When I was little I wanted to be Italian REALLT badly bc I loved the movie cars and specifically had a crush on this fucking THING
Which doesn’t speak English at all, all it’s line are in Italian and it’s name is GUIDO. And everyone knew I was obsessed with Italy in elementary school but they didn’t know why bc I, even as a young autistic child, had the sense to know this was a rightfully so, highly mockable thing. So I would read about cars on IMDB and then one day someone posted a crackfic on the message boards there and it was about this guy getting drunk and beating his wife, and it snapped me out of my fugue long enough to realize how absurd wanting to be Italian was, but then it made me cry really hard and my parents were like ‘hey what the fuck’ and I didn’t have the chutzpah to admit anything so I told them I saw a naked lady online and then they went into the computer and found all the weird south park midi songs I downloaded on lime wire and I thought they were literally going to kill me for about two weeks.
The reason I was downloading South Park episodes and songs on limewire and frostwire was because I was also obsessed with Kenny McCormick and for school we had to make a shitty little website about a world issue, so I found this free platform that doesn’t exist anymore but it was like a horrible little wix site from the mid aughts, and we based my groups theme on global warming. But when we were done with it I repurposed it as a perosnal site and lied about being a voluptuous blonde 19 year old woman who worked at a fictitious restaurant called the lunchbox, and I just wrote about how obsessed I was with Kenny McCormick and my sister found it and was like what the fuck is wrong with you. But she never told my parents. She also found this 80 page story I was writing about buddy the elf and all my weird skater ocs breaking into the moulin rouge, and at one point I was sick of buddy so I had a herd of buffalo trample him in the middle of a city and it was very tragic but jarring and unexpected. And she referenced a part of the story to me and it made me SO fucking paranoid that I wiped our entire, family shared packard bell computer and got in huge fucking trouble for it.
Marvel’s Avengers is a premium priced game with microtransactions and battle passes per character that are 10 bucks each, alongside special skins for clients of Verizon and other companies, while the game itself runs terribly in the beta. Square Enix seems to ignore all of this and tries to convince us the monetization system they’ve implemented is “fair”.
Ubisoft’s been ignoring reports of sexual harassment and abuse for YEARS. The culprits were not even fired, but given the chance to resign honorably. Meanwhile they claim their games are not political, while also using BLM imagery in their latest game’s trailer while the movement has been exceptionally present in mainstream media the past few months.
Activision-Blizzard has fired over 200 people after a record breaking year in which their new CFO got a starting bonus of 15 million dollars, their CEO makes more than 40 million dollars a year and its staff gets paid so horribly that they can’t even afford lunch in their own cafeteria.
EA’s been recycling the same sports games with the same bugs, glitches and content each year while charging the same price for it. They’re refusing to acknowledge the ultimate team modes in these games as gambling, while the number of stories this year about how many people have gotten addicted to buying FIFA card packs have only been growing.
EA, Activision and 2K are going to charge for upgrades for next-gen if you buy a current-gen copy while Microsoft has created a system on Xbox Series X specifically so that publishers wouldn’t have to charge extra (CDPR is not charging for a next-gen version of CP2077 for example), even though most of the changes will only include performance upgrades. Basically it’s if like you’re playing on PC and they’re charging you for a higher performance setting.
This is only a summary of what has been happening in the past 8 months. Triple A games are no longer games designed to be games, but money-making machines dressed up as games. Games are designed around monetization, creativity is no longer the standard in this landscape. And honestly, I’m so fucking tired of it.
So this post blew up unexpectedly (since it was mostly a personal post) and I wanted to add the following:
The working conditions at the companies I named in the original post are reported to be horrific, with stories of crunch and regular 100-hour workweeks. Rockstar boasted about how their staff working 100 hours a week shows their “dedication”. BioWare overworked their staff to the point that several of them had a mental breakdown. Game studios still try to convince their employees unions are evil. Buying the game nonetheless for “the developers” doesn’t help them; the money doesn’t trickle down to them, that’s a myth. All money that you spend on microtransactions and season passes goes into the pockets of already rich executives.
This being the standard in entertainment isn’t an excuse to not call it out and try to change things for the better. And actually put your money where your mouth is! How often have controversies in games led to any less copies sold? Not very often. If you dislike a company’s practices, don’t support them by giving them more money and thus showing them what they’re doing is okay. Hell, buy a used copy on console if you really want to play it, PC users have other…”methods” to get the games they want.
I’m not trying to ruin anyone’s fun or trying to “cancel” anyone. I’m merely asking people to be aware of what game companies they support. Make sure to inform yourself on what goes on inside these studios. Sure, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, but I do think that if we all tried to support games and studios that are at least more ethical than the absolute dumpster fire that are triple A game studios and their executives, we might at least have a chance of changing something for the better.
Did you know that Fall Guys is the very first “Strand Type” battle royale? It was so good that Shigeru Miyamoto, famous creator of Crash Bandicoot, said that he’s basing the next Call of Duty game on this masterpiece. 10/10.
