The Year of Go Fuck Yourself

So, every problem in 2023 got worse.

I wasn't sure whether I was going to make a retrospective this year. If 2023 was a year in which the games industry was on the precipice of cataclysm, 2024 is the year where everything just barreled off a fucking cliff while everyone just pretends that any of this is normal. Get hyped for the Game Awards, guys! Pay no attention to the incalculable number of layoffs over the past two years or the fact that 'industry-acceptable Good Game' pickings are so slim this year that we're genuinely considering the GOTY merits of the DLC to a game I'm reasonably sure we all just pretended to like in order to avoid hurting Yui Tanimura's feelings. It's fine, just put a stone-faced Dorito Pope up on stage to talk non-specifically about 'difficult times' for the industry while everyone on now-Bluesky critiques how he says it while ultimately doing less than nothing to change the media culture that produced him and fosters his ilk.

I mean, fucking Call of Duty is slapping a shitload of AI art in their games now. The game that Microsoft was fighting governments to acquire. It's the absolute pinnacle of The Games Industry as a commercial enterprise, and they don't give enough of a shit to have actual human beings work on it.

Don't worry about it. The games industry is fine.

At the same time, it no longer feels like it's enough to just respond to this by writing recommendations of games outside the Steam/Ceci n'est pas une Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo ecosystem. I can sit here like "corru.observer was great in 2023, its better in 2024, it's still free and playable in-browser, and you're still not going to play it" because ultimately what does that accomplish besides demonstrating that I, the enlightened blogger, have Indie Cred by letting people know about a cool game they won't play so that they can go 'oh my god, games exist outside of the polished skinner boxes I play to cope with the banality of my fake emails job' and then proceed to keep playing the addictive skinner boxes because they're addictive while swearing that, no, totally, this year will be the year I play The House in Fata Morgana or whatever.

There's games as an industry and then there's games as a hobby. Mobile phones are the dominant platform for gaming, and have been since consoles got prohibitively expensive for the average household around the start of the PS4/XB1 era, but everyone collectively agrees that mobile doesn't count so the mobile gaming ecosystem is utterly divorced from gaming as a hobby. Console developers post Twitter threads turning their noses up at mobile players trying their games at conventions who don't have the embodied knowledge of console gaming necessary to hold a controller 'properly.' Console developers don't think it's a them problem, that a decade of eroding their audience down to the absolute core has produced a generation of people who only interact with gaming through a touchscreen or a mouse and keyboard, it's just that mobile players are stupid, or addicted, or both. They don't want that kind of audience to begin with.

After a decade of publishers cutting off their noses to spite their faces, adopting the monetization strategies of mobile gaming but not their accessibility or low cost of entry or even the fact that mobile games survive and thrive on a model of small development teams and big marketing budgets, the bill for the games industry is coming due. Console gaming is a dead-end in its current form, drawing more and more money out of a declining audience. Paying eight hundred dollars for a box that plays games made by two thousand people working poverty wages for ten years and then gets shut down after six weeks due to not hitting Q2 revenue targets is untenable. Games greenlit during the last gold rush are getting released in this one and closing down as quickly as they arrived, taking their huge studios with them. If VR was dead last year, it's a ghost this one, with every tech company pulling out of supporting their overpriced peripherals after the few people who could afford them thought it was all a bit cringe. Streaming services have been cut down to the bone, with console manufacturers seemingly no longer willing to subsidize the development costs through exclusivity deals.

The next gold rush, if the rumors are true, is to try and colonize the handheld territory after the Switch and Steam Deck proved that there is still a market for dedicated handheld games consoles in the post-Vita era.

I am sure that manufacturers will fail to learn the most important lesson of either console: the Switch is an underpowered machine that consistently gets shit on by the Digital Foundry corner of the hobby because it looks and runs poorly relative to consoles twice the price. It is also hugely popular because it is inexpensive and its limitations are very easy for talented developers to work around, and so there's a dedicated audience of people who otherwise would not be playing console games who own a Switch. The Steam Deck is a beefier but not overly expensive second screen machine for the die-hards, a much cheaper option than buying a gaming PC in the era of parts manufacturers charging leg-breaker prices for a desktop tower. You have the one that sells, and the one for the freaks. Both are comparatively cheap, both are comparatively successful. Historically, the handheld ecosystem has only been able to support two consoles.

To be honest, I'm not even sure whether Nintendo or Valve will learn the lessons of these consoles. If the notoriously unreliable Uncle-At-Nintendo rumor mill is to be even remotely believed, the successor to the Switch is a 'the Switch, but more' machine that might compromise the price of entry and raise development costs through its support for the 4K television sets that are emblematic of an era where even TV manufacture has gotten so bloated and stagnant that 50% of the market belongs to the Samsung-LG cartel. This is a strategy that has only ever ceded Nintendo ground: the SNES handily lost the fight against the Mega Drive by trying to be 'The NES but more,' and the Wii U stands as a cautionary tale that following up a console principally popular with the casual audience with one for the hardcore fans does little to endear you to either audience. Valve are following up the Steam deck with a home console, which will run into every single problem that home consoles currently face, while also likely being more expensive than an Xbox Series S, equally as digital-only, and without the brand recognition among that audience.

At least they've abandoned the 3DO strategy this time.

There's a certain kind of futility to evangelizing the underground. This isn't a defense of gatekeeping, refer to my Drake & Conor McGregor piece from this year for my stance on that, but if 2024 has taught me anything it's that you can't fit a square peg into a round hole. There's people who solely conceptualize gaming as playing the highly-polished experiences on high-end consoles, there's people who complain that they don't like what's on offer there but never want to leave that ecosystem, there's the slop economy of opportunists and profiteers, there's jam games and joke games that flood storefronts with shit mostly for the bit, and then there's people actually making real good shit for basically no reward because everyone else takes up eyeballs and market share.

Speak to anyone who talks about small games for a living (or, more likely, as a hobby) and they'll tell you straight up that it sucks. It's exhausting, it never feels like you're making an impact on the broader culture, and your publication lives and dies without anyone ever really breaking from the discourse-outrage cycle to pay attention to what you're doing over there.

I think, now, that it's because these publications are trying to capture an audience that will never love them back. We're all products of the hobbyist gamer ecosystem, who have all ingested enough of that ecosystem to reject it, and publications aimed at 'bringing light' to smaller games either explicitly or implicitly target the console gamer in the hopes that the guy playing Assassin's Creed N+1 will soon be the girl playing Domino Club games.

That's a lie, I've never seen the cowards in the gaming press cover Domino Club games, but the point stands: you can't try to hurry people along those kinds of personal journeys, and I think we can all be better served by focusing on the people who are actually here.

So, as an experiment, I stopped telling people to try new games this year. I didn't publicize it (like I did with my 'I'm only playing CC-licensed TTRPGs this year' challenge, which got some tabletop developers who don't publish anything under CC licenses but owe basically their entire livelihoods to materials that others have kindly donated to the Creative Commons real mad at me, article on that one incoming), I just kinda stopped telling people to play the games I was enjoying and started... enjoying them. I joined communities around those games and left ones I didn't enjoy being in. I stopped hanging out with people because I thought I saw a person I could like in them, and devoted more time to people I actually like spending time with.

That's not to say I've given up on getting people through the door: I've devoted a lot more of my time this year to making tutorials. I've devoted a lot more energy towards making tabletop games, and social experiences, and diving back into forum communities and personal websites and all the cool shit that never went away but that people stopped paying attention to. I've posted about them a few times, but mostly I've just engaged with those communities, done my part to try and leave them better than I've found them, and stopped engaging with the discourse-outrage cycle outside of, like, posting about sports or albums I like.

I also got a job, which is why this blog hasn't been too active lately. I don't really know what 2025 is going to bring, but I know I'm probably going to be writing about anything but the video games industry. Jesus christ, that place is a shithole. Did you see Elon Musk is trying to get into gamedev now? Have fun with that!

Game of the Year is Soul Reaver 1&2 Remastered.