Casual Viewing
Largely glad the article keeps its focus in the main on this stuff being unusual at the scale it’s done at, rather than ignoring 100 years or so of film and so much weird shit in that time. Makes a nice change to read something that isn’t coming at the subject of streaming with a much more idealised and rosy view of the past.
But, Rob - you might say - what has this got to do with games?
Well, it’s all platforms innit and there’s a lot of cross pollination between what Netflix are doing and what other stores, or nascent streaming services like Game Pass are up to (yeah, it’s been around a while now but we’re clearly still in an early phase of it, we’ve not long left “look at us, we spend big, come play with us” and into less headline gathering games, “come play with them, they gave me money” whispering is out and a more realistic view of what all this is, is in)
In a way, games platforms have been lucky that outside of jangling coins at a handful of big names, they don’t really have to work too hard to accumulate guff. There’s plenty of people willing to throw in some generic keyword dirge, they just need the permission to dump it somewhere and a platform that’s not tended to enough by human hand that lets it float. That’s pretty much most of the big name platforms right now.
For others, it’s all in the scaling phase. All those free games piling up on stores, numbers in libraries going up - these are slow processes to platforms becoming established, to some sort of lock in, somewhere. Whether it’s just your Epic account becoming more valuable or your Prime account having that nice little bonus that makes it harder to give up on a subscription. There’s no guarantees this even works, there’s been plenty of this before now from storefronts and platforms that nobody remembers existed. But anything that potentially tips the scales, even if it takes time, is all part of the deal here.
So, if you’re so inclined to give a shit about this sort of thing, I think it’s worth not just keeping an eye on what established platforms elsewhere are up to but have been up to over the long term. Plus, the article is a really interesting look at how much of what’s being made isn’t for people (I’m fairly convinced the big ticket stuff on Amazon is for people, just that the people are six executives who think that will do the numbers and not the people making or watching it) and as we sit at a point where we haven’t got much time before a handful of big companies ruin everything by flooding it even more with AI slop, it’s worth arming yourself with a bit of knowledge to help find ways to route around the hell world we’re on the cusp of.