, I think there is extreme value in experiencing a narrative via a self-insert avatar, it allows us to connect & process the subject matter in a different but equally valuable way that books / movies do from third & second person)
why this is bad for culture, as a whole, but really possibly *great* news for marginalized artists and developers *if* we play our cards right
ok so that's enough bad news, the good news? it's going to become increasingly harder for AAA studios and the big budget numbers to gain any long-term traction if they're not blockbusters. we saw this happen to film.
what this does mean is that as open source tech does (and has! see: blender) continue to evolve, we get a lot more sustainable opportunities to us as long as we have tamed our ambitions to be more sustainable. will you get to be the next Hideo Kojima or CliffyB? maybe not, but you can make games smarter, cheaper, and in a way that is vastly easier to preserve by holding onto source code, using open practices and open tools.
this means, that if you're smart and you plan ahead (yes, I know it's hard, you're under enough pressure as is) you have an opportunity to be remembered better and for longer than even your biggest, formidable peers.
there is power in folk songs, oral tradition, and craft art. let us not forget how much of history we even know about thanks to little lost love letters or paintings of a friend. we don't have to play the big player's game to win where it counts; shaping culture for the better & more fairly to everyone. Please go start a game jam, learn to make games, pick up an open source engine, use open source tools and freely share your ideas & code with a non-commercial license and SHARE that knowledge to others.
I know the tech isn't as flashy, the tools aren't as easy, things are messy right now- but I remember how unusable Linux or Blender used to be, now Linux drives the heart of tech and then Blender drives several mediums of art, from 2d animation to game dev. Less and less I hear about Maya, more and more I hear about this open source tool people used to joke of.
That's not to say don't use paid tools, just pick ones wisely that seem to value their customers over proprietary schemes to squeeze another quarter of profit out of you. make sure that knowledge & your resources are transferable.
knowing how to create & maintain parts of your own tools is also really valuable, if not really painstaking. In the long run, nobody can take that from you! as powerful communities, we can provide for each other with our talents, cohost is proof of that in my opinion.
The future is ours, if we really want it.
We just have to support the folks who make it possible, our audience, our communities, the freelance journalists, curators, the archivists, the librarians, the fans, the speedrunners.
so yes, Chet is right about the system- but the system is wrong. we owe it to ourselves, our medium, our audiences, and future generations to think of better ways of doing things that are more accessible to posterity & those without economic opportunity. In doing so, we pave the way for future opportunity & return imagination to the commons with our inspiration and forward-thinking vision.