It is true that general inflation over time and the tariffs increase the material costs of actual gaming hardware…
But uh, higher game prices?
The ballooning cost of game development?
Those things are almost entirely a result of the ossification of major publishers and studios into smaller and smaller numbers of bigger and bigger ultimate owners, who are all responsible to their investors… who are only interested in next quarter profit, which makes sensible long term strategy basically impossible.
And also the … just generally absurdly incompetent internal management and strategic decision making within major game studios/publishers.
Just go look into basically any major AAA (or god forbid AAAA) game in the last 5 or 10 years, and you’ll find that management is basically bipolar/schizophrenic, constantly making and then unmaking decisions, constantly laughably out of touch when it comes to estimating the market for or appeal of their games.
Also also, it doesn’t help that the GPU market is basically a monopoly, and the new graphical paradigm (and development paradigm) is basically the equivalent of the entire US car market shifting to oversized luxury trucks and SUVs that most people can’t actually afford… instead of offering a wider range of ‘cars’ for a wider range of ‘drivers’…
Nor does it help that various IPs basically have a death grip on their fanbases, who will not stop giving them money no matter how many bugs are in their games, how many broken features they release with, no matter how much they cost.
…
The gaming scene is going to (and to a large extent arguably already has) bifrucate along the same wealth disparity lines that society is more broadly:
Huge numbers of people playing cheaper, older games, or indie releases…
And a smaller and smaller number of people playing absurdly overproduced, but very gameplay formulaic, ‘safe’, boring kinds of games… which cost more and more.
…
The ‘games journalism’ industry has largely been incapable of or unwilling to take the on the actual core problem: Capitalism.
Unrestrained, unregulated, unnacountable capitalism leads to monopolies/oligopolies that stop truly competing, and start extracting rent, and internally, culturally, they become more and more incompetent, inefficient, wasteful, and basically delusionally entitled.
…
To go back to the car metaphor:
Nissan is basically on the verge of collapsing.
Nissan was in talks to merge with Honda… but those talks fell through.
Why?
Because Nissan execs felt disrespected by the proposal that Nissan … still maintain its brand, but ultimately be a subdivision of Honda.
… Because that would mean a bunch of Nissan management and C Suite would now be redundant, and thus either let go, or functionally demoted.
Nissan wanted a more equal partnership merger… despite themselves being objectively less competent at managing both its finances and general operations.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/inside-collapse-nissan-hondas-60-billion-mega-deal-2025-02-12/
So now Nissan is pretty much guaranteed to just collapse, unless METI just strongarms them into accepting some kind of deal, which will now almost certianly be on worse terms than the original Honda merger deal.
This same kind of dynamic of delusionally entitled yet also objectively incompetent management/c suite is also whats driving nearly all the bullshit in the video game industry generally.
Comments like these is why I keep coming back!
Strong analysis. Really a microcosm of the fuckening we are being served.
Note how Valve is not a publically owned company.
They are privately owned, and are thus free from the ‘next quarter profit’ incentive structure.
… Which has enabled them to experiment, and actually drive forward gaming in general.
They basically invented achievements in games.
They also basicslly invented MTX.
They also basically have the best engine in gaming.
They also realized that turning steam, which was once just their game launcher/updater… into a gigantic digital marketplace for all games… was a very good idea.
They also basically invented handheld pc gaming consoles.
They also invented proton and are now rapidly approaching the ability to make the average person go… wait, why do I even use windows at all on my personal home PC?
… And they also pretty much make the best VR headset for AAA VR games, even if it turns out that VR is basically just too expensive generally.
The point here is: look at the incentive structure both within and surrounding an entity, and you csn determine how that entity is likely to act.
… Ironically… this is literally called ‘game theory’ and has many applications to economics, polisci, sociology, etc.
Yes, and even with Valve doing some great things for gaming, it’s important to note that we all will benefit from Valve having meaningful competition from Epic and GOG. If gamers spread their money around, service providers will do more to earn it.
Agreed!
Also worth pointing out:
Epic Games is American, and also privately owned, like Valve.
GOG is a subsidiary of CD Projekt, which became a publically traded company in 2009… but it is based in Poland, the EU, which has much more regulations in place that help to temper the pure insanity lust for maximum profits now! that American public companies have.
… Ironically… this is literally called ‘game theory’ and has many applications to economics, polisci, sociology, etc.
Game Theory presumes that you are dealing in near peer type dynamics where competition is possible while the people who own corpos and rule us don’t see us as equal and we really ain’t anyway economicly or otherwsie.
Obviously daddy Gabe giving capitalism sort of a good name here no doubt. But that’s an exception in a super lucrative segment.
Koch industries is privately owed so is Bloomberg and they behave like any other parasite.
Game Theory presumes that you are dealing in near peer type dynamics where competition is possible while the people who own corpos and rule us don’t see us as equal and we really ain’t anyway economicly or otherwsie.
No, it does not.
What you are describing is a constrained, specific usage or application of game theory, but the general theory is much more flexible and allows construction of and evaluation of much more varied and complex scenarios.
Game theory actually excels at analyzing situations where different actors have totally different preference sets, representing the power disparity you mention.
…
There are even whole subsets of game theory designed around accounting for information disparity between actors, where one actor knows their own preference set as well as that of the other actor… but the other actor only knows their own… and many other more complex scenarios…
… and there are subsets of games that sequentially repeat and form branching decision trees, and other models that use even more complex math for more complex scenarios.
Also somewhat ironically, a whole lot of early computers were designed specifically to evaluate massive datasets being pumped into iterative game theory models… computers and games go hand in hand, in many ways.
…
The thing that presumes you are dealing with near peer dynamics is the MicroEcon 101 level ‘perfect competition’ paradigm, which you will hopefully understand is certainly not 100% applicable to all situations before you finish your first year of a 4 year, proper Econ degree.
… I am not making a blanket statement that ‘all privately held companies are better in all respects than publically held companies.’
I am pointing out that in the context of video game companies, being beholden to outside investors is … seemingly in essentially all cases at this point… a recipe for all of your game development to lean toward the safe/formulaic/stale core game concepts, with increasing levels of production value, and also a massive disparity of power and wealth within the internal hierarchy, which leads to incompetent management.
High need for maximum investor profit = low appetite for truly innovative risks, which can’t guarantee they’ll even work at all.
Its basically a pretty clear rule of thumb at this point that when some privately held tech company goes public… 95% of the time that means they are either in dire financial straits and can’t find anymore VC funding, and/or they are about to enshittify and massively hypermonetize now that they think they have a functional lock on some market demographic or segment.
…
Perhaps a useful analogy would be the difference between a government with most of its debt held by domestic investors vs foreign investors.
If your own debt is mostly contained within your own country, you have more freedom to do both more radical monetary and fiscal policy.
If your own debt is mostly held by foreigners… well, your whole economy can collapse if you do something they don’t like, because they can just firesale your bonds.
This same dynamic plays out at the megacorp scale.
Get a steam deck, dive into the indie world and forget about all those issues.
Games at 80$ only affect you if you buy them. There are tons of games under 30 that are good enough to keep you playing without making you poor.
Not to mention decades of older content, and nobody could have possibly played everything good that has ever been released.
Hell, even the consoles have a bunch of great Indie options at reasonable prices these days.
Hold on. YES games cost $80 now, but they’re ALSO unfinished buggy messes
