Video games are a relatively new form of art-entertainment when compared to competing industries like film, fine art or music. As we enter the first time period where forty year-olds have grown up gaming, so too has the video game industry evolved. Gaming, now more than ever, has fully embodied its profit-motivations and gaming has taken on a new character. One we’ve seen occur in every other sector that capitalism has touched.

Now this is not to ignore the idea that gaming has always been perverted by capitalism. Of course, like any industry in the capitalist mode of production, where there is profit motive there is exploitation and capitalist tendrils. However alongside ‘no ethical consumption under capitalism,’ any good Marxist would tell you that capitalism is useful to a point. It is the late-stage nature in particular that exacerbates capitalism’s ails. Long gone are the days when gaming’s biggest capitalist exploitation were coin-operated arcade games meant to squeeze quarters out of Billy at the laundromat in his quest to defeat Shao Kahn while Mom bleaches his undies.

No, gaming’s capitalist perversion is far different now. If you’ve read Society of the Spectacle, and if you haven’t I encourage you to do so, then you may know this story already. As the industry has matured we see more attempts at capitalist exploitation. More efforts to invent revenue streams and extract profits from gamers, in ways they hadn’t before. More methods by which companies can piecemeal content for greater profit margins than they’d previously been unable to accomplish. Lootboxes, battle passes, forced online connections, day one patches, day one DLCs.

It wasn’t long ago that games came complete. You’d buy your disc or your cartridge, you’d slot it into your console or computer and you’d play it. And you could play that game in its entirety from the moment you sat down. If there were additional expansion packs or sequels you could do the same thing, buying them and coming home to play them. However, we see an increasing trend of day one patches and day one DLCs. Where companies force games out under tight windows in miserable working conditions to meet investor deadlines. Games come out broken and missing even core functionality under the pressure to meet the release date. These developers are given less manpower and less time to meet tighter and tighter targets as capitalism demands more ‘efficient’ production cycles.

A game like No Man’s Sky promised a nearly incomprehensibly large universe but instead of taking the time to incubate that vision, were forced to rush the product to a poor release. Luckily, Hello Games has since taken the time to dramatically improve the game through free content updates. But one wonders if the game would have been released in a far better initial state had they been allowed more time to meet their own goals. 48 months later, No Man’s Sky is a game that meets 80-90% of the vision it had set out during development. Four years after release and it finally is up to snuff. A far cry from being able to buy the disc and play what was promised.

While No Man’s Sky isn’t the first game with this sort of problem of overpromising and underdelivering, Spore is another famous example, it is emblematic of a set of problems becoming more and more common as the industry seeks to make as much money as possible from the least effort as possible. Largely gone are the days of video games as an artistic form of expression with profitable upside. Embedded firmly within the public consciousness for a decade or more and well outside of the niche it once filled, video games are similar to any mass market commodity. No longer are gamers ‘outcasts’ or ‘nerds’ existing on the fringe of social consumption. It is commonplace for people now to have a favorite game, favorite console or even favorite Twitch streamer. To capture the profit of this mass industry means mass appeal is needed, means the least controversial approaches are needed.

This doesn’t mean games were always purely artistic and noble endeavors. Of course they weren’t. But the problem is worse over time. Despite more technical power than ever and more money to be made than ever, games release in buggy states on a regular basis. Quality control plummets as games more and more release with a morass of major bugs. The increased technical possibilities and bigger design teams due to higher budgets hasn’t led to less buggy games. In many ways it has led to the opposite and gamers have taken notice. Games rushed out quickly with promises to fix them with quick patches is comparable to car companies knowingly rushing out vehicles with defects because it will be cheaper to fix them through recalls later. The horrifically buggy Fallout 76 is the video game industry’s Ford Pinto.

Downloadable content (DLC) used to go by a much different name; expansion packs. The ease of electronic delivery these days has lowered the bar on quality extra content. You used to be able to boot up a game and unlock all of the content through the gameplay. Today, Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man is a rarity in that regard. It was the case you could unlock secret rooms, new weapons, new suits, new skins etc. by completing challenges within the game. Or perhaps discovering cheat codes that would unlock things like “big head mode.” But with the move to faster internet speeds and permanent online connections, it is much easier to sell this content as piecemealed extras to consumers. $5 for this pack of character skins, $10 for this gun pack, $12 for this special game mode. All things that used to be free and for no other reason than to extract additional profits for things that used to come included.

Not all DLC is bad. Again, it used to be the case that 6 months after release, one year after release a developer would release an expansion pack for some amount of money. This would be something you’d buy in addition to the base game to provide yourself with extra content. Developers would need to do it this way because they’d use the profits from sales of the initial base game to fuel the development of the expansions. Some games still do this today, like Dark Souls, Skyrim or Crusader Kings. These models, I’m generally sympathetic too. DLC is not inherently a bad thing. But companies have taken to also releasing ‘day one DLC’ locked behind more expensive collector’s editions or just as additional purchases. Content that comes on the disc or in the download but you can’t have unless you pay more than the sticker price. Content that took time in the development of the game and is available at release just not for the price you’re paying, presumably the price to recoup the development costs.

Worse yet are free-to-play games (F2P) and games-as-a-service (GaaS). First we would release a game that had everything on it and people would buy it and play it. The next step was to release a game with some rough plans for future expansion content and then use the profits from the initial sales to fund an effort to develop an expansion pack. Then the next step became to release games with expansion content already built in but locked behind paywalls. From there developers would produce games that’d lock expected features or features that were previously free behind paywalls. The latest step is to release a game that costs nothing-at-all but that’s because the product isn’t the game anymore. The product is you.

Games like League of Legends (LoL), Valorant, Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO), Arena of Valor (Honor of Kings), or Fortnite dominate the gaming landscape. Games that cost nothing upfront but still make heaps of cash. They do so by hiding cash making schemes throughout the game. The most common of these are lootboxes in which ‘skins’ that change the appearance of characters or items are locked behind a gambling system. A skin is worth some amount of $$$ expressed in in-game currency. Sometimes these are directly purchasable. A skin costs 1000 crystals and 1000 crystals can be bought for $10. Other times, and increasingly so, these skins are kept in lootboxes which cost x-amount of in-game currency. So you purchase the 1000 crystals for $10 and then open the lootbox which randomly selects a prize for you that is often times less valuable in real dollars than what you spent to open the box. Of course the hope for you is that you use 1000 crystals to get lucky with a skin worth 10,000 crystals.

While some games let you resell these skins (CSGO, DotA 2) most do not. They hold no value. They cost you real life money to obtain and cannot be exchanged for that real value within the Terms of Service of said game. The game and the gameplay is secondary to the skins. Of course the gameplay has to be compelling enough to keep you around so that you are interested in gambling, but that is the extent of the gameplay. For League of Legends or CSGO, the game itself generates no direct income, the cosmetics do. Even worse that in a game like League of Legends, a multiplayer game in which you and a team of other players select characters to go against another team of players and their selected characters, the core functionality is locked behind paid features. League of Legends of course touts that every character in the game can be earned for free, and while this is technically true in order to do so you’d need to play for hundreds of hours daily for almost an entire year to accomplish that goal. If you’d like to buy them outright the total cost is over $1,000. The core gameplay is locked behind an otherworldly amount of money in the video game industry or an otherworldly time investment just to get to 100% gameplay accessibility. Hardly free-to-play in any reasonable sense.

Let’s say you do manage to do this. The game and gameplay is still secondary. These games make money from monitoring your behavior and selling your data. Collecting data on when you’re most likely to play, your geographic information, your favorite playstyles and characters. All of this can be sold to advertisers and other companies who then will use it to pitch you products. These companies then actually make money from the products of your labor. What was previously leisure, playing a game, is now an action that produces a commodity (your data) which can be sold to other firms without including you in the sale. You are entitled to no profits of your labor-time. The ultimate capitalist goal. This encourages even lower effort on behalf of the game developer. They simply need to maintain a Skinner box that rewards you with serotonin through exploitation fooling you into spending more than you ever would have on a comparable one-time purchase video game. League of Legends, a free-to-play game, has made more money than the entire Grand Theft Auto franchise (one-time purchase video games) and World of Warcraft (a monthly subscription to access). While League of Legends is a multiplayer-game in many ways comparable to Chess or Go, it has unquestionably less content than GTA or WoW.

Games today give you less for more. Development time spent on day one DLCs instead of expansions. Day one patches to fix bugs that couldn’t be addressed under a crunched development schedule. Franchises like the EA Sports Madden NFL series removing features only to resell you them as-if they’re new to the series (or never re-adding them at all). A return to the fight for console exclusives to procure an edge in the console wars with Microsoft in 2020 adopting the strategies Sony employed in the late nineties-early aughts. As companies need to fight for ways to extract increasing profits from an increasingly competitive and crowded marketplace the consumers lose as quality wanes. Guy Debord outlined similar behaviors in television and cinema, nearly 60 years ago. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall reaches all industries and while there’s a lot more blood to be squeezed from the video game stone this trend of less for more will only increase.

While there are still some ‘good guys’ out there employing lesser degrees of capitalist exploitation, they will eventually be forced to succumb as well. Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA) is the main competitor to League of Legends and despite offering all of its characters for free alongside a much greater graphical fidelity, it predictably lags behind LoL significantly in profits and revenue. DotA innovated the now famous battle pass model and while it has been lucrative for DotA it had a reputation of being far less ‘greedy’ than the battle pass models in games like Fortnite. Even with that said, DotA’s battle pass is under increasing scrutiny for upping its exploitative nature as it is forced to compete with less scrupulous firms in the same market. CD Projekt Red, the beloved developers of the Witcher franchise, are also guilty of employing increasingly exploitative strategies to compete in a capitalist market despite their previous opposition to such behaviors.

Capitalism forces the same trend in all industries. Extract as much as possible while providing as little as possible until those lines virtually meet. At which point crisis occurs and the market is violently reset. The oil bubble, dotcom bubble, housing bubble, tech bubble etc. It is a cyclical nature irrevocably connected to the contradictions within capitalism that lead to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and to the production of what is profitable instead of what is needed. With competitors like Google Stadia and Amazon Luna developing on the horizon you’ll see new ways in which companies will compete to offer you less for more. In the race to lessen the apparent costs to the consumer these companies will gain higher and higher profits until such point that the costs can no longer be lessened. And costs will then rise across the board. Quality will decrease across the board. Your experience will get worse and worse. Just like new movies, an endless litany of sequels, prequels, reboots and remakes, are now locked behind $15 a month subscription services to be watched on your phone or laptop screen instead of a $7 ticket to be seen on a 50 foot movie theater screen with chair shaking surround sound, video games too will see similar trends. Costing you more to play for less content in less convenient circumstances with more bugs and more gambling.

I hope I’ll pull the ability to save my game, but that’s a 5-star move and it’s only got a 0.1% drop rate. Oh well, what’s fifty more dollars?

-debord