Current Events > This just in: Adam Conover is still a moron

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https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1489701253806362625?s=21

This is the dumbest shit I have ever heard

Who?

Turbam posted...

Who?

@Turbam He did this awful show called Adam Ruins Everything, basically he thinks hes the smartest human being on earth, and hes really not

does that not seem like a legitimate concern to you? it certainly seems like one to me

How is this dumb?

averagejoel posted...

does that not seem like a legitimate concern to you? it certainly seems like one to me

@averagejoel Microsoft buying Activision? Not at all, its actually a brilliant move

AlBundy33 posted...

@averagejoel Microsoft buying Activision? Not at all, its actually a brilliant move

yes, from the perspective of microsoft, it probably is. adam conover is not talking from the perspective of microsoft though

Adam has said dumber, like claiming people who play mobile games would sit down and play a 20 hour console RPG because "Games are games"

Ummm....that's definitely a legit concern.

Not saying it's for sure what's gonna happen, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

I'm not gonna comment on the guy because I don't know or care about him, but the centralisation and monopolization of game development is a genuine concern - especially when you look at what was happening under Activision and EA before the Microsoft buyout.

Think of all the development studios and intellectual property Activision owned, only to scatter the development teams to the winds to work on resources for "tentpole" releases like Call of Duty and refuse to develop new games for classic franchises outside of mobile games, DLC or other avenues aimed at monetizing nostalgia.

Look at how games have gone from microtransactions to always-online singleplayer games to live-service games to NFTs/blockchain games - games are taking a path where monetization is more important than fun games with innovative features and player agency, and we've seen that progression over the past 15 years with the way Activision and EA acquired so many resources, introduced so many new ways to monetize full-priced retail releases and overtaking the movie industry in profits generated.

I used this example yesterday - the story of Microsoft acquiring Activision-Blizzard is a decades long story of a small fish getting eaten by a bigger fish, which gets eaten by the biggest fish - only for that fish to be devoured whole by a megalodon. The monopolization of gaming under one mega-corporation - and I use that term because Activision-Blizzard was already a significant conglomerate of hundreds of companies, as is Microsoft, turning their union into arguably one of the most far-reaching tech companies in the world - risks the acceleration and reinforcing of even worse anti-consumer practices, because without competition, Microsoft could use their unparalleled presence in the gaming industry to push through whatever standards they want, regardless of public outcry.

Think about the release of the Xbox One, where not only was the console going to require an online connection at all times, but the Kinect was going to be a requirement to using your system. They were going to kill secondhand games by making game discs single-use licenses, meaning that when you bought the game and inserted the disc, it would download the game and render the product code on the disc as fulfilled. Even now, with game discs being keys to access digital games, you can still resell them and share them with friends - and one reason Microsoft backed down on this was because Sony took the opportunity to kick them while they were down and state that their physical games would be free to work on any and all PS4 consoles.

When you don't have a competitor who can honestly compete with your business, you essentially have license to do whatever the fuck you want. Imagine EA's live-service push, where they arbitrarily decided that offline singleplayer games were dead and live service games like Anthem were the future - but instead of fucking up their own internal studios for a few years before backpedaling, it's an industry-leading company that's big enough to force through whatever standards they want as an industry norm. It's like companies like Facebook pushing the metaverse as Web 3.0, forcing the redundancy of the old internet in favor of an endlessly sanitized, corporate space where everybody lives and shops under intense surveillance - imagine that, but it's NFTs or it's bans across multiple online games because you were caught using an exploit in one game.

That's not a guarantee of course, I'm not saying the sky is falling. But when you look at how the gaming industry transformed under a publisher-driven wave of acquisitions and internal monetization schemes in the past, leading to full-priced games offering $100+ in-game transactions as accepted and highlighted features, you can see how the further centralisation of game development under an even bigger company than those former publishing giants can pave the way for something even worse if that company were to shed any sign of consideration or restraint - which, in an environment where money has shown to be king time and time again, is much more likely than perhaps we'd like to think.

So basically what I'm saying is that independent of what this guy is saying, the monopolization of the gaming industry under a single company - whether it be Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook or Sony, or any other company on Earth - is a significant issue that people are going to have to pay attention to. We've already seen the ethical standards of game publishers hit record-breaking lows in the past 10 years alone, let alone other tech companies that are making significant pushes into the gaming industry to capitalise on a multi-billion dollar boom that's happening right now.

When you put a majority of the gaming industry into the hands of one business, enough so that they can push through whatever standards or trends they want, the potential for abuse becomes exponentially higher along with the amount of influence and control they have in that industry. The centralisation of game development under Microsoft is not good news, nor would the news be any better under any other company, and we need to keep an eye on this to ensure that the next ten years won't see a further level of price-gouging, surveillance and anti-consumer practices that already plague the gaming industry today. Because when you have a juggernaut corporation who can define industry standards with the amount of influence their presence has in the industry, their word has the very real potential to become law.