Phil Spencer blames capitalism for games industry woes: ‘I don’t get [the] luxury of not having to run a profitable growing business’
Phil Spencer blames capitalism for games industry woes: ‘I don’t get [the] luxury of not having to run a profitable growing business’
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He’s unfortunately right
The problem isn’t profitability — it’s that these companies seek infinite growth from a relatively finite audience. The pursuit of a forever-increasing bottom line is what’s killing this industry and why every other game released these days is live service garbage.
Imagine spending $69 billion Dollars on Blizzard and wondering how you can possibly profit instead of just using that money to develop a game worth playing
I mean … He’s not wrong? Games are an art, entertainment. When art and entertainment become about profit and shareholder value ahead of producing a quality and/or entertaining product, they fall to shit.
That isn’t to say that it’s impossible to turn a profit on entertainment, obviously. You just gotta put the product ahead of the profit. And modern capitalism is *really fuckin’ bad* at doing that.
He’s not wrong in the sense every game developers face this problem but he’s wrong thinking that’s the only problem xbox has imo they need to focus on games their fans want rather than spreading into new markets.
Yeah i mean what is so unbearably frustrating is how long the writing has been on the wall but companies and the average consumer just dont care. The former gets rich anyway, how many layoffs have we seen compared to the CEO taking **any** pay cut? And the latter are too preoccupied with the small luxuries and inconveniences of life to care at all about the ever diminishing middle class, let alone actually think critically about their products they consume just to get through the day.
While Yahtzee, former Zero Punctuation bugger, is a bit snide I do agree with him that pretty much everyone who genuinely cared about games and the people that make them already knew this would start to collapse and the biggest culprits will go unpunished while thousands to millions lose their jobs. The soaring prices if game development, corporate greed and the economic strain of just living the life of average person was always going to come to a head. So we will enter a gaming recession and wait for Indie games to once again bail out the entire medium.
edit: Shout out to Skill Up because when he covers massive layoffs, he always mentions the sheer wealth of the people who do the firing.