Humans are interesting creatures, aren’t we?
Lately I’ve been bouncing between two different, and utterly opposed, worldviews. Depending on what happens that day and the information I consume, I can believe with the entirety of my heart and soul one of two things.
First, that “humankind is the most incredible and fantastic miracle that has ever occurred in the history of reality, and the beauty of our art — in both its production and consumption — is the entire reason this universe exists”.
On the other hand, I can believe with equal fervor that, “humanity was a mistake, and the world would be better if we had never existed.”
How much of this is due to spending too much time online? Probably a lot, a fact I have tried, with no small measure of effort and success, to remedy. How much of it is due to my underlying mental illness? I reckon a substantial amount, which I have come to recognize and am learning to manage in a healthy way.
Whatever the reason, of course, these feelings are very real and influence my behavior for the day and sometimes long afterward. I don’t mean to say that these feelings compromise my deeply-held personal values and morals, but they certainly influence the kinds of jokes I laugh at, what I feel like teaching my children that day, and how I digest the books I’m reading at the time.
All this is simply an example of how interesting, complicated, contradictory, and amazing the human brain is.
We can choose to believe some things so passionately, so ardently, so zealously, that they will drive us to war, genocide, and all manner of atrocities. Those same things can motivate others to incredible acts of compassion, love, and charity. Yet, when asked to explain those beliefs or those convictions, many of us can’t do it.
And then when we witness those convictions in others whom we have decided beforehand that we don’t like, they are obtuse, absurd, and immoral.
Many of us can’t point beyond the doors of our church or workplace, the cover of our favorite books, or the photo of some expert.
This isn’t new. You’re smart. We all know this. We recognize that humans choose to accept beliefs that reaffirm and support their existing philosophies and worldviews.
I’ve had to confront a couple of my own convictions recently, with varying levels of success. This piece is about just one.
I believe wealth inequality is immoral and a social cancer. I have believed this for some time. I believe it is the source of many of the issues we face today, and is itself the result of rampant, unchecked greed. I believe it is the symptom of a deeply sick society.
Yet, when asked to defend this position, or give specifics of how this was the case, I would stumble. I would misunderstand economic facts and studies. I would be left confused and feeling defeated because whoever I was talking to had better information that seemed to disprove everything I believed. I had a difficult time explaining how wealth inequality actually makes life worse for everyone.
I had found the conviction, but hadn’t quite found the understanding. I had no foundation. My human brain had a difficult time breaking out of its routine and analyzing information in a new way to help me understand.
It wasn’t until I had the issue broken down and explained to me in terms that I am intimately familiar with that it finally clicked in my brain, and I could approach the topic in a whole new way, and see how the gears of society are impacted by wealth inequality.
What was it? Funnily enough, it was a video rant on YouTube by a content creator I enjoy who was using his experience with video games to explain how the industry has been destroyed and permanently altered due to wealth inequality, all while rando clips of video games play on the screen.
I had grown up playing video games. Too many video games. What was it about them that I found so comforting, enjoyable, and easy to access? Why did I seek refuge with video games when life got hard? Great questions, but the answers will have to wait until another day.
Suffice it to say, I was very familiar with video games and how they worked, how the industry was changing, the process of making them, and which styles, genres, and settings I enjoyed the most.
By framing income inequality within the context of the video game industry, my eyes were opened.
This probably sounds like common-sense to everyone reading, but the most surprising part of this whole process was how obvious this blind spot was only after I had it pointed out to me. I had looked so hard “out there” for answers and clarification that I had ignored to take a look at the things closest to me and my experience.
Every “thought leader” on LinkedIn, expert, world-renowned author, and philosopher had failed where this content creator had succeeded. Isn’t it interesting how much we (or me, at least) refuse to confront the intimate parts of ourselves even when we’re trying to find information to support our worldview?
I had complained, mostly to myself, about the issues this content creator was describing in great detail and could finally see the roots of the issue.
The interesting thing is, I had talked and written about this before. I have said, repeatedly, that the primary reason I love science fiction is because true science fiction forces the reader, or the viewer, to ask questions about our modern-day society because the issues being presented in the science fiction production are current issues but framed in an alien, distant universe.
We can’t easily critique ourselves, our beloved culture, our religion, or our relatives. But we can easily critique green aliens, machine invaders, or future humans, even if we’re critiquing the things that are true about ourselves now.
The greatest works of science fiction make us uncomfortable. The greatest works of science fiction art show us something about ourselves that we are afraid of. This is not exclusive to science fiction, of course, but this is where sci-fi shines brightest.
- Why is Frankenstein (one of the first most famous sci-fi novels of all time) so beloved? It teaches us the lesson that just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
- Why is Neuromancer, the definitive work of the cyberpunk genre that kicked off the entire movement, so famous? Because it asks the question: what will the future look like if Reaganomics takes off and capitalism runs rampant?
- Why is Fahrenheit 451 taught in schools? Because it forces readers to see the impact of censorship, conformity, fascism, and what happens when a society becomes illiterate.
- Why did War of the Worlds sell so well? The book is a critique of British imperialism and forces a traditionally colonial population to live the life of the oppressed.
- Why is Dune the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time? Besides its fantastic worldbuilding, it seamlessly leads the reader to consider Middle-Eastern politics and Western military occupation in the region, gender norms and dynamics, ecology and environmentalism, and religion.
- Why was Star Trek such a cultural sensation? I never got into Star Trek myself, but I was always entertained whenever I did see an episode of The Next Generation. Why? Because every episode dealt with real human questions about society, morality, philosophy, culture, religion, and much more. Yes the action was corny, the special effects cheesy, but that’s not what made it special. The questions it asked the audience to consider were the real draw every week. This is in stark contrast to the modern adaptations that are simply action movies that happen to be in space.
I could go on and on and on: The Handmaid’s Tale, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Foundation, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, 1984, and so on.
One of my favorite examples of this is Starship Troopers. This novel follows the journey of Rico, from his beginning as a recruit in the Mobile Infantry to a seasoned officer. It explores duty, the morality of war and conflict, citizenship, propaganda, and culture and society. However, one of the most fascinating things about Starship Troopers is how many people are introduced to the book through the movie adaptation of the same name.
In 1997, Paul Verhoeven directed the Starship Troopers film based on the novel. When it was released, it was strongly criticized for endorsing fascism and Nazism, presenting jingoistic policies, and openly supporting war. The film was a commercial failure.
Yet, the film was satire; which American audiences couldn’t pick up on because the themes resembled our American propaganda so closely. People left the theater feeling disgusted by the same values they hold! The film was marketed as satire in Europe.
Since its release, it has become a cult classic and a master example of satire and criticism of authoritarianism, propaganda, fascism, and the military. It is now regarded as one of the best science fiction films ever made, and modern critics have said it has only become more culturally relevant in a time of increased police brutality, authoritarians, oppression, and a shift toward fascism in the United States. Even the terrible acting by overly-attractive actors (which was criticized at the time) was revealed to be an intentional decision to show how we accept propaganda more readily because we like the person who is spreading it.
I read this book in high school, and watched the film shortly after, and instantly fell in love with it. I loved how I felt things I hadn’t felt while reading other books. I liked how I could almost see some of the blind spots falling from before my eyes. I needed more of it.
So, what’s the point? I’m not sure. I got lost in my love of talking about science fiction that I forgot what I was writing about. Something about letting what we love lead us to grow, even if that growth is painful and awkward.
Whatever the point, I want to share the transcript of the video essay that helped me. The video is titled “How Economics Ruined Halo Infinite by “broadening its audience”.
I have left the language the same, editing only for grammar and readability. There is strong language, but I have censored the strongest instances. If you would prefer to listen to the video essay instead, it can be found here.
“[…] Now, what I would like to talk about today is Halo infinite. This game f****ing sucks.
[…] There are some good things about Halo Infinite. For instance, I really like the main menu. It looks pretty. I enjoy the music, I enjoy loading this game up and just sitting there taking in the ambiance for a little while, but everything after that is a failure. Halo Infinite has two major shortcomings both of which can be traced back to the biggest problem in the gaming industry today which is that economic inequality is severely limiting the kinds of games this industry can produce.
The most widespread complaints about Infinite among the Halo community have centered on its lack of content and annoying micro-transactions. Well, tough titty, kiddos, it’s time to get used to it because this kind of thing is only about to get way worse.
[…] When Apex Legends came out as a free-to-play title I talked a bit about how economists have noticed that as wealth inequality gets worse it affects which kinds of businesses succeed or don’t and how I thought that could be applied to trends in the gaming industry as well — as in physical retail. Analysts realized that as the middle class disappeared and consumers were gradually being separated into two groups of either very very wealthy or not very wealthy at all, stores that cater to one group or the other started doing very well while stores that tried to find the middle ground were going out of business.
For example, the Dollar Store popular chain that sells all its products for around one dollar has been booming as wealth inequality gets worse because as a larger and larger percentage of consumers can only afford to spend a few dollars at a time it’s simply become the best option consistently available to them. In 2021, dollar stores accounted for nearly half of all new retail openings in America.
Now what is the games industry equivalent of the dollar store? Well, microtransactions and season passes, obviously. And unsurprisingly, during the exact same period the dollar store has taken off so have these kinds of in-game business models that everyone hates. In fact, if you could put the growth of dollar stores and the growth of micro-transactions next to each other on a graph I bet you there would be just one line.
Now why does everyone hate these business models? Why are we not happy about everything being cheap as shit? Because it requires low quality products. You go to the dollar store and it’s nothing but knock-off cheap as shit brands. They’ll have a can of Coke and it looks exactly like a Coke but you pick it up and you realize they spelled coke with a Q and on the back in bold white lettering it says some shit like “made in China”, “not FDA approved”, “may contain lead”.
Well it’s the same thing with games business models these days. Just low-quality products. Halo 3 launched with a full campaign, co-op, split-screen, twice as many maps and playlists, Forge, theater, Etc. All this time goes by and you assume future iterations of the product will have more and do better because of technological advancements and they’ve had more time to master the product or whatever. But that’s not what’s happening at all. Everything is actually getting way worse and it’s because we the consumer can no longer afford the kind of games we were buying back in ’09. Therefore, companies can no longer afford to make them.
Now the only thing we can afford is virtual costumes and dance moves and so that’s what they sell us instead.
A telling comment came from former president of EA, Grank Gibeau, back just before Dead Space 3 released. He said, in general, “we’re thinking about how we make this a more broadly appealing franchise because ultimately you need to get to audience sizes of around 5 million to really continue to invest in an IP like Dead Space anything less than that and it becomes quite difficult financially given how expensive it is to make games and Market them.”
Now, that comment stirred some controversy back in the day and he kind of sort of walked it back, but it was a very illuminating look into the business side of things. Funny enough, 343 has been in hot water for saying something almost identical.
343’s Bonnie Ross said she wanted Halo to appeal to a broader audience. Many frustrated fans, like The Act Man, raised a good question: why does it need to broaden its audience? Wasn’t it doing just fine the way it was? Didn’t the first three Halos garner universal acclaim and explosive popularity? The difference is the economic context since the release of the first three games: we’ve been through two major recessions, both of which left the bottom 60 percent of Americans with way less money than they used to have. And there’s a direct correlation between our shrinking wallets and our shrinking games.
It’s important to remember that every single product and service on the market is essentially crowdfunded by its customers. The total volume of a product and its quality is driven by how many customers it gets and how much money those customers have. Supply is driven by demand. In order to fund the high development cost of video games, publishers need to be certain there are enough customers with enough money to make it profitable. So, it becomes no surprise that is the average consumer has become substantially poorer over the last 15 years. Publishers have gradually had to deliver smaller and smaller products.
And this trend has never been more clear than it was this year with Halo Infinite and Battlefield 2042, two of the biggest franchises in gaming which were both widely panned for being small, for having less guns, less maps, less playlists, less features. Now, of course, it wasn’t the only thing people were upset about but it was the first, biggest, and most consistent complaint.
Now what you might say (and you’ll see this in the comments all the time) is something like, “well I would happily pay full price for a full game”. But would you pay the full price for two full games? How about three? How many sixty dollar games do you actually buy a year? How many full games would your friends pay full price for, and which ones?
When the bottom 60% of Americans, by wealth, have 25% less money than they did when Halo 3 launched in ‘07 how many less full games are we collectively going to buy?
You might speculate, “well we’ll buy 25% less”. But, in fact, consumer studies show that when the consumer has less disposable income, spending on non-essential goods is cut entirely before they sacrifice any spending in other more essential areas of their lives. So, when an economic class has 25% less money, they aren’t going to cut spending on everything 25%, they are just going to cut spending on games completely so they can keep paying the bills.
To quote the Journal of Consumer Research, “faced with a reduced consumption budget in a recession, consumers cut expenditures disproportionately more in less essential categories, e.g. dining out, resulting in smaller shares for these categories and larger shares for the more essential, e.g. food at home.”
Or to quote the Kearney Institute which puts it more bluntly, “reducing the share of national income going to less wealthy households reduces overall consumer demand.”
So long as wealth and equality continues to get worse and the middle class remains broke, there’s going to be significantly less consumer demand for video games which means fewer games, way more generic games, and way more micro-transactions because that’s all the publisher can afford to make while still turning a profit on our broke asses. This is why our industry has essentially transitioned to free-to-play micro-transactions entirely at this point. It is a dollar store industry, and the problem isn’t that the money’s not there but that inequality has led to it being all pooled at the very top. This is why they call it the bifurcation of the economy: ‘bi’ as in two, because on the other end of the economic spectrum we are seeing the exact opposite effect where the wealthiest percentile of the economy is seeing the quality of products tailored to their income level increased substantially.
Case in point: super yachts. The super yacht business is booming. During the COVID recession, inequality skyrocketed. We added over 1,400 new billionaires around the world and the billionaires we already had saw their total wealth increase by 70%. Unsurprisingly, at the exact same time, we saw a huge spike in demand for products marketed to billionaires and subsequently a corresponding increase in the overall size of products marketed to billionaires. Many outlets like CNBC and The Guardian looked into the super yacht industry’s rapid growth and concluded that the boom in super yacht sales was owed directly to the explosion of wealth in the upper economic class and that the super yacht business was seeing record growth not just in how many yachts were being sold but how large and high-tech those yachts were.
The Guardian concluded, and I quote, “the primary factor behind the increasing size of super yachts is the growing wealth of the super-rich.”
So, I only bring that up to re-emphasize there’s always a direct correlation between the amount of money a product’s target audience has and how awesome that product can be. So, as the economy is split into two lopsided halves, video games basically had to decide if they were going to go for the super yacht customers or the dollar store customers.
The problem with the super yacht customers is that they are still just regular human beings. They face the same physical limitations that we all do. There’s only so much food they can fit in their belly. They only have so many hours in a day. They can only be in one place at a time. Thus, there is a difference in the kind of products they provide demand for.
They can provide demand for ridiculously high price items like a super yachts, but to provide the requisite amount of demand that video games need they would have to buy like 10,000 copies of Halo each. But there’s no reason for them to ever do that, they’re only ever going to buy one copy of Halo, the same as anyone else. If you have a thousand customers with a thousand dollars each of disposable income, they’re going to buy a thousand copies of Halo. If you have one customer with one million dollars he is only going to buy one copy of Halo, even though it’s the same amount of money.
And that’s how economic inequality reduces demand for certain kinds of products.
So, I suppose what Halo could have done is just gone all-out and create the most ridiculously fantastic Halo game ever made and slap a hundred-million-dollar price tag on it. Bringing Steven Spielberg and James Cameron to do the story and cutscenes, poach engineers from Google’s moonshot department and tell them to stop working on space elevators and time crystals and start making multiplayer maps instead. Build a campaign that takes over 100,000 hours to complete, and the game comes with a thousand maps, ten thousand guns, 500 game modes. It comes with a super computer to play it on and a special AI program that analyzes your gameplay and reconfigures the game’s code in real-time to be optimized to your preferences, and a shitload of those Happy Meal toys that everyone likes, except this time they’re made out of solid gold, and comic book manga strategy guide f**** things written by Stephen King, and free lifetime Brazzers subscriptions.
But even if they pulled all that off, guess what? The game would still suck because it’s playlist populations would be dead. There’d only ever be like a few dozen billionaire fail-sons online. You’d play every match against basically the same group of dudes and what always happens in that situation is that one dude, for whatever reason, is head and shoulders better than everyone else, so everyone eventually figures out whatever f***ing team Tad is on is going to win.
In all seriousness, the nature of video games as a product means they were always going to end up on the dollar store end of things. It’s a retail product, and retail is now a dollar store market. This is why free-to-play micro-transactions have become the dominant sales model. This is why the biggest games last year were $15 fads like Among Us and Fall Guys.
This is why GTA and Elder Scrolls stopped releasing new games and have just re-released their old games ten thousand times in a row. This is why CoD and Destiny and Halo Infinite have had to rely on increasingly obnoxious micro-transaction schemes. And worst of all, this is why so many games’ actual gameplay has become so dumbed-down and generic: in order to appeal to the widest range of f****ers possible.
Wealth inequality is the root of all suck.
Until it gets better, nothing else will. And remember: this isn’t just video games, you’re living in a dollar store world. So, the next time you’re writing out some long-winded rant on Reddit, consider that your time might be better spent calling your local Congressman instead. I didn’t vote for Bernie Sanders because I want to give everyone a fair shot or because I care about the starving children in Ireland and all this shit, I just want to smoke weed and play video games.
But I would like my video games to launch with co-op and Forge, that’s all.
Thank you.
