Games

Gacha gooner game with an in-game item trading economy you can buy into by changing dollars for Gooner Crystals and back again, but the devs take a 30% cut on transactions and the conversion back to dollars is way worse than dollars to crystals. There's also a crystals betting market on what prices particular gacha items will be at some given date.

OnlyFans models can have gachas created in brand deals where they get a cut of the sales and gambling for their items.

the other game they announced is looking like a cash grab but there's no mention of that in the article.

Oh yeah the article isn't any insightful analysis but the comment section is surprisingly great for a gaming site.

Gamergate is what made me quit games.

Games have long since peaked. The days of the 90s are long gone. Good games in 2026 are restoration mods or rom hacks of games from the 90s. People who were around from 1985-2005 had it good.

Gamergate, like most reactionary movements involving dipshit g*mers, try to pin the decline of gaming on the wokes and women. The real reason is the same reason why almost everything sucks relative to before. It's due to enshittification wrought by capitalism.

Gaming once wasn't a masculine hobby at all until the combination of the game crash of 1983, which wiped out a branch of gaming that didn't try to appeal to just dudes (read up on the development history of Ms Pac-Man) and Nintendo aggressively marketing games as "toys for boys" so consumers would buy (Nintendo) games because it didn't have the stigma of being videogames. The infamous horse armor DLC dropped in 2006, and everything got much worse since then.

Arcades, which were a third space for gaming, started to be usurped by consoles and PCs during the late 90s until it's mostly dead. Matchmaking destroyed player-run servers, which had actual communities with mores and communal understanding on how people should act like all communities. I genuinely do not think Gamergate would a thing if arcade third spaces were still a thing.

Arcades declined in the same exact way malls and other third spaces have declined, crushed under the weight of neoliberalism which seeks to turn every person into an atomized consumer with no sense of community. Games themselves turn into SaaS in the same exact way other software have pivoted towards Saas.

And the thing is it's not like game devs back then were somehow purer or anti-capitalist (The original design doc of Diablo 1 had the game devs envision selling game items through real life booster packs like Magic). What happened is that the finance bros eventually figured out how to milk people dry, figured out how to get people addicted through dark patterns (euphemistically described as "maintaining player retention"). There is a big difference between people being addicted to Diablo and people being addicted to some bullshit gacha even if the success of Diablo did pave the way towards the gacha bullshit we see today. Diablo was addictive because it's a Skinner box, and while the original devs might not have intentionally set out to make an addictive game (but note their original design doc as mentioned above), subsequent developers would very intentionally use dark patterns as part of their game mechanics.

The peak of gamergate sucked, but that was a long time ago, and now it's an increasingly irrelevant fraction of weirdos screeching about an increasingly tiny subset of games. Meanwhile, in every cool section of games (retro, indie, modding, speedruns, every niche with ultra dedicated fans), half the players have come out as trans.

Honestly every demographic is going to have loud weirdos like that once it reaches a certain size, there’s tons of games out there that are worth playing by people who aren’t chuds.

true

It feels like you're conflating a couple of things. There are more games than ever, but not of the kind that require high-end machines to run. Those are usually marquee studio releases, and there are far fewer of those per year than there were a decade ago. Most new major releases kind of suck, but I think indie games have never been better, tbh. Also I think microtransactions and DLC have come down significantly from their peak where they were a huge part of single-player games. Now they seem to primarily be the realm of multiplayer/live-service games.

I think the thesis that games are retreating from the mainstream is accurate, (i.e. nowhere near CoD-mania of the 2010s) but the indie scene has never been better.

I agree I mostly posted it because the comment section is better than the article itself. Pretty sure there are some of us doing agit prop on Kotaku lol

I just think it's interesting and a bit hopeful that even the game site comments section are sprinkled with nascent class consciousness and there most certainly will be a crash of some sort with the rate at which hardware and AAA games are ballooning while income is at best stagnant.

When people can no longer afford the bread or the circus things are gonna get spicy real fast.