What's Wrong With Video Games?

It picked the worst time for a commercial “There are some bad bad examples of people who do gaming content who are just s**t people” “Names?” *ad break* “Hello I am Patrick Stewart”

I'm glad Mark finally bought himself some new underwear. Only having two two pairs must have been difficult.

I work in a fringe area of video games (the merch part) and Mark hit a big nail on the head. Once people started realizing how much money nerds are willing to spend on their passions, they started infiltrating the space and making it all about money. A lot of games now have merch in mind when making them or have elements and characters designed specifically around the idea of merchandising them. It's made the merch space unnecessarily competitive and way too focused on FOMO as a method to make money. It's no longer about giving people a way to show off their passion, it's about making as much money as quickly as possible.

Can we give a shout out to these well written intros with the best voice actor of all time

bob looks so nice with beard, i dunno if i have ever seen him like that before

The problem, for me at least, is that now every game wants to be a Live-Service game that has your attention 24/7 playing all the time and playing ONLY that. We need to go back to experiences that CAN actually end

I like how they start with small talk and already, they are distracted...

Mark's right. I've been saying it for several years now. I work with people who complain about games and then go out and buy the games they were just complaining about. How many people complain every year about Madden who then go out the next year and buy Madden AGAIN. Stop making stupid purchases. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Probably not still hunting socks, but hank green has a charity store where all proceeds are donated and they make socks he designed in chemotherapy. Might be fun to try at least.

One thing they didn't bring up is the way the gaming industry treats its creators. The investors and publishers want game development to be an efficient money-making machine, and one specific aspect of that is how they would regularly fire hundreds of workers from studios, then brag about "profit" because they didn't have to pay those workers anymore. Then they would go through a rehiring cycle for the next game, and this has been a thing they've done for a long time. More recently, this has also led to the big companies losing their experienced developers and artists, the people who have been developing games for 10-20 years of their lives, and replacing them with people who have no experience whatsoever--and sometimes, no passion for games, only a desire to make money and "well since games are popular, this seems like easy money."