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He has some points but the main one, mentioned in the headline, is shite.
There are plenty of gamers to go around for just about any game, if it's worth playing.
If we wanna talk about soulless AAA bullshit like live service, or making trash out of a popular existing IP, that’s a different convo. Taking shareholders out of gaming would benefit everyone.
Taking shareholders out of anything would be a benefit.
Capitalism is humanity's second biggest mistake. Honestly, if private businesses disappeared altogether, I don't think they'd be missed.
I don't think private business is the issue. I think publicly traded business is the issue. In a private business, you don't have quarterly shareholder meetings with the expectation of continuous growth, and then shareholders demanding you fuck everything up.
Many private businesses are also fucked up, but so many others work just fine. Many work great, particularly small business or employee owned business or coops or similar.
X is a private business.
Obviously there are a lot of large privately held companies, many of them owned by billionaires, some of whom are very public assholes. Forbes maintains this US-only list (Twitter is 149th and falling): https://www.forbes.com/lists/largest-private-companies/ But, Twitter notwithstanding, most of these giant companies just quietly go about their business. Some of them become conspiracy theory targets (Koch) due to the flex their owners exhibit on the public sphere. And some of this is clearly incorrect in their table (ie: Cargill is not making $1M in revenue per employee -- they probably used US employee count, but global revenue).
Large private companies should be paying more taxes, imo, but are not strictly the problem. Large public companies are evil almost across the whole spectrum. The large private companies don't typically fire 25% of their staff at Christmas just to massage numbers for the quarterly report.
When you look at small companies though (for example, my company is two people, both owners, no employees), I hope you'll see that we're just trying to make a living :)
I was saying that private control of the means of production are the problem.
Imagine your life for a year without visiting a single private business
I wouldn't go that far, but we could benefit with less of it.
What's wrong with live service games? Soulless AAA games tend to be live service, but so are good games. All of MMO's are a live service and many are good games (if MMO's are your thing).
what would you day a good live service game is?
I got slowly beaten out of Destiny by their live service model.
I play Hearthstone, but I've had a full collection for 4+ years now and I recognize spending ~$300/year on a single game isn't for everyone, I also recognize in 5 or 6 years they'll close the game down and nothing will remain, and then in 20 or so years even websites and YouTube videos mentioning it will become scarse.
The same is not true for games like Mario 64, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, even Tetris.
Any multiplayer game will die once its community moves on. Whether it's live service or not and one could argue live service helps prolong a game's time in the spotlight.
Elite: Dangerous is all right. Buy once, no subscription or other crap, really cool in VR. Or World of Warcraft (I played it over 10 years ago, so not sure about now), had a really good time, don't remember any bullshit from the devs.
WoW itself is probably decent but "Blizzard" and "bullshit" are kinda synonymous for many reasons- although the majority are not in-game reasons.
Blizzard today just has nothing to do with Blizzard back in the day
Somewhat agree but I'd argue "today" is relevant to "live service"
Yeah, my point boils down to "nowadays live service games tend to contain lots of antifeatures and bullshit practices", but the concept of a live service game is not inherently bad.
Breaking news! A publisher discover what a saturated market is!
Hey now, Too Many Games is a small convention and doesn't deserve any of this.
A strong, cogent argument can be made for having a wide variety of game developers. I don't see ANYONE saying, "we need more companies like EA, Activision or UbiSoft."
People don't make that argument. But the ultimate goal of any capitalist organisation is to form a monopoly.
Games are an art form like any other, I don't see people complaining there's too many songs or too many movies, and it's easier than ever to make one thanks to all the free engines, hobbyists make something, push it to itch.io and move on with their lives.
To be fair he said it was an 'industry' problem. And the music 'industry' absolutely has the same problem.
Too Many Songs, Not Enough Hits: Pop Music Is Struggling to Create New Stars - https://www.billboard.com/pro/new-music-tiktok-artist-development-suffering/