The transition of gaming from a nerdy, niche hobby to a mainstream multi-billion dollar industry has led to this cycle of destruction taking hold all across the board: studios founded and run by creative people with a passion for games get bought out by the money side of the business. The creatives get pushed out, and what's left is a money machine to be bought, sold, and inevitably destroyed by the higher-ups in the larger tech industry as a whole.

A good rule of thumb, simply stay away from any public traded companies

Infinite growth is unsustainable for every industry. Those AAA companies think they live in a perfect utopia. They just hated the cyclical nature of life, the way things are.

One of the worst curses you can put on someone is to wish that their hobbies become mainstream.

To quote South Park Minister: "And so in conclusion, the successful premium game is based on five principles: entice the player with a simple game loop, use lots of flashing cha-chings and compliments to make the player feel good about themselves, train the players to spend your fake currency, offer the player a way to spend real currency for your fake currency-" Prince: "So they'll forget they're spending money." Minister: "-and make the game about waiting. But let the player pay not to wait. It's a surefire way to make lots of money." Phillip: "We understand micropaying, but can't the game hidden inside the charade it- just at least be fun?" Minister: "No no! It has to be just barely fun. If the game were too fun, then there would be no reason to micropay in order to make it more fun." This episode came out in 2014 and was likely made to make fun of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans but it even more relevant now

It's all a side effect of video games skyrocketing to become the biggest entertainment industry this quickly. You get a lot of money men that see games as nothing more than an investment.

I'm not saying all of the blame is on the consumer because it isn't, but the only reason it's gotten like this is because people keep buying games that do all of this. I implore anyone who does this to realize there's decades of games that have already released that you can enjoy right now and a good amount of them you can enjoy for next to free due to price drops and sales. Ask your friends about older games they like, maybe seek out other peoples favorite games of their childhood or titles you already own but never played. Give more games a chance especially ones that respect your money and time.

Laying off Tango has the same energy as when a math teacher tells you have the correct answer (Hi-Fi Rush), but you didn't follow the formula exactly as he wants you to (No microstransactions) and thus is giving you a 0 on the assignment (Laying off)

Business should be about the customers and employees. Not the investors and executives.

One thing - the "vote with your wallet" mantra doesn't work and never worked. The publishers today are targeting specifically people with a gambling addiction and western gaming whales with a lot of $ to burn (I was called "just mad and broke" for telling people that buying a scalped PS Portal is nonsensical with the handhelds we have available today, and I literally sell these electronics and had a PS5 and VR2). One of these people pays for.. what? 500+ of "normal" players? You can't win against this.

Well....i went into indie games back in 2012, and modern news tells me i made the right choice. only getting company games on occasion when a worthwhile one shows up. indie is cheaper and free of various issues these companies have. and i have plenty of fun.

The killing off of Tango was so pointless and out of left field. It was a studio that actually had people's attention and interest, and whatever game they came out with next would have instant free press and popularity.

At this point, I'd rather play games from the 90s and 2000s

that is insane... they claim they want smaller prestigious games yet they close their only japanese studio which did nothing wrong and produced a hit?? someone explain this to me!

First of all I genuinely can't wait to see the corpos try to create a game that is just raw AI output. It's going to be fucking hilarious. You ultimately need skilled humans to make products comprehensible, because AI cannot judge or curate its own output. It doesn't have reasoning to determine whether something is unplayable or not. You don't need to check out of games entirely, just check out of AAA games. They're not interested in making fun games anyways and more ex-AAA employees are going indie and making real games. Let the big blimps crash down in a big fireball, because games themselves aren't going anywhere. Support more indies.

I find it ridiculous that people who don’t do something, weasel into that something, then destroy it for people that actually care about it and walk away with the decades of effort and profit that went into the thing to begin with. How many of us has had that cousin who comes over, screws over the entire dynamic of your house, then goes home and says he never likes being at your house anyways and he only comes by because he wants to play with your toys instead of his.

Thank god that studios like Fromsoftware are still around makinh great games without any monetization.

There are *solutions* Encourage for more and support Independent studios. No Shareholders. - Worker owned - staff have more control over their work - better direct relations with consumers (gamers) - support open source/public domain over corporate I. E. Godot >> Unity - Push for public funding to upstart businesses. - investment in the company and staff within NOT the stocks. - in the long run Workers can and will get more earnings. - games will be made for gamers by gamers not shareholders.

This might be the most Eloquently written video I've watch all year. Keep up the amazing work!

Hi-Fi Rush is a little indie-like beat-em-up with a short campaign, they made it a Game Pass exclusive for over a month. No surprise on it didn't "turn a profit" on paper, it all went to Game Pass! They axed the goose and smashed it's golden eggs in sacrifice to King GaaS, yet were surprised when the corpse didn't keep laying golden eggs.

You just voiced exactly all the reasons I haven't played a single new 3xA game on my own since 2017. This is also one of the reasons why I keep a bunch of old computers and consoles, I love my NES and my Genesis , they just work, you get what you get, no microtransactions, no day 1 patches, no ingame gambling (besides actual gambling games), it's perfect. Mainstream gaming is in the final stages of enshitification, it's a fact.

A huge reason we’re seeing mass layoffs now is because of the exorbitantly high amount of people hired and studios merged during the pandemic which was always bound to fall back down to normal meaning a lot of people suddenly became redundant

cigman returns with another great video, i'm glad i wasn't the only one who saw major red flags when publishers started mentioning integrating AI into video game production

I feel like you’re looking at the 80s and 90s industry with rose tinted glasses, as there were plenty of shovelware games intended for grandparents to buy and tie-in games with a guaranteed minimum sale quantity despite everyone knowing they sucked. That said, loot box and season pass addictions are definitely more exploitative than quarter-sucking arcade cabinets; but the difference is one of degree rather than of kind. I don’t know if I’d ever agree there was a true symbiotic relationship between publisher and customer. Especially given that when cartridge games were the norm, the console’s company exerted more influence on the games than in the old Studio System of Hollywood! It wasn’t quite pure vertical integration, but it was close with yearly maximum quotas and so on; it wasn’t until CD-based systems came along that developers had the freedom to set their own game-content goals and production quantities. From that one could maybe argue the late-90s and 00s were the only truly competitive market, I suppose. But that newfound freedom for developers and publishers also led to even more shovelware, and slightly-tweaked re-releases with a little bit of changed content. (The latter of which annoyed many people even more than DLC adding 20-50% on the price, because it would be the price of an entirely new game or even slightly inflated for the special edition! In fact that’s part of why people reluctantly accepted DLC in the first place!) The practice existed before CD dominance, just look at all the Street Fighter 2 editions, but CDs made sure every publisher could join in if they wanted to. But yeah, your analysis of the late-00s DLC era leading into micro-transaction hell is definitely accurate. Most of this video is a perfectly scathing and accurate analysis of the current industry. I just think there’s a little too much nostalgia in the intro.

I've previously worked in games so I can shed some light on the rampant monetization which is happening right now. Game studios 100% know what percentage of players will buy micro transactions. If everyone actually banded together to reject this shit price gouging it flat out wouldn't exist. It really is that simple.

It's funny that you show a clip of arcade games as an example of the good ol' days. Back then many arcade games were designed to be extremely difficult to force you to spend more quarters. I hate the degradation of the AAA space too, but in concept its not anything new. The 80's crash happened because corporate greed lead to an avalanche of cheaply made games that suck, but now it is kind of the inverse- an avalanche of overly expensive games (in production costs) that suck. At the end of the day it's more of the same. The 360 era was great, but a bit of an anomaly. Besides there are tons of amazing games coming our every year, more than ever, they just aren't AAA games from major publishers. The indie scene is churning out so many bangers that it's impossible to keep up.

There was a lot of Truth in this video. And he did not shy away from pointing out that consumers are also to blame.

Fantastic video. I went back to school in 2011. One of the last times I could still be considered a "gamer" was around the release of HALO: REACH. By the time I eventually got a job as a game tester I barely recognized the industry. Everything had some kind of bizarre table top card game aspect to it and was RIFE with micro transactions and scumbag DLC. I might be an old man but for me, pure oldschool gaming died when the war with the Covenant ended in Halo 3.

Gaming is the only industry where you can double your investment and still be considered unprofitable by your superiors

Video games will never die even if the AAA Studios fail us. We will just want games enough eventually to learn to make our own. also known as Indie gaming, which is consistently better than most AAA games not that there are all bad AAA games, some Triple AAA modern games are legendary (Helldivers 2 kicks ass) but the ratio of good AAA games versus the bad AAA games its clearly favoring the bad side compared to Indie developers, which favor community, driven gaming passion projects, most of the projects are always quality.

Chilling stuff, and hard to fix. We could, as gamers, start supporting the indie game developers to the exclusion of the AAA publishers, but that is hardly likely to make the publishers sack _fewer_ people or _drop_ prices. Gravity is a law - what goes up must, ultimately, come down - and the present pricing and gouging is unsustainable, but there will be a lot of collateral damage while it corrects. Arguably there already is.

Great video, friend 👍 As someone who has been casually gaming since my childhood in Nigeria, i am very fascinated with the history of the industry and hobby. I mainly started with the PS2 in 2006 and only recently did i build ny own PC for gaming. I have come to hate the new phase of excessive monetization in the industry a d mainly stick to single player games😢 Hope things get better

Its only a matter of time till game publishers force updates on older games to include adverts and the only escape will be a 1.0 version on disc. As well as relying on soneone to mod them out of a decade old or longer game.

opens a portal in a fantasy game, sees a crystal cervesa Comercial before im allowed to step through

Remember, It is always moral to pirate AAA games.

I wonder why a company like Microsoft wouldn't try to at least sell off a studio like Tango, when they don't want them anymore, instead of just shutting them down. They could at least make some money back that way... and an existing studio with a great creative team would not just be destroyed.

In the immortal words of Mighty Sterling, Corpos don't need to make money, they need to make ALL the money

It hurts to be around during the 360 golden age just to see what the xbox brand reach new lows.

3:59 This is actually untrue, in regards to Nintendo. They still have some people employed that have been there near the start of them shifting to video games, and the reviews of the company from previous employees is actually 90%+ positive. I cant speak for any other publisher, but Nintendo is actually a great company to work for, apparently.

In my opinion instead of lamenting the death of the suicidal the gaming community should focus on the preservation and optimization of old games and emulators, the translation of untranslated games and the support of indie games. They need us not the other way around.

Bloody hell you know there’s stagnation when someone coins the term “yesterdecades”. 😂

Nice to see Lyle finally achieve CEO of sex status in the thumbnail

Bro couldn't wait for Xbox presentation

great video! love the use of smt music + sfx a lot lol

People blame "the industry" and not the system. It's the system that's broken.

The top shareholders who are also at the top of *every* publicly traded major tech/gaming platform pushing for these in-game ads/stores to buy real merch from in-game, predatory monetization, avatar-glopping, AI game development, merging game and social media, per-game subscriptions in addition to account subscriptions, is something that has been tested already for a few years on another platform. One that showed the shareholders so much promise that they decided to shift other platforms they control to that same testing model over time. Roblox. I kid you not. The success they saw on that is behind the direction you are seeing other gaming platforms take. The testing and platform shift of Roblox went largely unnoticed but not to people who develop and play on the platform. If you want to see the investors' vision for the future of gaming, look at the platform they've been testing it on. Its insane.

I’d recommend the book _Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business_ if you want to see where these practices and methodologies came from.

Companies learned that games don't need to be fun to make money.

i wish people had my mentality of never buying something from a game that you already paid for, you went to a concert, you paid the ticket to enter, then you pay more for shirts and for food, but at least on a concert you can take the items that you brought back home.

💯Strangulation, Stagnation, and general enShittification. It's never been about the cost of making games, and always been about exploiting people that make games for the profit of the elite few.

Love your videos.

Love the use of cruelty squad soundtrack towards the end. Very fitting!

A mass unionization drive in the industry would be the final nail in the coffin, not a path out of the darkness.

It is not enough for them to have profit. They must also have infinite growth. Like a cancer.

The issue isn't companies being too greedy, and they need to slow down their greed to make better games; the problem is the profit motive itself and how it destroys all forms of art and entertainment.

hell yeah ciggy love your videos as always

Fantastic video !!:))

dragons dogma isnt "riddled with microtransactions", yes it has them but the player still has a complete and finished game. Capcom uses this monetisation strategy for all of their games. in DMC, you can buy every single type of orb in the game but there is more than enough in the main game so you dont have to buy buy anything. Its the same with DD2, you get a steady supply of RC throughout the game, and it is used to hire new pawns (many of which are free) and it can also be used to get some other cosmetic items that dont affect gameplay.

AA, indie and old games for me for some time now - no AAA for a long time now and I've never pre-ordered.

I'd blame the casuals /whale gamers. No one else to blame tbh Mobile games set the rules for these and they follow

*ORGANIZE, UNIONIZE, SOCIALIZE* the games industry, until then this corporate greed will never stop.

I am 42 and feeling this for a few years now! Big money got involved milking every pixel we see, it has taking most of the fun out of it for me, I used to be able to play 5-6 hours a day having a blast, now days go by where I'm not even bothered to play at all because you get confronted with all these paywall and chronic online bs screaming for your dosh and attention.

Great video

Well written, you have earned a sub.

I guess the only solution here is for corpos to not support game development then and just leave everything to the studios to somehow make it big themselves.

spot on! I also laughed at 10:04 and couldn't agree more. Thanks for the video

My theory is that the costs of production and distribution of a modern AAA game has outstripped the profitability of a $60 game, thus forcing them to resort to services and microtransactions. In that case they need to lower their scope and shoot for AA to be more consistantly productive and profitable.

This is why I consider myself semi-retired from gaming and whatever gaming I still do is mostly regulated to daily physical/mental training and playing with my esports team. These days I’m more into manga and anime, and I’m trying to come up with my own stories!

If you really think that introducing advertising into games isn't "patricularly objectionable", you should reflect deeper on how advertising in public spaces affects the mind. It's literally pollution and brainwashing. I live in Europe and the trend is actually to remove advertising from public spaces. There is scarcely any allowed in my city, and I can tell you it has been doing wonders to my psychological wellbeing.

Great video.

great vid, u got a bright future on youtube

One of the few things you won’t regret in your life as a gamer, is buying a modded retro console.

At this point, i think playing an old Play Station game with a split screen is way more entertaining than this shit, i remember how my brother and i would fight to select the best and coolest looking character, and even fought for who gets to use the freshest controller, i think thats the real nostalgia not the featuring characters that fornite does

I remember playing a game named Zula in my childhood (and i think its still up and running with players) the game had very predatory monetization practices and questionable design choices for example the loadout and gunplay mechanics of call of duty but with the movement (and many game modes) of counterstrike and almost all of the weapons were behind a paywall with the free weapons being garbage and the weapons weren't bought, they were "rented" meaning that you used real money to use a weapon temporarily and it had most of its maps ported from call of duty or counterstrike with a paint job

Nice video. U deserve more subs

Very good video

I got an ad for a gambling site midway through this video

can Some one Help Me With Name of the 3 Game after battlefield Clip 40 Secs into the video ?

I'm just glad key sellers exsist if i really wanna buy a new game, which rarely happens nowadays. I dont see a point in forking over 70-80 bucks to a company that wont use the money to improve game quality but rather puts it in some overpaid Ceo's / shareholders pocket.

I'm not tryna play no indie games they just don't do it for me that's why I play the good AAA games because I like my games with a little money behind them with a great story, graphics, gameplay, and voice acting. I'm not interested in playing games that look like they were made on a $10 budget.

I am just glad Nintendo keeps on making quality games and don't fall into this never-ending trend.

The cherry on top for me was getting an arknights ad after the end of the video

Honestly, with how much gigantic the big three are, I doubt the coming VG crash would be enough to get rid of them.

Well, I did check out, sadly the gaming landscape is not what it used to be. I recently jumped into Action Figure collecting, mainly Figmas, and I've been quite please with the stuff I've gotten so far.

The root issue of why our favorite franchises and devs have degraded can boiled down to the average consumer. We constantly complain of these scummy practices yet eventually give in and purchase the game, or whatever microtransactions. We're basically telling these devs and publishers that what they're doing is acceptable and they will make money regardless of public opinion. I've had this sentiment for ages and it feels like more people are finally beginning to realize how bad things have gotten in the gaming industry. Blame publishers all you want, blame the devs, blame the shareholders, the CEOs, but it's ultimately us, the consumer, that is to blame. We vote with our wallets and until the larger scene of consumers realizes this, things are only gonna get worse

Do anyone recall time when Humble Bundle was released with Trine in it? I recall people playing it on KZfaq for reviews and many was like "Holy crap, its beautiful, why do we need AAA with this indie devs?". And i still feel same way. Yes, there was a lot of new developers joining hype trend, a lot of crappy sloppy made indie games for quick buck, many underdeveloped products(good idea and intentions, underwhelming execution), but goddamn its still better then those battlepass microtransaction boolshit.

I’m just glad indie games are doing very well their are a lot good indie and double AA games like helldivers 2, roboquest, risk of rain 2, deep galactic and ultrakill.

I think I finally get the whole point of armor core now

I've had this feeling this state of the industry will end like a forest fire. All the horrible things about modern triple a gaming will reach a boiling point. It'll get ugly, but maybe something better will come out in the aftermath of it all. I'm not sure if I'd call this optimism or pessimism, but I do get that feeling things are gonna go through an almost sort of reset once shit hits the fan. I could be wrong though, so who knows really.

Anything can be addictive if you give an addict enough time. Smoking was made to be addictive, but intelligent modern people realize it’s unsafe and don’t do things they know are built to be addictive especially if they know they have an addictive personality. Every idiot knows many of these video games are built with predatory practices, it’s your job as a consumer to not be a total idiot and have some standards and brain. It’s up to adults to act with responsibility and standards, and If they don’t have standards then tbh it was all our faults that we allowed society to erode and brain rot to this extent, our morality has fallen so ofc standards have too. I hate people infantilizing adults, if companies are making money off dumb people ok, people have been slowly getting dumber and dumber we all know this was bound to happen. Focus on supporting indie games and other games worth supporting instead of trying to force these companies to make games they have no creative interest in making anymore

You mean, the corporate strangulation of anything that promotes freedom of enjoyment and creativity.

11:46 You bet I am, Game. *Selects Suffer and Die*

corporatism is the death of all art

ciggy-san can you make a video about the 1947 film "Out of the Past" starring robert mitchum and kirk douglas

Ultimately many of the old games are still playable and many are in better shape than modern games. They can also expand (if they received an influx of players) to accommodate large player bases. So play some quakeworld or unreal tournament.

No one is talking about the proliferation of extremely well built affordable handhelds coming out of china. Why buy a 100 dollar game when you can get a reliable polished system with decades of games for the same price.

Profitable ENOUGH, that is the key word, because is never enough for a industry that seek profits in a predatory and irracional way, following a virus mentality, that only stops when the host is dead, then search another one to repeat the process!

4:57 Technically, there were ads for it. Saw Xbox Game Pass ads on TikTok featuring the game. In some, it was the first thing you saw.

Finally, a gaming channel that sees the real issue

Business suits entering any industry is always the beginning of the end of said industry.