The Business
I’ve always kept one eye on business news in games, being acutely aware that a lot of reporting on the business of games is more sports team bullshit than reflecting reality or completely bizarre theorising that flies in the face of whatever is right in front of someone at the time. It can be a chore to wade through but there’s still a handful of people who, with thinking caps in hand, are really good at trying to prise apart what’s going on.
Admittedly, this used to be easier when the entire ecosystem wasn’t being gutted and the people who would write the best coverage of any layoffs or whatever hadn’t also been laid off. Videogames.
There’s obviously always been an element of trying to divine from entrails to fathoming out what’s going in, it’s kind of par for the course when you’re forever running on incomplete information, having to pay attention to five hundred things all happening at once and whatever else, but the best folk might not have always gotten things right or correctly guessed where things would lead but they reported with compassion for the people within games and a deep understanding of a whole bunch of things most people wouldn’t ever need to pay even the vaguest attention to.
There is, somewhere in there, some logic to things. The why things are done, the potential fallout - good, bad, indifferent, to decisions made. Things you can observe and say “yeah, doing this will mean this is more likely now”.
Wait. No. There was, somewhere in there, some logic to things. To why things were done, a business logic that meant you could see how this stuff would effect the people within games in the future. Things you used to be able to observe and say “yeah, doing this will mean this is more likely now” about things.
It’s in the past tense for the most part now. We are now so far down the shareholder value, boosting numbers to make the next three months worth of numbers show growth, growth, growth hole. The problem I’m having now, whilst reading even the best of the best at discussing and needling at what the videogames industry is and will be, is that even if they’re at their most bang on, it doesn’t matter.
I mean, of course it matters because this is huge, huge, huge amounts of money flowing around we’re talking about, it matters because every decision effects somebody, somewhere and this is people’s lives, people’s health, people’s ability to thrive. It’s always going to matter in all those regards and even more so today.
It just doesn’t matter in any particular business sense with the largest of companies, the platform holders, the companies that solely exist to buy and to own as much culture as they can, because all the long term bets are off now. The system is built on cashing out. We’re all still speculating about the future when the industry at scale is destroying the future a little bit more every few months. Whenever shareholders need more value. Whenever a line needs to keep going up. What is sane, what would be reasonable, what would build a strong business in the long term? It is more likely than ever to just be undone in a couple of months time and the people working towards a brighter future fired. The people doing the work that generates the money in the long term, also fired.
So whatever decisions are made today about what a business could be, whatever people are building, maintaining, supporting, is entirely secondary to making a number go up. We all know that logic is perverse and destructive in the long term but there is no long term, only the next quarter, the next step necessary to maintain the illusion that infinite growth is possible. It isn’t, of course, but you can fudge it, fiddle it, deliver it to shareholders for a surprisingly long time whilst eroding all the things that made that growth originally possible. You can throw an LLM into everything, number goes up. You can sack nine thousand people, number goes up. You can eliminate the console from your console business, number goes up.
Sure. At some point this will collapse but there’s so much money involved, so many lives involved, so many aspects of the world a bunch of mega companies have ventured into, as we’re seeing right now and have been for years now, that just means there’s also a lot of ways of delaying the inevitable too.
It’s angering and upsetting and I hate everything about it.
How are you even supposed to report on this? I suppose you could Ed Zitron it and go off your noggin, seethe at what you see, name the names of the people undoing everything around us and really, I wouldn’t blame anyone for that because it’s all fucked up. Part the reason I’m writing this now is so I don’t go on social media again and lose it into the void at the people responsible for destroying and undoing everything.
How can you ask “what does this business decision mean for Xbox” when the man at the top of Microsoft can, and will, decide Xbox is having an LLM wedged into it somewhere now, it’s going to be a delivery mechanism for whatever nonsense makes that number goes up and they will sack thousands of people just because? I have no idea! But now, whenever I read even the most erudite of commentators, I’m going to be thinking “yeah, that’s nice but what if someone needs a number to go up elsewhere, they’ll just fuck if all off anyway” because you can sack nine thousand people for doing their job well, that’s just where we are at now and it’s completely shit.