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Adam Rezich's avatar

This is a great post.

Without getting too far into the weeds here, I believe that anyone who has sincerely, dispassionately paid attention to Discourse About Video Games And Those Who Enjoy Playing Them over the past decade and a half should realize that at one point there was a bit of a concerted effort to "kill" "gamers". "Gamers" took said effort to kill their self-identification very personally, but missed the reason for why it happened:

AAA games got very expensive to make, and publishers wanted to increase their games' target demographic to be greater than just self-identified "gamers", so as to sell more units, so as to be able to continue to make bigger, more expensive-to-make games, in an increasingly diluted marketplace where it's no longer a foregone conclusion that big, expensive-to-make AAA releases are guaranteed to sell a bajillion units, as they were more prone to do in the Old Days.

That's it, that's the whole reason why that all happened. Everything else involving overemotional platitudes about "feminism" et al., "gamers are dead", the ongoing "culture war" (as it pertains to video games)—all of that stuff is all downstream of this stark, inescapable business reality.

There's much more nuance to the situation than I'm outlining here, of course, but this is the basic gist of how we got to the point where indie developers think it's a good idea to shit on their own customer base, to proverbially pee in the proverbial pool they and their fellow indie developers are proverbially swimming in: they saw what The Cool Kids (AAA, "journalists") were doing, and they got caught up in the overemotional rhetoric being spewed, without realizing that none of it has anything to do with them and the sorts of games *they* make—completely unaware that they were being conscripted as soldiers to fight a war against their own self-interests, on behalf of ever-consolidating megacorporations that are *directly competing against* them in the marketplace!

This is what happens when one confuses Like and Retweet integers as being a useful, viable heuristic for not just Truth (lol (lmao even)), but also Alignment With One's Own Self-Interest. Just because something *feels* *emotionally* good to post online, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so—even if the phone in your pocket is buzzing nonstop with Engagement Vibrations.

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SimulatedKnave's avatar

Weird as it sounds, gaming is a service industry (which is why a decent chunk of your advice for small indie game developers is directly applicable to small legal practice).

There are many service industries where people forget it's a service and start feeling entitled to the customers. It always ends badly, it's just who gets fucked over: the deserving, the undeserving, or both.

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