While I’m only 30, I increasingly feel like I’m in a nursing home, complaining to my grandkids about how things used to be as they lead me to the bathroom because I shit myself.
“Kids, when I was your age, video games used to be products, not services,” I tut. “You’d buy a game and own it outright; none of this DLC crap.”
“Sure, grandpa…” my granddaughter says after cleaning me up. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
Video games were an integral part of my childhood, and I have vivid memories of walking to Target with my dad to buy titles like The Sims 2, Fallout 3, and Mass Effect — all for PC DVD-ROM. After running home and installing whatever I’d bought, I’d then immediately start playing. I owned physical copies of these games, and even if I’d leave them out of their cases, causing the discs to get scratched (as I often did), they were mine.
In the early-to-mid 2000s, series like The Sims began to gradually increase the number of expansion packs they released. While I found this frustrating (as my dad did too; he, after all, funded my gaming addiction), these expansions generally added exciting new features to games. My Sims, for example, went from living in sprawling mansions and perennial summers to apartments with pets, as the seasons changed and they danced at clubs every night. During this era, video game companies — including larger corporations — seemed genuinely interested in making fun products for their customers, and the love for their creations shone through in the final products.
But as I blinked and two decades flashed by, something changed.
While I still enjoy gaming, every title I play today I launch through Steam, which, while convenient, means I don’t technically own my games. Instead, I purchase licenses to play them — something that Valve could yank away at any time. (Amazon did this exact thing to Kindle users when it removed, of all titles, 1984.) My custom-built computer doesn’t even have a DVD drive, and microtranscations from the frivolous to the insulting have infested series as distant as The Sims and Assassin’s Creed.
Often, this desire for profit is evident not just in bloated menus clogged with advertisements, but in the quality of games themselves. While digital artists continue to pour their hearts into their creations, executive boards frequently push studios into releasing half-baked, buggy titles that feel lightyears away from being customer-ready. Series like The Sims have shifted from products to services; from something you purchase once and enjoy to something designed to extract ongoing investment.
Today, many games have entire portions of content locked away, only to be sold back to customers in subsequent DLCs. Depending on the title, players can expect to invest hundreds — and sometimes even thousands — of dollars to play games in their entirety. And while some releases are so abhorrently barebones that companies are forced to grunt out half-hearted apologies, many seem content to screw people over.
Why? Because they can.
As Cory Doctorow explains in his book Enshittification:
Companies don’t treat you well because they’re “good” capitalists, and they don’t abuse you because they’re “bad” capitalists… Companies abuse you if they can get away with it.
Companies like Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, and Embracer Group have been allowed to gobble up competitors, mistreat their workers, and erode trust with loyal players. EA, in particular, stands as a bleak example of corporate greed — the company went from funding innovative titles to ruining longstanding series like SimCity. As of writing this, EA is poised to be acquired by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) in 2026. If the deal proceeds, the $55 billion buyout would give the despotic regime ownership over 93.4% of the company, with the remaining 6.6% going to Silver Lake and Affinity Partners — the latter of which was founded by none other than Jared Kushner. (And notably, the PIF is already a “significant investor” in both firms).
As a longtime video gamer, all of this is depressing, but you don’t have to look far to find other industries where corporate ghouls are living out their wettest, wildest, and most exploitative dreams. Digital design software paywalling color packs; tech giants fighting tooth and nail against Right to Repair legislation; streaming services that now have ads unless you pay more. Enshittification is ubiquitous, and it’s forcing us to spend money on purchases and subscriptions that would’ve seemed absurd just a few years ago.
In protest, I’ve begun making the shift back to physical media wherever possible. While making space for boxes of video games and Blu-ray discs is far from enjoyable, I see it as a necessary evil — I’d rather create clutter than give another cent to the companies hollowing out what we used to enjoy. And while drawing a line in the metaphorical sand feels empowering, it’s crucial to recognize that individual choices alone won’t impact the powers at play. EA, after all, is being acquired for 55 thousand million dollars.
As Doctorow highlights in his book, escaping the depths of enshittification hell will require a combination of four factors:
- A return to staunch antitrust enforcement (something we briefly saw under FTC Chair Lina Khan)
- Strong competition that keeps companies innovating, instead of abusing
- Empowered workers that can restrain executive overreach
- Interoperability that lets us own, repair, share, and do whatever the fuck we want with the products we purchase
We’ll never be able to convince the handful of ketamine-addled sociopaths wrecking society to care about us. Instead, we need to demand it through legislation and worker power. And while things in the United States may seem bleak at the moment (Trump is almost certainly the embodiment of political enshittifcation) the movement to check corporate greed is growing across many parts of the world.
I’ll always be a gamer, and despite disappointing trends, I’ve still been able to find incredible titles that have made me feel like I was a child again, unopened copy of a new video game in-hand. But I look forward to the day when video game companies — and corporations in other industries — are forced to show us the dignity we deserve.
Chandlersweb.net 