Many people believe being creative is the same as creatively manifesting artistic opportunities, but plenty of talented individuals perish in unfulfilling jobs because being creative has no bearing on success. The only pre-requisite for success is opportunity. Everyday people meet success after they meet an opportunity, and the timing is crucial because if, say, Joe isn’t ready for that opportunity, it’s likely he’ll have to wait a long time before he gets another one.
What seems to circumvent this (unfair?) process are hobbies with a very low barrier to entry. Drawing is a good example. I used to dream of becoming a professional illustrator and tried pursuing that dream for 4 years before realizing that no serious opportunity was going to arrive. I still needed to eat, so I was at an impasse. That blockage wouldn’t happen had I understood that it’s okay to dedicate time to a hobby without desiring to make a career out of it, and have a job that pays the bills.
I conflated being creative with being able to make an opportunity out of thin air. Things are better now, as I’m settling into my job as a product designer and use fantasy writing as a hobby and non-fiction writing (whatever this blog is) to feel better about my addiction to video games.
Writing is- also- a hobby with a low barrier to entry. Unlike drawing, which requires an audience to give you tacit approval, writing functions as a way to organize one’s thoughts. Contrast these activities with other potential hobbies, like rock-climbing, the gym, or fashion; hobbies that are more difficult to do consistently because of social implications and money.
Designing and developing video games seems to be an interesting breed of low-entry and high-entry. One one hand, the resources to learn and create a game are plenty and available at low prices. From a technical perspective, the entry barrier to developing games can be non-existent if you decide to pick any of the dozen or so titles with an active modding community and develop using a free-to-use engine. All for the sake of creative expression and love for video games, right?
Hobbies stop being interesting when the financial incentive is more important than achieving a vision for how you want to live. It’s the same conundrum in most creative disciplines, where the only serious question is whether or not you’d be doing what you claim you dream of doing if you never made money or gained reputation doing it.
The Internet gave plenty of people the illusion of likes=fame. Creative professionals know that, at the end of the day, expression and love will not pay the bills, so they feel justified in adopting the heuristic of likes=fame=money because desiring fame feels morally superior to desiring money. Well, not fame, but reputation. Becoming a master of the craft or whatever, all ways of saying likes=money, because we understand intuitively the most famous were the best paid.
But if you study the history of whatever hobby you’re planning to engage in, you’ll find that the first were the most famous, and consequentially, got away with insane price points you will never charge. No matter how good you think you are as a graphic designer, you will never be as based as Paul-Rand-who-got-six-figures-for-making-a-logo-for-Steve-Jobs’-mediocre-product-after-refusing-revisions.
Paul Rand didn’t get 100,000 dollars because he was a genius (you may come with the torches if you’d like.) He got six figures for no revisions because when he started working, modern graphic design was new. Paul Rand was one of the pioneers of modern graphic design. He was one of the first designers to have a cohesive view of what graphic design should be, and publishing his book Thoughts on Design gave him the legitimacy of a pioneer.
In essence, he got there first.
Nowadays, you wouldn’t be able to get the present-day equivalent of 100,000 dollars for a branding manual, call the design community mediocre, and refuse to provide any option or revision.
All of this is to go after the elephant in the room when people talk about video games pricing: why haven’t prices gone up with inflation. The short answer is that video games, in their infancy, were overpriced luxury goods packaged in obsolete hardware mostly paid for by early adopters and developed with small teams that were designing with no precedents. If Super Mario World came out yesterday, it would be asinine to claim it’s worth $70.
Today, if you launched a title with the same length and similar ideas, adjusted the UX to feel modern to play, and slapped a screen texture slider over it, you would sell the game at (probably) $15 at full price and have it regularly at $4.49 or part of some goofy Fanatical bundle.
Both Paul Rand and Nintendo in the early 90’s were able to inflate their prices because they believed, rightfully so at that moment, that the value they provided to their customers as pioneers was more important than an inaccessible price tag. Paul Rand wasn’t interested in being accessible; he was interested in money, and his customers were willing to pay because they saw value in a pioneer’s offering.
However, as a professional who dabbled in short-term freelance gigs, I can tell you that value-based pricing does not work (unless you were first or don’t care about accessibility and can survive on 1 gig per year). As a developer, designer, writer or illustrator, the potential customer sees no value in your offering until you make it more tangible.
Because video games are a product that needs to be experienced before a purchase (through a trailer, demo, or a positive review from Yahtzee), it’s difficult to rely on value as a first-time (or even 10th-time) creator. You are merely the 12,567th video game developer of the last 20 years, so far removed from Nintendo that you might as well call yourself a laggard (blame Clayton Christensen).
Video games have become so mainstream and building them is so streamlined that we are all laggards, in some way. It’s only by making value more tangible that today’s AAA developers manage to surpass, ever so slightly, the standard price tag. They achieve this through several ways:
The above are more about consumer behavior than about how to price games correctly or how not to get burned when shopping for games. Weird and shady things have happened since the dawn of mankind; Bethesda doing microtransactions in Fallout 76 and relaunching Skyrim a third time doesn’t diminish the fact that you can buy a copy of Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3, and 4, together, with all DLCs included, for less than $60, which will amount to more than 500 hours of fun.
Sure, microtransactions are terrifying, more so in conjunction with dark patterns that encourage gambling and rely on trashy, poorly-designed third-party launchers that “prevent piracy efforts.” However, the truth of the matter is that right now we live in the Golden Age of video games for the consumer and things can only go downhill from here.
I’ve written somewhere that we live in the era of niche fanbases because modern DRMs made it possible to play video games on the go. Physical medial is, in my opinion, bad for the consumer because it puts too much power in the publisher’s hands. This is visible with books, which have increased in price in the past years and are likely to increase further even if the quality of the printed products is going down and published authors are lesser than classical ones.
And while there are flea markets and Amazon, the price points for physical options tend to stay similar. It’s only by sheer luck that I stumble upon an online shop which sells physical books at a fraction of the cost for books available in my local shops. These tend to sell books at a similar price I find on Amazon; it’s not a deal to purchase from anywhere unless I get lucky.
Kindle kind of changed this because it was convenient to purchase with a click and have it delivered on an okay-ish device. Kindle’s issues were the battery and the screen’s quality kind of sucked on my lower end product, and it’s terrible to read at lamplight. But it’s an option; it’s something the consumer can choose to do if they believe it to be a better deal.
Consumers buy products for a variety of reasons, but when it comes to leisure products like books, games, movies and accessories, I find that the perception of getting a good deal is more important than social factors (no one sees me reading Crime and Punishment in my apartment.)
Video games on CDs were terrible. The product was inconvenient and dependent on the hardware, its packaging was gross and took up a lot of space, and once PC manufacturers decided to remove CD-ROMs from most laptops, it became obsolete. Not to mention that buying physical media, before Amazon, was a question of availability. In Romania, when I was attending primary school, there was no way of purchasing a valid, first-rate copy of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind on CD unless I was willing to hunt it down like a pack of wolves. Funds were also a big issue; I was a kid with no source of income other than my parents and grandparents.
So I (and all my friends) relied on piracy and trashy MMO-RPGs like Metin 2 for entertainment. Piracy is (was, is, will ever be?) a point of contention among most developers, but Steam realized at some point that pirating games is an issue of convenience. Gamers will, to this day, pre-order digital keys as if publishers are going to run out of them; it’s obvious that for plenty of US-based middle-class hobbyists purchasing games is not a question of price.
Once DRMs became the norm, the conversation shifted to be one about ownership. You never really owned the physical copy of the game you hunted down like a wolf, you owned a copy of a game on obsolete technology.
Discussing copyright infringement isn’t the point of this… written piece. People have been making fools of themselves discussing the evils of piracy since Internet Explorer, and I have no intention of doing that. Piracy exists because it’s possible, and because it’s an alternative to other forms of acquisition. In countries where price parity doesn’t exist and people’s salaries are tiny compared to the standard $60 price tag, it’s asinine to expect someone to pre-order Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
What can we draw from this? Price points for most video games are targeted towards a primarily middle-class audience with disposable income. I’m not sure what to make of price parity at this point; people will find ways to take advantage of that system and something tells me it will involve another couple of DRMs stacked on top of the already existing DRM I purchased the game on.
But piracy shows us that, even in convenient systems, people will look (sometimes will need to look) for flexibility. Right now, it’s very flexible to find any game at a price point you consider reasonable, on the platform of your choice.
You can use isthereanydeal or gg.deals to find the lowest prices for the video games you’re interested in. Developer-approved sales are a dime a dozen, and if you’d like to own a key for the sake of convenience you can always shoot your shot on any of the grey market websites that sell keys of questionable origin at a fraction of a title’s full price. If you dislike that, there are some subscriptions, you can own several types of console and handheld gaming technology, and salvage physical media assuming you are tech savvy enough.
Not only that, but given how prevalent sales are, I question the need of having fully standardized prices to begin with. When I think about how much I would pay for a game I’d been following for a while, my general reaction is to think of the lowest possible price I’ve seen pop up the most during sales.
So, Hollow Knight, for example, isn’t a $15-game, it’s a $7.50 one. Sekiro isn’t a $60 game, but a $30 one. Anticipating a sale that derives from a full price makes me wary towards the concept of a game’s standardized value even more. We all know a sale will come eventually (until we all switch to subscription models and then we’re all fucked). What’s the point of paying full price at launch to be an early adopter if, like I said previously, they aren’t going to run out of digital keys very soon?
There are a few reasons why people buy at first price. For one, there’s company-manufactured hype done through influencer marketing. Second, there’s a desire to take part in the culture of a freshly launched game. The Dark Souls franchise, for example, was designed to be approached by a community, not by a single player, and being part of that community at launch will give you multiplayer benefits that will not exist in a few years once the player base moves on to other titles. Third (possibly final), players have expectations based on how a prequel made them feel.
In discussions, “full price” often means the opportunity cost of missing out on a deal (remember that people will make purchases based on what they consider a deal). Paying full price (whatever that might look like) is a customer’s way of saying “there are more important things than getting a deal out of a game.”
Before we move on, this is a good spot to address the “but bro, if you complain about spending $60 on a video game, you should see how expensive are other hobbies” stupidity.
For one, while you could spend your entire life on a gaming chair, it’s unlikely you’ll do it. Video games are not a price/ hour hobby, unlike casual dating or fashion, where you measure expenditure based on a limited number of hours where you try to maximize the quality of each hour. Autistic way of putting it? Sure, but I don’t care. With video games, not even developers attempt to make every hour a quality hour. Firewatch is a 5-hour game in which most gameplay is spent walking from point A to point B, waiting for an NPC to call you on a walkie-talkie. I’m not saying it’s bad, or that people shouldn’t pay money for it, but that it’s naive to consider that each hour of Firewatch deserves money. It’d say around 50% of the game is more or less a sub-mediocre walking simulator, elevated by nice-looking graphics and an engaging narrative. That’s 50% of the time that could have been shaved off to make this experience the best quality/hour possible. If you extrapolate this to something like Hades, it becomes an exercise in being a muppet. I clocked in 60 hours of Hades. Imagine if Hades was designed with the idea that it’s ok to have 50% of the time be shit, then expect people to pay full price for the game. That would have been 30 hours down the toilet.
Instead, Hades is a game where I’d say 95% is quality time, which is fantastic for a rogue-lite. Would anyone spend 60$ on something if 30 hours of it was garbage? I hope not, but that’s what the “but bro…” argument entails. It’s fine if the game is poorly designed because at least some percentage of it is okay, right?
This type of historically revisionist mentality permeates gaming culture to the point where we make martyrs out of game developers after they fail in delivering a functional product. Case in point: CDPR. CDPR is a developer most known for its Witcher franchise, Geralt’s 3-part adventure where the first 2 parts are terrible from a technical standpoint and the third part is terrible mechanically. Great example for the quality/ hour argument, too, considering how much of Witcher 3 is spent skipping cutscenes.
CDPR never launched a game free from issues, and Cyberpunk’s launch was a terrifying affair that destroyed the faith in humanity for plenty of gamers… except now there is a trend that tries to erase what happened and replace it with “look how great the game is now that they patched it up to be playable.”
People paid full price for Cyberpunk at launch, for reasons we’ve mentioned before (it wasn’t just hype). Then, they had to wait years until the game became functional on the same level as a free Skyrim mod, only for CDPR fans to bemoan when distraught gamers remind them of one of the worst launches in gaming history.
The real meat on the bones here is Fallout: New Vegas, which stands as a nice counter argument to the idea that “nowadays, devs only launch bugged games in pre-alpha.” Fallout: New Vegas was a disaster at launch. Obsidian bit on more than they could chew believing that using Bethesda’s engine and assets would give them the freedom to craft the equivalent of a novel. They failed, didn’t get some bonuses, I don’t know. But there is this weird, pervasive, goofy theory online about how Todd Howard himself fucked Obsidian by super-imposing some unreasonable deadline. Obsidian- who has always been a AA developer- was martyrized by a community of goofballs who not only haven’t been at the game’s launch, not only haven’t engaged with the game’s modding community to see how much had to be fixed, but didn’t even care to double check their claims.
Players complain about aggressive marketing tactics and weird price points because of stuff like this. They become “patient gamers” and never ever buy a game at launch because of things like this. And when they go online to try and double-check a recommendation, most likely on Reddit or YouTube, they risk being lied to by fake critics who make a wage telling their audiences what they want to hear.
I bought Signalis at full price. Not a single person online said that Signalis is just a Resident Evil/ Silent Hill mashup with an anime coat of paint thrown over it, with zero original ideas, a non-sensical story, and a gameplay style I’ve seen a thousand times before. Of course Signalis didn’t my make my landlord throw me out. Signalis didn’t enter my apartment and drank my milkshake. But it did, in fact, waste my time, and it’s likely I would have been more amenable to the wasted time if I read a decent review that didn’t cater to an audience of fanboys.
This is how disappointments are made and how customers are incentivized to wait for discounts- it’s too easy to be led into believing that a game is worth paying a particular price for, especially when:
The demo debates are often told from the perspective of a developer, who, distraught with the volume of work, would like to spend less time on building a demo to showcase the game’s mechanics. There was even a paper made a long time ago where findings indicated that demos “diminish sales”.
Well… what are demos supposed to do? If your pricing strategy revolves around using YouTubers to lie to their audiences your game is something it’s not, it’s only fair your sales take a hit after gamers complain on Reddit. Some expert guy has already touched on this at GDC 2025, telling us developers should, in fact, publish a demo, which is in line with my observation that video games are a medium that needs to be experienced in some way before the purchase.
Early Access is a bit more complicated. You’d be surprised at how often I watch YouTube videos made by one of those channels that spread the word about “indie hidden gems”, which are, in fact, titles that have been stuck in Early Access for years. Monomyth is a good example. Gloomwood is another. These titles are, for all intents and purposes, unfinished, and will likely never be finished in this decade (I might take the L on Gloomwood, but not on Monomyth).
To me, it’s fine that developers use Early Access capabilities to gauge player reactions and test ideas. But frankly, this could also be achieved with a longer, playable demo, but a demo wouldn’t sell, so… we’re stuck with Early Access titles most of us patient gamers don’t touch out of principle.
The main video game consumer problem of today is the ever-increasing number of games that come out each month. While this may sounds dumb, the truth is that it’s becoming more difficult to find stuff you like.
While my previous chapter focused on talking about value distribution, and the third chapter focused on how value exists outside of the work/ product, here we discover that value is, in fact, a subjective experience. The most valuable games, to me, were free Skyrim mods are free Thief fan missions. To me, quality/ hour makes little sense when I am looking for games that match what I like.
Previously, I said that we live in the era of niche fanbases. If multiple people like the same thing, and a developer learns that by making that thing they will deliver the most quality/ hour to an audience, they will think it’s an easier path to success than making a game they find interesting .
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot Reddit ads with weird titles that say “X meets Y”, like in “Skyrim meets Witcher”. Like in “Resident Evil” meets” Silent Hill” meets “Anime”. There is no interesting idea or gameplay behind these titles, it’s just a cocktail of visual elements and mechanics copied from other titles into different engines.
While these copy-and-paste video games end up clogging the recommendation feeds of people looking for new titles to play, there seems to be an even deeper desire to be catered to. This is where I criticize the consumer (for the first and only time). People believe that companies should do what they want instead of what looks like it’s profitable, but forget that if something is profitable it’s because others like it, or at least, pretend to like it enough to purchase it.
Usually, people don’t spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing why they like something. People justify their decisions after they’ve made them, so it’s difficult to pinpoint with precision what drew them in to something in the first place.
That is, until a YouTuber tells them what they should and shouldn’t like. Influencers, unfortunately, play a big role in the opinion business. That is, people will watch Whitelight, Mandalore, Yahtzee, or (god forbid) PatricianTV or Joseph Anderson. The same people will go online and repeat ad nauseaum those YouTuber’s opinions, clogging the Internet with half-baked takes, and making it more difficult for the average consumer to make up their mind on a purchase.
Where I live, $60 isn’t the type of sum I throw out on a whim. I don’t wake up one morning and decide to buy Elden Ring at full price without having made the slightest bit of research on the subject. Remember that if we judge video games on a quality/ hour basis (the most normie take ever), most games fail because the best ratio I’ve come across is, like, 95%. Which is still a lot, but it’s the best you’ll ever get from a game.
The meta-problem with game development is that there are so many systems that make up even a trashy 4-hour-long indie horror time waster like No one lives under the lighthouse. The average consumer has neither the time nor the patience to learn how to analyze a piece of art; they only want to know whether or not they’ll like it, or at least, like it enough to become invested in it, or at least, like it enough to finish it. Consumers flock to influencers for a vetted opinion; it’s assumed that Mandalore (who is pretty good btw) knows the difference between good and bad.
The reality looks a bit different because of the aforementioned “value is subjective” thingy. I prefer fantasy or modern/ historical settings with fantastical elements and innovative gameplay. So, to me, stuff like Skyrim, Dishonored, Sekiro, Thief, Pillars of Eternity, Planescape Torment, Pathologic, and Hades are, more or less, a certain win. The second I saw on YouTube a no-hit fight with Sword Saint Isshin I knew I was going to like Sekiro. But that’s because Sekiro has a well-developed concept, consistent across the entire experience, which doesn’t deviate to allow a half-baked narrative to interrupt the flow of gameplay.
The problems with YouTubers or review outlets like IGN is that it’s difficult to read or listen to a piece that states a genuine opinion, like “this is garbage because X” or “I like this because of Y”. YouTube and gaming journalism are businesses, so they try to cater to the lowest common denominator, that of formulating opinions that are not too strong, that seem to have arguments behind them, which are just justifications that appeal to their target audience. Finances talk
Hobbies are difficult to monetize because of a lack of meaningful opportunity. Even if you get an opportunity, its difficult to charge a high price point because “value” is subjective and very dependent on timing. There are plenty of okay-ish ways to inflate the value of a game artificially as long as the customer has flexible ways of acquisition and purchasing/ refunding games is convenient. Quality/ hour isn’t a good way of exemplifying value, so most people turn towards YouTubers to gain an impression of a game before making a purchase. But YouTubers are incentivized to manufacture opinions that sound good to a certain audience, so disappointed customers become disillusioned with game developers.
It’s important to remember, when discussing price points, that the developers making your game are rarely hobbyists. The people who worked on the latest Assassin’s Creed or Signalis were financially motivated by a publisher. Video game sales are what investors use to recoup their initial investment, but plenty of AA and AAA (and even indie) devs got paid already.
Darkwood is my favorite survival horror to date, and unlike Signalis, it was made by hobbyists- people who had no financial incentive while working on the game (crowdfunding it on Indiegogo was the equivalent of gambling for funds, while Signalis was funded by Humble). Darkwood devs developed it in their free time after work, who charge an insanely low price point during sales, and who even gave the game away for free on torrent websites specifically to avoid grey market purchases.
Let’s restate, it’s the lack of a financial incentive that makes a hobbyist, not whether or not they make a product in their spare time. If you get paid by human beings to create something that’s not 100% sure it will recoup its investment, you are an employee. When Obsidian devs worked on their Kickstarter campaign for Pillars of Eternity, they weren’t hobbyist designers; they were employed by Obsidian to create a product that would cater to fans of old-school isometric RPGs.
I want to remind people that what they consider artistic and life-changing, or simply a great time is, more often than not, the result of product, marketing, and distribution teams. Crime and Punishment wasn’t Dostoevsky’s hobby; it was his job. He already got the money for writing it before your grandfather read it.
The distinction is extremely important, because of how conversations about making money from hobbies goes nowadays. It’s common to hear “follow your dreams”, “follow your heart”, “do what makes you happy” or other empty platitudes of no value. All of this, I find, boil down to “try to monetize a hobby”, when in reality, the products that motivate you towards bettering your skills were made by people who weren’t hobbyists.
If you are an “aspiring” (disgusting word) indie developer, or writer, or illustrator, what would likely help you in not wasting time building trash is to decide if you plan on practicing your craft as a hobby or as a job. Hobbyists succeed exclusively through luck, while employees may or may not succeed depending on the professional relationships they build through the years. But since this distinction isn’t made clear by gurus or well-intentioned people who lack intelligence, new artists believe the only path to success is through monetizing their hobby by force.
Back when I tried to make my illustration hobby into a career, I had this annoying inner conflict between “being good at illustration” and “feeling satisfied with my work”. At the end of the day, I only made products that served no purpose, that were somehow in-between these two states, not too artsy and self-gratifying, but not helpful to get gigs either. And the online advice I got was staggeringly idiotic.
Most people giving illustration advice are art directors working freelance themselves or employed by publishing companies. Their advice? Spend an inordinate amount of time on this hobby without financial returns and get a low-paying job (preferably 4 hours a day) to have time to email art directors and beg them for gigs.
And I tried that for some time, but the problem was that art directors are incentivized to reduce the number of “new hire” meetings. It’s not like they could hire an illustrator on a whim. I lost well-paying gigs to illustrators who were only a bit better from a technical perspective, but who were already vetted by other art directors who were giving them preferential treatment because it was more convenient than hiring someone new.
And I’m not saying that to wear my resentment as a badge of honor, it’s to highlight that it would have been more helpful to hear “just work on your illustration as a hobby for a few years, see if it gets you anywhere, but you should get a well-paying job if you need the money.” Instead, the unhelpful advice was framed within “monetizing the hobby”, which, in time, drastically diminished my interest in the hobby and made me flock to activities I wasn’t as emotionally invested in. It wasn’t necessarily the fault of art directors for giving poor advice, but it was mostly my fault for not drawing a clear line between a hobby and a job.
What does all of this have with game development and pricing games? Hobbyist developers launch products that look and feel like they were made by hobbyists. Even in the rare instances when this doesn’t happen (see: Darkwood), the financial reward doesn’t cover the time investment. Acid Wizard Studio (Darkwood’s devs) took a hiatus (it’s joever) after selling something like 1.5 million copies of their game.
I’s difficult for me to imagine what a monthly salary looked like for the Acid Wizard members during these past 8 years since launch, but “not enough” is probably about right. Acid Wizard members cited a “destructive working environment” for closing shop, which sounds consistent with what I’ve experienced, albeit at a much smaller scale.
I tried going out with a bang before stopping illustrating. I spent my obligatory 8 hours at work, then took a 1 to 2 hours of illustrating after for about… 10 months. It felt terrible. Not only was I left without the energy to pursue other things, but I also made little money from my hobby even if I produced my best work and got a copy of a book I illustrated as a gift from overseas.
When financial incentives become more important than how you live, the value of a hobby diminishes until it dies out and you need a sabbatical (it’s joever).
So, financially, how do you go about this? Do you plan on selling the game that took 5 years off your life at a low price point and hope to recoup costs over the years? Plenty of AA and indie titles did quite well by taking this route. Or do you sell your product at a high price point and hope to manufacture enough hype prior to your launch date? Plenty of AAA titles sell this way.
I’m not writing all of this to be discouraging, but to pose the question: were all those trash games launched daily on Steam and Itch.io someone’s dream? Cluttering the market with sub-par products that are difficult to market and sell means the customer has a more difficult time researching interesting things. And what happens when there are too many options and a budget so limited that choosing anything is an exercise in frustration? People flock to services that decide for them.
The main experience issue that I see in Epic and GOG is that the player and the developer aren’t the main focus. Steam is built for longevity, while Epic is built for absorption, and GOG is built to host and preserve abandonware.
There’s a lot of talk about GOG hosting DRM-free titles, but highlighting this one benefit of purchasing games from GOG misses the point, because customers don’t care about DRM-free. They care about convenience, accessibility, and refund policies. Nobody purchases games from GOG and copies files that will be unusable on Windows 12 on a hard drive unless they have too much free time on their hands. Which is why this whole talk of “ownership” is bullshit that will inevitably drive people towards subscription services, where we know we don’t owe anything, we know the host can withdraw and disable games whenever they want, making the offering worse and losing money in the process which will drive up the subscription price for less value. Just look at Netflix and Spotify.
The problem with the ownership discussion is the inherent hypocrisy of pretending to own something you’ve never owned. Ever since games begun selling, we’ve been mostly paying for the experience of playing a game, and some of us paid a whole lot more for the experience of playing them on new and interesting technology. Downloading files and putting them on hard drives was never new and interesting technology, so it shouldn’t surprise us GOG hasn’t been able to monetize this one feature, exclusive to them, to its fullest potential.
But the kicker is the weird notion that people are somehow happy to pay a monthly fee for a subscription service forever. Even if SaaS would be super-imposed on all our gaming catalogues, we would find ways to reduce everything to a one-time purchase, like it’s the case for plenty of SaaS products that have better deals when the customer purchases a yearly plan.
People know they buy access, not a product to be owned, and the real inner conflict is about how much power ends up in the hands of a platform. Most platforms take a 30% cut off a developer’s sales and devs are more than willing to give it to the platforms because exposure matters more than immediate financial return.
We live in an era where the customer isn’t really rewarded for intensive research and understanding of the market. There are so many discounts that it’s more interesting to buy plenty of games at a discounted price (even if some of those are misses) than to peruse Reddit and read and understand critics before purchasing a title at a higher price point.
One Steam spring sale can net you about… 5 or 6 high quality titles for less than $20 if you know what to look for. This is obviously going to end at some point. I simply don’t believe the way things have been going for the past 10 years is how things are going to go forever. Something, somewhere, will break, and then we’ll all mostly be left doting over the good times when games were absurdly cheap, access and convenience mattered more than ownership or whatever, and indie devs were motivated by exposure.
True indie devs, if there is such a thing, are the people developing stuff like The Black Parade- unheard of, impossibly obscure, niche, and irrelevant to any possible gaming market, and yet, a colossus of level design and interesting ideas. The Black Parade is a free 10-mission campaign for Thief: Gold. It was designed entirely by amateurs and disgruntled devs who left the “industry” to do actual good work as a hobby. And this is where we come full circle, I feel.
Most video games are terrible. Not mid, not maybes, just flat-out terrible, designed more than likely, by people who believed strongly in their right to monetize what once used to be a hobby. I don’t think “entitlement” is the correct word to use here, it’s more a combination of naivete and misunderstanding of how something you do in your spare time is supposed to fit within the overarching narrative of your day-to-day existence.
Some years ago, business gurus were hot and heavy for this concept called Ikigai. Ikigai doesn’t mean anything, it’s just some trash made by a capitalist who wanted to make everyone feel terrible for separating the way they make their money from the way they feel good, and slapped a Japanese word over a Venn diagram. Fast forward a few years, and even people who used to be worthy of respect (like Chris Do) were spouting and sharing this non-sense on LinkedIn, garnering thousands of likes for what is, essentially, some no-name’s invention.
Now imagine. Say you have an actual talent, be that in the arts, crafts, athleticism, or business. Or any other talent, but something that seems to come naturally to you, that speaks to you in a way it doesn’t to normies. You have to distribute your short time on this planet between making money to live, having some sort of a social life outside your job, and making something with that talent of yours.
Ikigai imposters already know what you should be making with that talent. Money. Coin. Gold. Just… find a way to give someone else rights to your art so you could make some money. No control over the platform. No ownership over your ideas or profit margins. Just sell. Cold mail people, send your draft to publishers who don’t care about your work because they are businesses who sell what marketing departments tells them to. Or better yet, go into debt to pursue a hobby, then watch how you burn all your finances trying to make it work long term. Fail miserably and waste years off your life believing the grind will amass to a livelihood some day. Feel guilty about it and blame it on that one bad day when you decided to abandon a job to “pursue your dream.” You have to make this work, otherwise there’s no Ikigai. If there’s no Ikigai, Chris Do will post another carousel about it and make even more money off LinkedIn bootlickers.
Without bootlickers believing in garbage concepts like Ikigai and “following one’s dreams”, I feel so many industries would go belly up and so many bullshit jobs would go extinct. Bootlickers are also responsible for purchasing video games at full prices from Ubisoft btw, which gives Ubisoft the right to… keep existing. I’m sorry, but I have to live in a world where Looking Glass Studios closed shop after making, like, one game and a half, and where Ubisoft is working on Assassin’s Creed 14, betting it all on investor money.
What do I believe?
I believe that hobbyist developers should delay launching their games indefinitely. If all of us, hobbyist artists and devs, would double the time spent on passion projects knowing that we’ll never sell anything, take advantage of what the Internet has to offer to build our own networks of distribution, rely on a well-paying job that delivers peace of mind and money at a steady pace, come up with our own price points without interference, and give up the idea that there is one activity that’s supposed to deliver all meaning in life, we would have a better gaming market, less critics, more invested customers, less mediocrity stuck in early access, less trashy Instagram art, less DJs, and, overall, more quality. Per hour. In life.