Analysis

By Yanai Levy, October 25th, 2023

In the early days of the videogaming industry, it was a winner take all wild west. Innovations were happening so quickly, and the increments of improvement were so vast that trying to navigate that world was a minefield for someone without their finger on its pulse. Not only was it mostly unregulated legally speaking, but every game developer was a pioneer forging a path in uncharted land. Some companies sank, some swam, and some turned out to be Olympic swimmers that haven’t tired till this day.

The videogaming industry today looks hugely different to how it did in the heyday of Atari in the late 70s/early 80s. Gone are arcade cabinets, the judicious replication, and the culture of innovation that drove enthusiasts to get their hands dirty and create the next generation of videogaming technology. That isn’t to say that there are none of any of those factors today, there are, but they have been stamped down to a large degree. When new technology and the new affordances it grants bursts onto a scene it causes immediate turmoil. Think of when electricity was just getting started and there were competing inventors like Edison and Tesla, misinformation campaigns (looking at you Edison!), and a general lack of understanding by the public that followed. The same type of thing happened when videogaming came out to the scene and the consolidation that ultimately follows is the reason for many consumer’s gripes.

Today’s gaming industry is a much larger ship, and it is therefore much harder to change its direction. The gaming industry has become a huge revenue generator in ways that would have been impossible to predict in its youth. The gaming industry generated an estimated 365 billion dollars worldwide last year. Part of that is its introduction into the mainstream consciousness. It has become normalized for almost anyone to play some kind of game regularly, whether it’s your grandma playing solitaire online, or your gym rat cousin playing Call of Duty in his free time. Some of that explosive growth was due to the COVID-19 pandemic to be sure. Many people staying quarantined indoors or working from home were looking for ways to pass the time or get lost in a world that was not a cesspit of anxiety and doom. Despite the influence of the pandemic, the growth of the gaming industry is not expected to slow down anytime soon. Analysts predict a yearly growth rate of around 8% per year, and at the kind of scale in question, that is an absolutely massive sum.

This is all to say that there are many powerful people in the gaming industry that are very highly motivated to keep their various companies and conglomerates in a position to keep riding that rising wave. Adding to that, there are fewer and fewer options for a gaming consumer to turn to if they wish to avoid the corporate greed that is afflicting the industry as a whole. A small list of companies own a large majority of gaming intellectual property. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Tencent, and Embracer Group own almost all the AAA game IP out there. Triple A is a term that used to refer to the amount of money a game had in its budget, implying tens or hundreds of millions of dollars were allocated to the game’s development. However, in recent times, the term has evolved to mean any large, well-known, or well publicized game that is launched by a large game developer/publisher. Usually the financial aspect of the term remains true, but there have been games such as Apex Legends that have been released without that kind of monetary commitment but have achieved triple A status due to the identity of their publishers and subsequent popularity.

Game production used to be a varied and diverse collection of companies and passion projects from many different countries and backgrounds. It was a new field, with lots of experimentation and startups, the fierce competition between which can only benefit the consumers in the end. In the last twenty-odd years however, large companies have been slowly but steadily acquiring smaller studios, and each other, leaving less and less space for newcomers to claim. The impact of these types of decisions is being felt by people engaging with these companies is sharply felt. Small transactions within games have creeped into games of all genres, and the ownership of games is slowly becoming less and less held by the consumers. These strategies are unilaterally developed by game developers to make more money than they did the previous quarter. They are enabled by sophisticated technological advancement without a doubt, but they become acceptable to consumers through the narrowing of options available to them. When previously a consumer would be able to choose games made by a company they support, they can now be forced to support a company they find unconscionable if they want to play a certain type of game.

Cross-platform equivalencies were much more common in the earlier years of gaming. Companies tended to make their own version of a certain style of game to achieve some kind of feature parity with their competitors. These alternative versions often took a lot of…inspiration from the competing brands to put it charitably, but the end result was that whether you bought a SNES or an Atari Genesis, you could generally access the same type of content. If you liked kart racing games you could have played Super Mario Kart on one system, or Atari Karts on the other. Platforming fans could play Super Mario, or Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and so on. While it could be argued that this type of copying is not the path to creative innovations, it did provide gaming consumers with options to pick and choose from. If Nintendo made decisions that you disagreed with, your next console could easily come from Atari or Sony and vice-versa. This is no longer the case. Without getting into sketchy websites and technically demanding programs, if you want to play a Nintendo style game, you will give Nintendo your credit card information.

The modern practices of siloing types of games within a specific company’s catalogue is limited further by the systems developed to control game distribution. There are concerningly few major marketplaces such as Steam, Microsoft (Xbox) store, PlayStation store, Nintendo eShop, and a few smaller players that allow digital distribution of gaming files and content. Yes, you can still buy DVDs with game files on them, but they often just contain a verification program that then instructs your system to download the game from the same digital store. This type of distribution system suits the developing companies quite well, as it keeps all of the control in their hands. You pay them the $69.99 that the game costs, and they allow you to access it, as opposed to transferring ownership to the customer. Subscription services also exist to do this in an even more extreme manner. You may be allowed to play the game so long as you pay their monthly fee, but a lapse in payment can remind you exactly how little ownership you truly possess. The companies can decide what game to keep supporting, and how, no matter how many people pay them for the possibility of playing them. Games-as-a-service, the term used for this type of constant payment for access, is nothing new. Other software such as Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative suite has been using this type of model for years, but in gaming it has grown particularly oppressive to users.

Is there any hope for the consumers that do not want to engage in this system then? Well, sort of. Independent or “indie” developers are alive and well creating works of passion that can rival the quality of experience that these mega-corporations can deliver in a much smaller and friendlier way, if not their levels of graphical fidelity and cutting-edge tech. There have been plenty of success stories that follow the old paradigm, consisting of a small group of passionate and talented individuals that manage to overcome the ever-higher barriers of entry to the gaming space such as Hollow Knight and the Ori series. However, the unfortunate truth is that when these kinds of successes do happen, they are often followed up by an acquisition by one of the aforementioned mega-corporations.

All we can do is support small developers in the hopes they will keep at it and provide us at least the option to choose something different, even if they are unlikely to ever compete at the scale that the large ones can.

Thanks for reading!