Recently, many issues involving the sheer nature of capitalism (crunch, speculation, slave labor) have creeped into gaming discourse. They have always been there in material terms, with things like CD and console manufacturing outsourced to countries with less humane labor legislation, but thanks to a crescent economic and climate crisis, we are able to talk about it in terms that are closer to our understanding.
And more recently, we have witnessed even more of the greed that fuels capitalism, with Sony and Apple both trying to make more money off the competition in a very transparent way. For a long time, the corporations have openly screwed over the workers, through surplus value and neoliberal working conditions, but now they are also screwing over the consumers in an obvious way. There are not a lot of venues for them to make more money, so they need to charge more for the games, or (god forbid) diminish the scale of the AAA games.
And heck, even with indie games, I have to worry about the working conditions because nowadays indie is just an accolade for "smaller company". Look at Aeon Must Die and how development went. And when smaller studios aren't shamelessly exploring their workers in an obvious, they are doing so by turning value into profit for the higher-ups. And even when it is an ethical team, you still have to worry about distribution. Devolver is apparently pretty cool, but what if the game is published by Steam, or Epic? It's very hard to escape from the act of giving money to billionaires, unfortunately.
Would you be OK if all these big companies had to be downscaled and turned into cooperatives? Without the fetishism of giant gaming conventions designed to make money, would you still be able to enjoy smaller indie games with not a lot of hype or crunch behind them? Would you enjoy a clean, ethical supply chain as the norm?
I'm saying that in a very small scale, since it would be really hard to abolish the current system in a global scale
How do you know that? Have you tried? Why wouldn't gaming be bigger than ever without capitalism?
Jaxon Evans
Yes it is and no i'm not going to read your blog.
Isaiah Smith
Late stage capitalism is destroying everything, the real question is, why would you think gaming is special in that regard?
Dylan Wright
>How do you know that? Nigga, the Soviets tried to ban Tetris and didn't see any value in its creation, the guy who came up with it was criticised for being unproductive and had to get into contact with a Western company to get his creation out to the world. >Have you tried? Nigga, think about it. How on Earth would dismantling a system built around pleasure and consumption benefit an industry that is centered on pleasure and consumption? The only thing that would come from that is inferior, smaller products built as small passion projects instead of catered to the tastes of the masses (however poor that taste may be). >Why wouldn't gaming be bigger than ever without capitalism? Because the very concept of a gaming industry is capitalist
Austin Foster
People made and sold stuff long before capitalism, and how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that the only possible replacement for a broken system, is another even more broken system?
Brandon Jenkins
Before capitalism, people weren't using huge amounts of time, money and resources to create products exclusively for the pleasure of the masses.
Josiah Myers
Right, theater and music didn't exist. And nobody ever played games of any kind.
Xavier Morgan
why do communists still think they're relevant in a world where the means of production were sent to china decades ago and the left will never bring them back?
Kayden Carter
No.
Julian Mitchell
In a post-capitalism world, economies would have to be centrally planned. Video games have no value to the state and therfore have no value in centrally planned economies. Video games were enabled by the excess wealth and motivation of free market economies. Unless post-scarcity is achieved, video games can't exist without a market to support them.
Joshua Lewis
they're the lowest of the low and the most easily manipulated sucks, or actually so naive that they think "government will be good this time!" and ignore the fact that it always collapses into a dictatorship in a decade or two
Elijah Clark
user, name one such large-scale endeavor that required the equivalent to tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars to make at 2+ years of development that was funded by a national governing body.
Jeremiah Anderson
communism only works in a post-scarcity society communism in a scarcity society only """""works""""" if the entire planet is forced to operate under communism via the threat of violence and death
Michael Peterson
People make better shit in capitalist systems because there is an incentive structure built in. Capitalism isn't foolproof and it has problems, but in broad strokes its way preferable to living in a system that can't figure out how to put bread on your plate. Look at consumer American cars in the 80s vs Soviet cars from the same period.
Levi Gomez
So the government is making video games now?
Oliver Thomas
Again with the capitalism vs communism shit. I guess expecting anyone here to be able to think any further than that was naive.
Nathaniel Baker
>how do you know? Have you ever heard of the Gaming Crash of 1983?
Dylan Wood
China's government is
Kevin Campbell
Games need someone to fund them you moron. You can't make something out of nothing. You need to pay the employees, pay or the equipment used, pay for any other resources, pay for the advertisement, pay for the software distribution. If private companies aren't gonna fund games then who the fuck is?
Benjamin Carter
Soooo redditards basically
Jaxon Jackson
if a communist government started openly funding video games it would mean the country is about to collapse because of communist fuck ups literally the circus part of 'bread and circuses' to keep people entertained and not actively revolting
Angel Cox
Capitalism is destroying everything, including your games, your community and people in it. Capitalism is no better than communism, they just use different tools to enslave you. Remember that those two are not dichotomy, they are very similar outlooks both built on globalism, materialism and anti-nativism. And lately, they've been merging into one vector.
I'd rather follow my Capitalist overlords than live in your Socialist shithole.
Nathan Reed
Don't justify your ideas, they're limited by the mind they come from anyway. I was thinking about this while playing Doom Eternal: it's an honest game, generous in what it offers to the player, but it somehow tries so hard it leaves an unpleasant feeling of being too big for the simple hardcore shooter it is. It contrasts with the microtransaction fad of the rest of the industry, so much it ironically fails to be perfect. A system is not better than the other, you're still in the Cold War mindframe because you're American and that's how your government sustains itself, by making you think everything happening right now was written in stone because your system was the one to eventually make others fall. Industries aren't capitalists in essence, they're domains of production. You would wake up at 10 and work 'till 4:30 rather than 8-to-5, it would still be the same industry. What could change are the wages or amount of people working in it.
My thoughts on the issue are that the big companies will eventually back down on their cash grabbing tendencies and the indie market will continue to thrive. We're just at the crossroads where some big gaming workers are sick with the ways of the industry, and indie developpers are starting to make more money and better games thanks to a growing and loyal consumer base. It's just time passing by, old market spearheads are getting older and cynical and young talents are aware of the bottomless pit.
Now I realize you're just waving your communist ideas like a helicopter, but that's because you're a faggot.
People like OP don't actually give a shit about the state of gaming they just want to spread communist ideology. If capitalism is the problem and communism is the solution where are all these great works of art coming from cummunist countries?
Kayden Cooper
Video games only exist because of capitalism you retarded nigger.
Joseph Brown
Soviet Russia had some dope composers. They were also constantly under threat of being un-personned if Stalin didn't like a given piece though.
Angel Long
tl;dr
Lincoln Rivera
Some systems are naturally better for certain things than others. There's a reason socialist and communist countries don't produce much in the way of hit TV, film or vidya. Video games are fundamentally capitalist since they can only truly thrive in a free market.
William Rodriguez
Just don't complain when they replace you with spics, indians or other cheap imported scabs after you demand raise lmao. They all do that, open borders is inherently capitalistic measure existing to destroy any leverage in contract negotiation that workers have, and modern "leftists" supporting it as basically main political goal only shows that boundary between two things that subhumans like you consider opposites blurs more and more.
Short Answer: Yes. Long answer: Art shouldn’t be made for profit, period. At best, you can get commissions, but selling art as a service or as a mass produced product leads to creatively bankrupt and manipulative work. Games in general are more susceptible to this because they are capable of being addictive, and decrease gray matter in the brain. Of course videogame devs incentivized to profit benefit from a dumber consumer base that buys anything they make
Jeremiah Price
Globalism is ending though. America's navy is the only thing keeping the trade lanes open and neither side of the US political spectrum wants to maintain it because it gives the leg up on China.
Luis Smith
Capitalism is an abomination as is Communism. You can all hate both because both suck. Democratic socialism is also pretty awful as is American Libertarianism.
Big guys with lots of money will never let the worker have a good time. Post-war America was a brief blip before they set to work sucking up all the cash.
Ethan Martin
Art is worth whatever the fuck the the market says it's worth. If one party is willing to buy for a Picasso from another party for $3 million, then that painting is worth 3 million dollars. If a million people are willing to buy a game from a company for 60 dollars, then that game is worth 60 dollars
Luis Russell
>How do you know that? Because everyone is busy starving. Did you get the new game out of North Korea or Cuba?
Juan Wilson
>Art shouldn’t be made for profit, period This is the ideal, isn't it? But guess what? An ideal is an ideal because it isn't reality. The majority of what we now consider to to some of the greatest artists in history did so with the intent to sell their art for profit. You think just because Vincent Van Gogh lived and died in loneliness and poverty that he's exempt from this? He tried so very hard to make money with his work; he simply failed to do so.
Art shouldn't be made for profit, you say? Any "artist" who says this is either a hypocrite and a liar, or is living in misery and poverty. The true fact of that matter is if that if something didn't bring food to the table, most people wouldn't do it.
Luis Baker
>open borders is inherently capitalistic measure not really. communists oppose sovereignty and the nation-state. open borders is a leftist policy.
Benjamin Wright
Stupid capitalist. They pay those prices to launder dirty money. Your stupid money worship ideology lets these people do criminal actions whenever it’s something business related
OH ITS OK THEY REMOVED YOUR RIGHTS ITS A COMPANY NOT GOVERNMENT HAHAHAHAHA CUNT
Isaiah Brown
Post war America lived like that because it would have been unacceptable to have population that looks to USSR as land where common men are treated better, so standards of living had to surpass it. Now that it's gone, nobody cares because there is no big hostile power that can attempt to gain foothold in proles' heads.
