Well I’ll be, multi-billion dollar company Epic Games is in the news again.

Hey, remember Jazz Jackrabbit? Fair, me neither. How about Unreal Tournament? Kinda? Okay, well, you do remember Gears of War, right? That sure was a game that lots of people played - like, a shitload of them! Gears was so popular and successful that it effectively declared itself one of the core franchises of the Xbox brand during the 7th generation console run. Microsoft seemed to agree, considering they purchased the rights to the series from Epic back in 2014.

Personally, I was always more partial to Epic’s competitors like Quake (also now owned by Microsoft) and Halo (also also now owned by Microsoft.)

I wonder what ol’ Tim Sweeney and his scrappy little company is up to these days?

Oh.

What the fuck, man?

It feels almost trite to bring this up, let alone make a whole damn blog post about it. The recent news from Epic is yet another terrible story in a long line of terrible stories as the ongoing collapse of the post-2020 video game industry continues. There used to be a time where I would have seen this headline shared across multiple Discord servers the day it broke. That doesn’t happen anymore. Nobody is shocked by this news any longer. Everything has been so shitty for so long that the average reaction to this new round of layoffs seems to be a shrug followed by a “Yeah… Damn.” Just another day in the modern gaming industry.

There’s a whole genre of jokes and jabs that spawned from pointing out how Fortnite has been so successful (re: profitable) that it has reshaped much of the existing AAA-industry in its exploitative image; Everything Is Fortnite.

Failing to become Fortnite means your game has failed, because Fortnite is what is profitable, and being profitable is what matters most. Even if it hasn’t failed yet, don’t worry, it’s just a matter of time before it does: Because it’s not Fortnite. And when your game fails then your studio probably fails too. Next thing you know, you’re back on the streets, looking for another Fortnite to start working on.

Make a new game that is Fortnite? You fail again. Fornite already exists, pal! The only thing you have that competes with Fortnite is your hubris!

Apparently, not even Fortnite is Fortnite anymore.

The nebulous “AAA game” tag has long carried a broad set of growing player expectations with it, like cutting-edge graphics and audio technologies, masterfully written stories and characters, or being stuffed so full of Content that one has to dedicate a full-time job’s worth of play time just to extract every little drop from it.

Simultaneously, a darker and more sinister list of expectations have also evolved, the ones meant to protect or enable profit, and now often do so at the detriment of the gaming experience: poorly implemented always-online DRM that harms game performance has replaced the old lower-tech methods of CD keys and codewheels; Problematic anti-cheat-for-hire solutions requiring more and more access to your personal computer in ways that aren’t acceptable or even supported by some operating systems; And of course, the big one of this era - all of the egregious real-money trading, gambling, and microtransactions that have converted many games from being deliberate and intentionally crafted experiences into marketplaces with a game attached to it. (The ‘micro’ part of that title doesn’t mean what it used to either.)

The venture capital mindset takeover of gaming didn’t have to happen. The alarm was all raised on all of these behaviours years ago, long before they became normalized and accepted. Corporations and investors put the squeeze on their audiences, and those audiences largely failed to respond in ways that would have protected their interests. Now we are all paying their price.

Despite this, I am still hopeful for the future of Video Games™️, even the ridiculous ones that cost one-hundred gorillion dollars to make. I don’t know how we get there from here, but right now it feels like there’s too many dead-end industry landlords like Microsoft and Epic holding way too many pieces of the global gaming ecosystem in ways that are actively harmful to everyone, including even themselves.

I’ve seen some suggest that AAA games and companies are a scourge that just need to go away entirely, that “small-to-medium” sized games made by independent teams is the only future worth chasing. Despite my criticisms of the corporate industry at large, I don’t think that’s the only viable (or even ideal) future. The kinds of people who have the talent and drive to make games at a professional level aren’t excitedly staying up late and willingly putting extra hours on the clock designing the in-game cash shop of their dreams. Serious artists aren’t filling their personal notebooks with hand-drawn diagrams and doodles of how to extract as much money as possible out of their exploited players. (Maybe Tim Sweeney does, but he’s long been disqualified as a serious person.)

That said, I simply don’t see a productive way forward for as long as people still willingly choose to support these giant profit-first corporations that are holding massive swords over the heads of both the people who are actually doing the work to create games and the end-users who have chosen to engage with those works. When massive mega-hits like Fortnite still end up laying off 1,000 members of their staff despite their continued rampant success by all reasonable metrics, then something is clearly wrong here. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone but the shareholders. Sometimes also the shareholders, too - but fuck ‘em anyway. Especially you, Tim.