Tech Won't Save Us - How Video Games are Shaped by Capitalism w/ Daniel Joseph

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Daniel Joseph to discuss the relationship between video games and capitalism, how the gaming experience has become increasingly commercialized, and what the new consoles — Xbox Series X|S and Playstation 5 — herald for the future of the industry.Daniel Joseph is a Senior Lecturer of Digital Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Read his articles for Real Life about video games and capitalism and platformization, and for Briarpatch about what better platforms might look like. Follow Daniel on Twitter as @DanjoKaz00ie.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.** Support the show on Patreon and read the plan for the future.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network and follow it on Twitter as @harbingertweets.Also mentioned in this episode:“If Xbox is Netflix, then Playstation is cinema” by Christopher Dring at GamesIndustry.bizHow PS4 better positioned itself against Xbox One, including a short video about trading gamesNintendo was charged with price fixing in the 1990s in the United States and EuropeIn 2015, Valve and Bethesda had to backtrack on plans to commercialize modding53% of PS4 game sales were digital in 2019. That grew to 74% in the early part of 2020.David Nieborg and Thomas Poell’s work on platforms; Sarah Grimes’ work on commercialization of children’s gaming; the App Studies Initiative; and T.L. Taylor’s “Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming”Support the show

Hello everyone. Today I wanted to start the show by taking a couple minutes to give you an update. Tech Won't Save Us turned six months old last month. We've had 36 amazing guests over 35 episodes touching on a whole range of technological topics to give you an idea of how the tech industry and technology is affecting workers, consumers, and various aspects of our society and our lives. Part of my goal in starting this podcast was to provide more critical perspectives, more left-wing perspectives on technology, because in a lot of tech reporting, we don't see very much of that. It is becoming more and more common, which is great, but there's not enough. And so this podcast was in part a response to try to

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Hopefully by the time this goes live, I'll have something written to explain that a little bit better and I'll update you on next week's show anyway. But for now, if you like the show, please consider becoming a supporter. You can find the link in the show notes. And either way, enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Daniel Joseph. Daniel is a senior lecturer of digital sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He's also written for Motherboard, Real Life Magazine, and Briarpatch Magazine. In today's episode, we talk about video games, their relationship to capitalism, and how new business models are further commercializing more and more of the gaming experience. This conversation is obviously prompted by the fact that new video game consoles are being released this week, the Xbox Series S and X, and the PlayStation 5. We cover a lot in this episode, going from the early days of gaming

all the way through to the present and what might happen in the future, but I think it will give you a really good overview of kind of a critical lens that has been applied to many different aspects of the gaming industry. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. You can find more info about that in the show notes. If you like the show, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it with any friends, colleagues, or on social media where other people can see that you like it. And if you appreciate the work that I put into making the show every single week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Enjoy the conversation. Daniel,

welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to speak with you. We have new video game consoles coming out. And I think there's a really important kind of discussion that can be had around video games and how they interact with like capitalism, commerce, like all of these really big questions. So I wanted to start really broadly in a piece that you wrote for Real Life. You stated that if you look at games, capitalism stares back at you. So pretty simple question to get us started. What is the link that you see between video games and capitalism? So there's kind of, I guess, there's two elements of it. So on one side,

we have like video games are obviously sold as commodities, right? Like they're developed by developers, produced and distributed and sold by production companies and stuff like that. And we have this kind of like massive global ecosystem of like the consumption and production of games. It makes lots of money. Every year there's bigger and bigger sales and stuff like that. So on one side, we've got that. It's an industry, right? Like, you know, it can't be described any other way. On the other side, we have the logics of games. Like if we kind of go back to the origins of video gaming, we have those mostly in the military industrial complex, right? Like the PDP-1 and a lot of other ARPA-owned computers that were tapped into like, you know, university research clusters that were funded by the Department of Defense were the places where some of the first games were made. And so because

those games came out of the 1960s, that's when there's like the United States has this huge, like, you know, the heyday, I guess, of like government spending and the Cold War and all these kinds of things. So we have, on one hand, the industry side of it, the very real industry side of it. And on the other, they're kind of like the origins of this art form at the kind of like some might say like the golden age of capitalism and then what i look at is kind of how those long trends in its origin and also its industrial side continue to play out so like just in the ways in which like games continue to be produced and sold so the labor conditions of the games and like how sometimes you can connect those conditions and and the production of them to the logics that we see in games themselves so

you know competition and earning points and all these kinds of things we associate classically with kind of like capitalist culture are key dimensions of games not all of them i would you know there's lots of exceptions to these rules i think but broadly speaking we can say the logics of the video game industry and video games themselves at a mass scale really do reflect these two elements of its origins under capitalism. And it's just nature as a cultural industry. I think it's so interesting that you describe it that way, because, you know, when we think about the tech industry, you know, it has this very similar story, right, coming out of a lot of this military spending by the United States government and other governments around the of this military spending by the United States government

and other governments around the world, but mainly in the United States, you know, and that eventually gives us the internet and kind of Silicon Valley as we know it today. But it's interesting then to hear you kind of relate video games to that. And as it being an art form that comes out of this very similar history, I guess. And obviously, you know, what it comes out of is going to have an effect on the kind of logics that are then built into it. In a sense, like this is the kind of like classic Marxist argument, you know, like the base and superstructure thing, right? Like if they come out of the base, the industrial origins of an industry certainly matter. But like, and then we get the superstructure, what's the ideological components of games themselves?

And like, it would be foolish to draw like a crude, overly determinist model based on this, but I think it is very much, it's very relevant. And the industry side of that reinforces those dynamics that come out of state spending and military spending. And the quick ways in which those industries supported by the state became privatized in the 1990s, right? as ARPANET became NSFNET. And then it became, and again, I'm not an internet historian. So some of the stuff I might get wrong, but like broadly speaking, that happens. It's its feet in the 1980s with Nintendo's rise in the Japanese video game industry, kind of like saving console gaming.

And then we have PC gaming and Sony and Microsoft and Sega and all these other companies really blow up in the 1990s. And I think it's that dynamic that like they become like very much tied to like profit motive, obviously. That leads into my next question really well. And that is you describe game consoles as maybe not the original platforms, but like some of the original ones that define some of this kind of platform logic that we're seeing play out on a much grander scale today, where kind of everything

to do with technology and the web is a platform now, right? In how they restrict what can go on the service, take a cut out of what comes out of there. So what do you think positioning game consoles as a platform does to kind of give us insight into how gaming and consoles in particular work? The way I normally frame it is this, like, I'm always saying this, gaming is like the canary in the coal mine of capital, right? It's an industry that finds its origins at the death of the golden age of capitalism and the birth of neoliberal capitalism. We get also the creation of, you know, proprietary consoles, right? And a way of controlling IP and data and content in a way that computers aren't naturally inclined towards. Copying

is this fundamental principle of data, at least in open computing is the idea of it. Consoles restrict that, right? One of the reasons that Atari really struggled with their business model early on before they went bankrupt was that people started creating lots of what they called shovelware. They didn't have a proprietary system of becomes the dominant paradigm in console gaming not on the pc but in consoles like an enclosed garden space where like only the approved content can get onto it and that is the basis of their business model for you know from then until now and that kind of comes into conflict with the kind of more open architectures of pc and open source computing and like all the kind of you know sort of libertarian utopian conceptions of computing that define those movements. But we've seen, obviously, I think with the advent of like Apple's like ascendancy, which always had embraced as a

company that closed hyper centralized mode of content control. And this is the kind of platformization argument that David Nyberg and Thomas Pohl talk about. This is their idea of like, we're seeing this logic that comes partially out of game consoles and others of control and of control over digital commodities that aren't necessarily predisposed to being controlled, but now are. one of your pieces, you wrote that in 1991, the Federal Trade Commission accused Nintendo of price fixing, and it settled that lawsuit or whatever. Do you want to like describe what went on there? Basically, the way I remember it, Nintendo was like accused of telling the retailers how they could like price the consoles and sell them and stuff like that. Basically, they were putting pressure on distributors. So as a wholesaler, Nintendo is just like selling them consoles. And then the people selling those consoles normally are allowed to do with whatever they will with them.

That's where you get this kind of concept of like the manufacturer's recommended price or something like that. I think Nintendo really didn't want any distributor of their consoles to undercut, to rob the Nintendos of their value as a high value product. And I think that's when the antitrust legislation got put against them because they were unjustly overstepping the boundaries by which they're allowed to, you know, do that. But then, of course, they said they still had done nothing wrong and then settled out of court.

I'm pretty sure like all Nintendo owners or something like that were allowed to get like a certain payout, I think, and that it was a class action. But yeah, it's basically just that like Nintendo for a long time was very litigious on certain kinds of things. And they continue that trend to this day. I'm not an expert in Nintendo history. But like, basically, that is kind of their specialty is being kind of like leaning on people for undermining their brand and undermining the value that their closed system kind of imparts upon it. I just think it's really interesting, because, you know, you describe that original like Atari, it didn't have enough restrictions in place, I guess, to keep a ton of games kind of flooding on there and whatnot. And then Nintendo kind of like perfects

that model by bringing in the proper restrictions by being very strict on price, all these sorts of things. And that defines, I guess, what we think of as a console today, right? And what the console model really is. Famously, they put a restriction on content too, right? Like they said, there's certain content you can put on Nintendo and there's certain kind of content you can't. And a lot of that related to violence, but that obviously would have played out in any number of themes that they would have thought controversial. So you can see that direct line from economic control to control over content and censorship, like private, like corporate censorship, something that, you know, I think we all need to be very honest and realistic about

is happening constantly. And that's like, we can see that direct line there. So from there, I wanted to go from the consoles to what you've seen kind of then happen in PC and how that model, I guess, was then brought into PC. And, you know, a lot of your work is focused on Steam in particular and what happened with Steam and how it created this platform that gave it, it's not a monopoly, but a very significant degree of control over the purchasing and distribution of games on PC. So can you explain how Steam kind of then evolved, I guess, that platform concept within the video game industry? There's always been alternate forms of distribution,

especially informed by the internet. But also, you used to buy like a PC magazine or PC game or something that used to get like demos of games like distributed on it like a demo disc. There was shareware. Doom famously was a game that was distributed through shareware. You could get a copy of the game and you could play the first few levels for free and then you'd have to mail them some money and you could play it yourself. But the idea of like controlling distribution digitally on PC didn't really exist until Steam came about. And it wasn't that other people hadn't tried to create chisel distribution in some form or another over the years. But the first kind of success story on PC was Steam, just created by Valve, famous for creating Half-Life, picking up Counter-Strike and then selling Counter-Strike, buying Team Fortress as a mod and then creating

that as well. Valve is an interesting company because it's privately held by a few individuals, most famously Gabe Newell, but a few others as well, at least at the outset. And their goal was to make money, but also kind of spend money in funny ways. It's not driven by the board or shareholders' interests. So they take a lot of risks on strange things that would probably be 10, 15 years out from being profitable, but they just do it anyway. And Steam was one of these things that they created

to basically mass distribute game updates to their games like Counter-Strike and stuff. And then it became famously a distribution platform for Half-Life 2. You could pre-download Half-Life 2 before it came out. And that was a really big deal. But what it did is over the years, people increasingly wanted to get on Steam. So they started signing third-party deals with other game companies and stuff like that, because it was the only game in town. They had a lot of servers all around the world, and you could download stuff relatively quickly for the time. And as a result, just because it wasn't originally designed to be, I think, a profit-making vehicle, but had a massive install base,

because if you wanted to play a game made by Valve, you had to download Steam to play it. That became their digital rights management tool, right? Like if you wanted to play an authenticated copy of Half-Life, you had to have Steam that was updated with a username and a password and stuff. So all these kinds of things begin to centralize control with Valve and with Steam. And Steam then kind of became over the years, at some points, was reported to have more than 70% of the digital PC game marketplace, like sales and revenue anyway. So we see that kind of that model of platforms that were extremely closed coming to PC. And then soon it became really the only place you could get most games on a PC was through Steam.

And so they almost kind of like accidented into a monopoly. Like, you know, I think it's still quite large, like their market share. And a money printing machine, because they took a sizable chunk of every sale and revenue too. Because they said, well, we're providing a service. We're giving you server space to host your content on it. When people buy it, we just charge you a fee. And so they've made a lot of money, but it was almost like an accident, I think. I don't think they ever planned to become industry dominant in this way, because that was never... They're not that kind of company, but it is an interesting story all the same. So that dynamic has kind of become de facto the platform for PC gaming, which is interesting.

Yeah. And you discuss another aspect of that, which I don't know, it seems a bit less accidental to me. Maybe they got greedy after having this really powerful platform. But you talk about how then they kind of moved into marketizing modding and in-game objects and things like that against the community's wishes. So can you talk a bit about how that played out and the community opposition that arose to that decision? Yeah, it was interesting. So it became a big flashpoint in the community. So like making mods, just like making like a modification for a video game, often allowed by the video game

company to say like, hey, you can make your own little games. You can make your own art assets and stuff like that. We will tolerate it. We'll let you do it. It adds value to our game over time anyway. So it's no big deal. You just can't make money from it. You can't sell a mod. You can make a mod.

You can distribute a mod. You can't sell it. And often they're community projects. Lots of people contribute rather than one because it's a pretty small community of people. But it's also a place where a lot of early people who want to become game designers often practice game design skills and stuff like that on these things.

So it's quite a vibrant and thriving community over the years. And the game that threw this whole thing for a loop was Skyrim. Basically, Bethesda and Steam came together and decided, like, what if we fully marketized this kind of, like, community-driven project of cultural creation? And we'll start saying that anyone can make a mod, And in fact, you can sell these mods for money now, like you can finally earn a living from being a good mod maker. So if you make a mod everyone loves, like you'll actually make some money from it, it'll augment our game, everyone wins.

What happened though, is because this immediately introduces a lot of problems, like who owns the IP to something made by hundreds of people or even five how do you determine what is an original mod and what's a copy all these kinds of things like become extremely complicated and on top of that a lot of people were doing this because they loved doing it it was a hobby for them like it's something that they were doing because it was community oriented and when this was released on steam they decided like hey mods are now fully marketized we are going to in marxist terms you'd call it like formally subsume something. You're going to like really subject like market dynamics to what was once a non-market process.

And everyone kind of really got really mad. And like, basically, I think the project lasted for less than two weeks. It got taken offline very quickly. And people got very mad at Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve, because he was like, I really thought everyone would like this. Like, people always talk about being exploited in the game industry and we just want to pay you. So like, why are you so upset? It was this very, like, kind of out of touch. Like, they really didn't understand what introducing market dynamics to community oriented social production actually does, which is like a thing that a lot of my research focuses on, which is like kind of at the basis of it, I'm really interested in what happens to like non commodified forms of cultural creation when they are commodified. And this kind of goes back to like the concepts of like primitive accumulation, like in capital and all this kind of stuff. It's the idea of like just taking what was not part of capitalist society and then forcing it into something capitalist. That to me

is a constant never-present dynamic. And so I saw a lot of that. They actually have this now. I think they eventually did marketize these things. They created like a special partnership program. Like all of these things have gone through, but the initial reaction to it was extremely hostile. And I thought that was very interesting. I think what you described is super interesting because throughout capitalism, there's this process of increasingly marketizing more and more of our lives and the things that we do. It's something that I've been writing a lot about things are developing right like when i was reading about it i was thinking about like mmos and how there were obviously like in-game economies with mmos but then increasingly you know you could spend real money to like buy more money or buy objects or or whatever because that produced more of a return for the company right and that kind of a

model has now been rolled out across like more mmos but also in like these multiplayer games that i guess are not really mmos like these fortnights and all these kind of things their internal marketplaces are very much like defined by the the moba model like league of legends of dota dota being the original version like the loot box and the battle pass like find their their origins in Dota, which is a Valve game, right? Like they experimented very heavily with these market dynamics in that game. So, you know, obviously, part of the reason I had you on today is that we have new consoles coming out around this period, Xbox Series S and X and PlayStation 5. These consoles are

responding to trends that are occurring within the video game industry and further helping to facilitate, I think, like a new form of platformization and like new kind of platform oriented business models that are occurring within the video game industry, right? That I think is just a continuation of this longer trend that we've already been talking about. And so before we dig into like specifics of these kind of business models that I think are interesting that are really emerging here, do you have any kind of general opinions about these consoles as they launch? What I've read and listened to about them has been interesting and it has been mostly the divide seems to be mostly based on business model. I've yet to hear much about them being substantially different in power. What we have is like two brands of business model and of game production on Sony. You know, I've heard some people describe it as like the HBO of game development. They have a stable of

extremely talented game developers that are internal to their company that make prestige products. So you know, things like we would associate with HBO prestige television, high budget with important themes or the capital T, you know. So we can think of these as like, you know, the Uncharted games. The Naughty Dog House style is kind of one of the defining characteristics of this.

Ghost of Tsushima was another one, like recently released and quite obviously well-received. And The Last of Us 2, you know, like they took them so long to make that game, but it's like, it is quite obviously uh well received and the last of us two you know like they took them so long to make that game but it's like it is quite a masterful thing so on one side we've got sony and then on the other we've got microsoft which has like embraced a subscription model not only with xbox live game pass and then also the two different tiers of systems you embrace this subscription model because you can buy these systems on credit

so you could get an xbox live game pass and pay like one tiny chunk of your xbox every month for like 30 bucks 40 bucks or something like that you know right like and you get this like with a credit check and stuff so what i see is is like two different business models embodied in this two different kinds of game distribution and production because microsoft has had to figure out what is their value add in the competitive market with lots of different games, but where they haven't developed a stable of prestige products that Sony has. Yeah, I think that's a really good way to position it. Obviously, Sony is a tech company. There's no question about that. That is its history.

But it's also very much a cultural company, right? Like it has a big music company, the film studios, the video game companies, and it does seem like it's approaching it more from this kind of entertainment industry kind of lens. Whereas Microsoft is one of the major dominant tech companies and they are approaching it through more of that tech model, right? And as you say, they are coming as the underdog, the Xbox One way undersold the PlayStation 4. So they need to introduce something new to try to shake it up. And obviously, these kind of subscription and streaming business models are really huge in what tech is trying to do with culture and entertainment right now. And so that's kind of what I want to get to first.

One of these business models that is being presented is kind of the subscription and cloud kind of gaming model where you pay this fee every month and that gives you access to this library of titles. You'd imagine it kind of like a Netflix of gaming where you just pay every month, you get access to these games. Sometimes the games might be removed and recycled, new ones added, all that sort of stuff, right? So what do you make of kind of this shift in the business model from buying games to then paying for a subscription where you can access games as long as you're paying,

I guess, and as long as they're actually available on that service? It's interesting. I mean, it really does mirror the degradation of, I think, like basic consumer rights over the last 20 years. You used to be able to, you know, you buy a DVD and like it was your DVD, but obviously still came with restrictions, right? You've got a DVD and you showed it at a movie theater without paying royalty rights. You know, you could get in trouble kind of thing. So even then, like ownership was still very much structured by IP

and copyright law and all these other things. But at least it was yours or you had a physical copy of it. No one could take that away from you, really. And what we see now with the shift towards specifically like online delivered, like always online stuff, because it wasn't the Xbox that had to always be online. I think it was. Yeah, I think the Xbox one, that was the original plan. Right. Right.

Like it was like, oh, yeah, when it first comes out, everyone was like, oh, you just always have to have it connected to the internet because if it disconnects, it'll just turn off. It'll deactivate your access to the network. I think, obviously, there's workarounds for that now, but for a long time, that was kind of the... And everyone was like, wow, this is such an invasion of my privacy.

And it's like, yeah, you're right. In a lot of ways, it is. But what we have now, even if you buy a physical disc, like if I went out and bought a physical disc of a game that has online connectivity technically i don't own that i've paid for a license to play that game i don't own the game right and this is a dynamic that even with physical media we've lost a lot of those rights if you read the end user license agreements if you do all this kind of like if you just as like a hobby just want to go and read all this stuff, like what do you actually own when you pay for something in a video game, you don't own anything, you own a bundle of like, access to like special features

that the company can revoke at any time that they deem necessary or desirable. Like if you violate their end user license agreement, like if you do some kind of community violation, say, for instance, you hack the game, or you cheat in it, they can ban you from all the money you've spent on it. And it's a very powerful position to be in for these platform companies. So I think they both embrace this dynamic. But Microsoft has definitely decided that the Netflix model is the one that they're going to follow, right? Like it'll be bundled into a $15 subscription where you pay every month and you get access to this many hundred games or something like that. And it'll be rotating.

What you're describing there makes me think of the value proposition for the PlayStation 4, right? When it was competing against the Xbox One, they had that video that made all of the gamers really excited when they responded to Xbox One's press conference by just having a short video where one executive handed a game to another executive and said, like, you can share your games with your friends, right? Like, it's not just locked to your console. And what we're seeing now, even on the PlayStation side, where they do have the digital only console, and I think I read recently that like a majority of the games they sell now are digital anyway. You know, I spoke to Maria Bustios about this recently on another episode related to like the publishing industry and ebooks and stuff like that. But how, you know, all of these digital products, to Maria Bustios about this recently on another episode related to like the publishing industry and ebooks and stuff like that, but how, you know, all of these digital products, you don't actually own them, right? You have a license to play that game or whatever, but it can be revoked

by the company at any time and you lose your rights to anything really. It's funny because like, it's both something I think we all implicitly like, kind of like, Oh yeah, of course. But like, it's, I don't think we spend a lot of time thinking about because like 95% of the time this doesn't affect us. Right. But it is ever present. It's something that's always there. And if you think about just like, what do we own? Like for instance, there's some great researchers, Sarah Grimes, the university of Toronto, like a lot of her research is about what do children own when they make like content in the game, like little big planet or something like that. Right. Like if you use these tools to be creative, like a lot of her research is about what do children own when they make like content in the game, like LittleBigPlanet or something like that, right? Like if you use these tools to be creative, like what is your rights to what you have like, you know, created with the sweat of your brow or

whatever, right? Like there's this kind of like, if liberalism is dependent on this idea that like you labor on something and like you should make something and like that should be yours, right? Contracts and all this kind of stuff determine, you know, like the rational distribution of resources, all these kinds of things. Like in reality, like that doesn be yours right contracts and all this kind of stuff determine you know like the rational distribution of resources all these kinds of things like in reality like that doesn't even exist for most of us even beyond just the the fact that wage labor itself is inherently exploitive like just the idea of like making something on your own time you know you don't really own stuff and playing these things a lot of the stuff we pay for we don't even know that to me is like kind of wild and as much as I'm very skeptical of consumer rights, broadly as a fully complete, like political program or anything like that, I think there's a long history of consumer rights stuff and activism

that I think are actually important. And it's definitely worth revisiting when we consider this kind of stuff, because it is really, I think, I think there's a lot of radical potential in some components of it to kind of think about what is ours and what is the corporate world's i guess i think what you're saying there about like what rights do we have to the content that we make in games is also really relevant to the other major business model that i think they're pushing right now right which is really the rise of video game streaming on like twitch and things like that, where, you know, people play these games for large audiences, you know, obviously, that helps to promote the game. But it also allows these creators to kind of, I don't know, build a business or a following or whatever by by playing video games. But I guess I wonder, when you discussed like Steam and how they kind of marketize

modding and in game objects and things like that, You know, is there any worry there about the way that now we're like marketizing just like the playing of games for people? Like, I don't know if I can really form that into a question, but I'll throw it to you for thoughts. Yeah, we're seeing the very play act itself brought into relations of commodity production, right? And in here, this would be the audience commodity produced by and distributed by streaming services, right? Like, why is Twitch owned by Amazon? Well, they saw eyeballs

they could sell to people, right? They saw data collection, and they saw eyeballs, and they saw ways of making money off of streamer labor, right? Like, hey, people are watching these streams, and people want to donate money to their favorite streamers, because they want to have that direct relationship with them. And then, you know know twitch will take certain percentages of every single amount of money that's like put into the system so there's all like there's the cheer chat badges there's all these things you can like buy to support the greater right but of course amazon then just is cleaning up on all of the 15 30 or whatever the heck they charge per dollar that's put in right so we're seeing like the actual physical act of play and in a way that

like sports have been this is this has been sports right like why do professional athletes make so much money well because their play is televised on television and it's distributed that way and that means it's advertisers want us to pay for the eyeballs of consumers and it's the same thing here we're seeing that dynamic with games that had sort of been done with esports and stuff but esports still hasn't taken off in the way that I think that streaming definitely did, like in a way that I think is really interesting. It also makes me think of like, you know, when we talk about these gig companies and kind of what they're doing by turning people into independent contractors,

and we talk about that being like, in some ways, like a form of self exploitation, because you can work as much as you want. And then they kind of tweak the platform in a way to make you work a lot longer, and then still earn the same amount or less, right. And you have very few rights when it comes to how you perform that labor. And so then when we look at Twitch streaming and stuff like that, I wonder if it's like in some ways, turning playing video games into this form of self exploitation, because, you know, there's always this opportunity to make a little bit more money, the longer that you play. And I feel like I've seen, you know, when it came to like YouTubers, and I think with streamers as well, where they say, like, they just get completely burnt out, because they're spending so much time

doing this stuff in order to kind of make that money, right? You get put on a treadmill of the attention economy. And that's a key thing with like, if you're a YouTuber, you have to constantly be producing content, right? You get to a certain level, and then to maintain that level to maintain those subscriptions to maintain the engagement and to continue to get those like really lucrative brand partnerships and stuff. You have to keep producing content, you can't slow down. And it's the same with Twitch, like there's a really good book called Watch Me Play by TL Taylor. And it's all about her just interviewing and watching people stream and talking about what their life is like, basically, and how money fits into this and the ones that do make it and the ones who don't. make negligible amounts and then it's a handful of very successful but also you know i would say like highly exploited twitch streamers who are like they have to be streaming 14 hours a day sometimes 16 hours a day like just to keep the momentum going because they always need to be

available for whoever is around for them so it is yeah it is very self-exploitative because like ostensibly for similar audiences 30 years ago to get similar audiences you wouldn't have to audiences, you wouldn't have to do that. You wouldn't have to work that much just to get what is essentially like not an amazing salary in all things considered. Like, you know, the ones that are doing well do okay. But it's not like three houses and a Lamborghini money. It's like, you know, maybe you can buy a house and like support a family kind of thing. That's it. Like, it's not a very lucrative career for the vast majority of them. I think I'd want to point out to like, the way that we're talking about it is not to say like, oh, streamers are bad. It's to critique the way that kind of this market has been built and the incentives that are built into capitalism that push people to self-exploit in this way.

And that's the thing. It's the platforms move the goalposts, right? Like that's one key thing about it is that they're very concerned about how to maximize the data production and the revenue streams that are good for them. And discoverability is a big issue. This is something that I think needs to be studied more. And I've written a little bit about this. And there's a few of us out there that are kind of really interested in this idea of like, how do you get seen? Right.

And when it comes to cultural production, that is everything because it's economies of scale. Like you either have an extremely niche audience that really cares about what you do and they give you money for it and like you can actually do okay. Or you have to go for a wide audience where very few people give you anything. Like Patreon says 1% of your audience will give you money. So you have to operate at massive scale. And that means that you really do have to work too hard.

Yeah, like, you know, Twitch streaming is great. Like I could imagine an alternate universe where I would have wanted to make a go at that kind of thing. I love video games, you know, right? Like that's performance. There's a lot of skill involved in it. It's not easy to be an entertainer and it's a lot of work, but it produces certain kind of subjects that have to conform to the system that's built for them, which is like very much like, you know, oriented towards profit maximization.

I find that really interesting, though, you know, like, if streaming had been around 10 years ago, I think that's definitely something that I would have wanted to, like, try to do in that period of my life. Right now, I think it would just be Twitch streaming. And Twitch streaming, like, it's fun to watch people play games that you can't necessarily afford to play. Games aren't cheap. And if you're, like, someone who's, like, got witty banter, wants to play a game that you like watching people play, and you just get to waste a few hours doing that every day. I get it. When you're young, you get a lot of free time. Nowadays, I would rather play a game myself than, you know, watch or try to perform while I'm playing it. But I get it. Yeah, totally. So I wonder, like, you know watch or try to perform on planet but i get it yeah totally so i wonder like you know we've talked about the platformization we've talked about what's going on with steam we talked about how like subscription and cloud gaming is coming

in we've talked about the mobas i think like the fortnite and stuff like that we've talked about the twitch streaming like if we're looking forward the next few years what do you think is going to be really relevant to you know what's happening in the next few years of the video game industry and in particular, like how it is commercializing, you know, aspects of play and aspects of gaming? This is kind of what the last few years of my research I've really focused on is like, after I did Steam, I started working with David Niborg and Chris Young at the University of Toronto. We're a part of this project called the App Studies Initiative. And we were researching the political economy of apps in app stores.

And so what I've noticed and what we were able to kind of understand about that is app stores really are where the majority of the money is coming from. If you look at revenue numbers, like compared consoles and PC games do okay. Fortnite, they have the highest revenue numbers i don't know about profits probably very high because they don't tell us about profits these video game companies don't tell but we have revenue numbers from like third-party organizations that collect this data so apps like app stores and mobile gaming is where all the growth is happening if you look to china where most of their gaming industry is app based the mobile app that makes the most money yearly has been chinese for the last, I think, five years.

Mobile apps are definitely going to become more and more sophisticated. They're going to look more and more like console games. So I think if there's like a growth area, it's in the mobile space. And then it's also the kind of mobile model of battle passes and loot boxes. Games as service, really.

Games aren't just things that are finished. So the Sony model of HBO gaming, high production production value you got to play this one game every year because like everyone's talking about it those will keep getting made they're profitable but i don't think they're the defining paradigm the paradigm of capitalism is like going in one direction and that's like extremely profitable mobile games with lots of little things you can buy marketplaces where you can buy and sell stuff maybe but right now it's loot boxes it's battle passes it's very like consumer oriented it's like going to a shopping mall but it's like a video game like you're always buying and selling things you're always like buying stuff to like keep being able to play the game you're buying dances and outfits like lots of cosmetic items like that's the thing so like battle royale games fit this

very well but lots of other games are doing this too. You know, you can look at Valorant, which is made by Riot, which is their kind of like entry into the like Counter-Strike space and stuff. And it has lots of again, like, you know, special currencies that you can buy to get fancy looking weapons, all this kind of stuff. So that is the growth sector of the industry, I think. And then Microsoft will be able to capitalize on I think Sony will also have those kinds of games too. But I think just in the future, it's just more and more mobile. It's subscription-based services. And cloud gaming a little bit. I think when bandwidth speeds get fast enough, cloud gaming will be a thing. I think for another 10 years, it's probably negligible. But I mean, they already have it. It's already

in a number of places, Google Stadia and stuff. But I think mobile games is just, I think that's the better bet. VR a little bit, but VR is still expensive too. It's growing, but I think mobile games is just, I think that's the better bet. VR a little bit, but VR is still expensive too. It's growing, but I think we're another 10 years out, I think from VR really exploding. I think someone at Sony said the other day that like, they're still committed to VR, but it's not happening anytime soon sort of a deal. Yeah.

And you know, even when you look at their games, they are very much often those single player experiences. But over the past number of years, they have increasingly been building in like the multiplayer modes where they can try to sell you more stuff after you've actually finished like the main storyline, right? Even though that's that's the core of the game. So I think that's really interesting. And you know, I think there are also a lot of issues that come with that, you know, the focus on the microtransactions. And I think what people have described is like trying to build like gambling aspects into games, and how that really takes advantage of people in the same

way that you know, all gambling does when they are constantly buying these like loot packs and stuff to possibly get these new items that they really want, right? A lot of governments have started to regulate that space to China was famously the first but Belgium and a number of other countries in the EU have also started to regulate this. We'll probably see more and more regulation of the loot box, you know, casino dynamics, right? Like when you're collecting and analyzing revenue data in app stores, like basically the most profitable games are your suite of Clash Royales and all those kinds of things, but also like gambling games, or as they call them, social casino games,

extremely popular. And in those games, you you're always winning and yet you're still somehow losing money it's very interesting and so i think regulation like i'm helping a crew of researchers over here in the uk we're going to put together something because the house of lords put out a call for evidence on loot box regulations so we'll put something together around that but like you know and my whole thing is just to be like there's a profit motive here there's a mode of designing games informed by the extreme amounts of profits that are to be made from manipulating people at kind of this micro level that's extremely dissatisfying even for the people who use it i think that's like that is the defining characteristic of games i think right now going forward, this kind of app based box centric microtransaction model. I think you're right. And I think in many ways, that really sucks, right?

Because like, it does, because maybe this is just like my preferences, and I'm like putting them on everybody else. But I don't see how that how that is fun, right? How you need to keep buying things in order to actually enjoy a game and to play a game and to do well in a game. And I think that's really disappointing. I remember seeing a discussion a few months ago about how games have gotten too long and how people would like more curated experiences and all that sort of stuff. But it just seems like we're going in the complete opposite direction of these games where they want you to play for a really long time and to keep spending money on DLC and, you know, new costumes and like all this kind of stuff. Obviously, it serves a function of capitalism, a desire to generate more profit. But again, I think it further illustrates this kind of way that, you know, these commercial incentives are not actually producing things that are best

for us. They're producing the things that generate the most profit. And, you know, it just makes a lot of things in our world worse. And this is just another example. And these companies, like they're not fun to work at, for the most part, like a lot of people that work in the app space. One thing about app games, like because they aren't released on this like tight schedule that's shaped by quarterly reports. But like, yeah, big budget games, like they're driven by crunch, right? Because of these big releases, like Cyberpunk 2077 being the one that's like, it's very bad to work at.

CD Projekt Red right now, because it's like never ending crunch to get out this game. App developers don't really have as much crunch because they just release it and then they just keep updating it over and over. But again, if it's a gamblified game with lots of microtransactions,

all of their money is being made from like basically like 1% of people who just have no impulse control. So it's like, you know, you're like, Oh, your jobs is maybe a little bit less shitty, I guess. But at the same time, like all of you are getting paid by like, basically like exploiting like poor grandparents who like don't understand when they shouldn't be spending money or something like that. Obviously, we've talked about, you know, this long history of how capitalism has influenced the development of the video games industry. And, you know, I think we've arrived at this conclusion that obviously, there are great video games that have been produced by it, but it's also produced these trends that are increasingly negative and are increasingly commodifying more and more of the experience in a way that is not positive, right? So I wonder, do you have any thoughts on what a video games industry or what video games themselves would look like under socialism, like under a model that is not so profit driven? It's a great question. Like, for me, I'm always like, I don't want to predict too much or whatever. What does this look like? Who knows? Like, I think even just under a more

equitable system of production, you you know if we've like dealt with the climate crisis because we do need to think about the environmental impact of computing right you know how much rare earth metals and lithium mining and all these other things is the production of computing hardware ethical and just and sustainable like those are definitely deep questions to ask about computing generally but video games also like you know i was thinking like in 50 years, are we going to think it was such like an absurd luxury to have smartphones, you know,

like, or are we going to have to pare down on that kind of consumption just because of environmental reasons. But I think, imagine like, you know, like co-ops of just like people coming together with a shared vision of something that they want to create and making that.

And that happens now, like more and more game developers are coming together to start co-ops and stuff. But I still think like, you know, it's a stopgap. A co-op still has to compete at a competitive marketplace. They're very much at a disadvantage compared to well-capitalized

multinational game companies, right? So it's like, we see lots of examples of small batch games that are actually like wonderful and beautiful, ask great questions, like have all those standards when it comes to art with a capital A,

like we would think it meets all of those things. A game like Kentucky Route Zero or something like that. Like, you know, these really wonderful independent games, like we do have elements of that already. I think a lot of people would be quite happy to make this kind of stuff. It would just take longer. We wouldn't have crunch, you know, like employees would get to set the pace of the thing they make. I know Paradox just released Crusader Kings 3, and they had unionized very recently. And they said they actually made the best game they could have made because they stopped crunch and they were able to make a safer and more equitable working situation for their

employees and stuff because the employees came together and unionized. And so I think games are like any other media form, right? Like books, films, television, those things aren't going to go away we're still going to want them we're still going to want digital tools to explore ourselves explore the nature of competition and stuff but what it would do is it would end an equitable way of producing game and crunch it would end the kind of like obscene levels of money and time and blood sweat tears that gets pushed into these blockbuster experiences that I think can be quite amazing.

But honestly, I don't think most of the people on them would say it was worth sacrificing five years of their life to it and destroying their family possibly in the process because it was like they had to get it out in a certain amount of time. I think great projects of mass, lots of people, hundreds, thousands of people could come together to work on things, but it would just take longer and i think right now the labor conditions in the games industry are such that like it's quite intense and exploitative and that's kind of why i did you know so much work to kind of like help get like game workers united around like back when that started and stuff like that because i think it was like i think that movement has changed the

the discourse around what working conditions can be like and what the kind of games look like under a more equitable system. You know, I think there's so many more aspects of video games and what's happening with video games, you know, in the industry that need to be explored and that I definitely want to explore on future episodes. And, you know, seeing what's been happening with Game Workers Unite is really exciting. Daniel, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat about this and to kind of fill us in, in this broader history of video games and give us this critical perspective. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate it, Paris. And this was a lot of fun. Daniel Joseph is a senior lecturer of digital sociology at the Manchester Metropolitan University. You can follow him on Twitter at Danjo Kazooie. You can also follow me, Paris Marks, at Paris Marks. You can follow the on Twitter at Danjo Kazooie. You can also follow me, Paris Marks, at Paris Marks. You can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't

Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And if you want to support the work that I put into making this show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.