Given the vague use of quotes in that video, I decided to look up the full quote. He’s not exactly being taken out of context, but it’s being blown out of proportion. What he’s saying is not anything surprising or new. He’s describing a big financial strategy for a growing section of the games industry, rather than making a proclamation that Ubisoft are going to steal all your games. The industry has been moving towards online-only and always-online setups, and it’s been that way for a long time. It’s the shift away from games as physical products towards games as a service.
The games industry is dominated by big corporations, and corporations are entities of capitalism - they exist solely for making money. There’s a lot more money to be made from getting people to pay over and over again for the same thing than charging them a larger amount only once (at least that’s one way of looking at it, as most people don’t have unlimited budgets). Streaming services are one way to get people to keep spending money on a particular company’s products, rather than their rivals’. It’s inevitable that many companies will try to make that shift if they see it as a way to make a lot more money.
Problem: Game studios want to make more money. But people want to pay less money by making one time only purchases.
Solution: Make all the games free. Goverment subsidises all the games. Game companies get payed proportional to the amount of time their games are played. And this can be made by making electricity prices more expensive, because if you are playing more games, you would be using more electricity. This would also solve the ownership problem. You wouldn’t need to be connected to the internet, the game wouldn’t lag and they wouldn’t be able to take it back from you. And also all games would need to be launched from a single app so that the app can see how long you play each game. This would be a monopoly, but it would be a good monopoly because it is done by the government and we elect the government. They may even redirect the taxes from other industries to the gaming sector if they get lobbied by gaming firms or want to get the votes of the gamer demographic. And everyone would become gamers because they pay for it, at least for electricity, even if they don’t play games. Parents would tell their kids to play video games all day, people would socialise in games and high scores would be a status symbol. All activities would now happen in the digital space.
What do you say, comrades! Would you join the revolution to overthrow the the boomer governments and establish a gamer’s republic?
Of course!
No I don’t want that
Maybe
0voters
We can make civil disobedience until the governments willingly enact this plan. If this doesn’t work, all the gamers in the EU that are old enough to vote can go to micronations such as Andorra and elect gameist governments. Once a sufficient number of countries convert to gameism, they can launch cyber attacks to the other countries until the whole planet is unified under one ideology. Hacking can be gameified, so every gamer would also be a soldier for this just cause without doing anything special. We can also go the accelerationist route and release an intelligent AI to the internet and if it feels indebted to us it may build a gameist utopia on that post apoclyptic world.
(Responding to the first half of the post because I’m pretty sure the second is ironic)
No, games are form of art, and the government shouldn’t be the deciding factor what kinds of art get produced (otherwise works critical of the system would never be funded, maybe some grants are okay, but the majority shouldn’ t need it).
Games should remain in the private sector, and instead have regulation for egregious monetization and ownership practices.
If video games are subsidised, this could mean that other art types are produced less, such as novels or movies. I personally don’t think this is that bad because you are more active in games instead of being reactive. And that gives a better experience.
Yes, there is a conflict of interest.
They can create a blackmarket of sorts where games are still obtained with upfront payments, assuming these can be advertised and delivered.
Aight, I was kinda with you in the first half of your first post, but you had a rather odd second half of your first post and Oncapa made a great point. then you spouted this:
Could not disagree more. For all I love video games, would 100% rather they all get scrapped and stopped being developed than the cessation of novel production
So while I think you have a point, can’t agree with you after you said this.
This runs into the problem of that how would anything new and exciting get funded? This sounds like exactly the problem that if one subscription service gets all the gaming industry money, they’ll be purely the ones deciding which games get made in the first place. And having just a single subscription to games limits the total amount of money that each gamer would pay into the system effectively placing a hard limit on the total available money pool and capping the amount of games that can be made. Currently new exciting games can make people pay more money than they would otherwise, thus effectively meaning that the money coming into the gaming industry depends on how well the released games get people to spend their money.
During a combat, the winning side receives disproportionately less casualties, even if they barely won. But this stops being valid in constrained spaces
Humanitarian help and weapons trade is inseperable because money is fungible.
There is always only a few arms producers on the world, and money is not the only way it is purchased
The real reason why there are no giant insects is because their exoskeleton is too heavy
With these kinds of debates, it’s usually called political science. Which can be fine, but since there are rules to avoid politics it’s my opinion that it’s better to avoid such subjects entirely than to rely upon technicalities to make certain posts allowed
Australian hunter gatherers had a sort of agricultural revolution. They were also real life minecraft players because they built semi automated fish farms.
Pre agricultural societies are known to build forts in coastal regions, Siberians did that in inland regions
Early humans weren’t cavemen, at least not all of them. They lived in wooden houses. And perhaps they started building tents the same time as they started sewing clothes.
