There Are Too Many Video Games. And too much entertainment.
Over 30 new games per day, just on Steam. Around 60,000 new songs on Spotify per day. What is happening? The usual: bottom 90% scraps around and the top 1% swims in wealth to the point of finding amusing and interesting to create artificial scarcity.
The huge problems with games is that they’re the worst work/profit ratio of any creative endeavor: you can compose a great song in one hour. You can’t produce a good game in a year.
This leads me to the good old Systems VS Narrative debate. It’s an old debate in video games, but it’s starting to describe a lot what’s going on in the economy at large: we live in systems and people want to force narratives on them. Which doesn’t work. The solution is to modify those systems and make them work for a better output.
Example: people love the narrative of unions protecting employees and love to push the idea in tech: “get unions!” they will yell. But the system we are in, 2000s capitalism, doesn’t allow unions. It’s a done deal. For unions to work you need leverage to bargain, you need tangibles. The world of tech and game development are full of intangibles, from which tech to use to which market to aim. It’s bet over gamble over “I hope this works out”, times a random amount of luck. This is not a situation where you can call for unions! Yet people love the idea that we are still in 1912, working for Henry Ford. Just form a union, and you will be fine! Sadly, this is not reality.
Interestingly, the same people who want unions will –in CA, a relatively chill state- vote against Uber drivers becoming Uber employees because they don’t want their Uber costs to skyrocket. Because that’s how the system (capitalism) works: it delivers value, spits out profit, and churns out bodies. Even when voters have the option to change the lives of thousands, they vote in favor of the system that allows them to get cheap(er) Uber trips. To hell with unions and decent compensation right? I don’t think people are horrible, they just don’t want to be accountable because the systems are complex and you can always find a way to think about a problem to make you feel like it’s not yours (“Uber has to be a side gig, I don’t care!”). Which I always find funny because well, we are indeed in this together. More now than ever before.
Anyway would you write stories, build video games, compose music, edit movies, skate and do all kinds of creative stuff that makes you feel alive, you need a support system. The more you do, the steadier the support has to be. Obviously to make great games, which takes years, the support needs to be very resilient.
Universal Basic Income, y’all. That’s not a narrative. That’s a system fix that would work. 100%.