The Trouble with the Video Game Industry | Philosophy Tube

[Music] [Music] [Music] you know what that tastes like freedom every year at the open-air Delacorte theater in Central Park New York City they put on a big Shakespeare play sometimes starring a famous celebrity and it's free you don't even have to pass an exam to show that you understand Shakespeare they just let anybody in but there are limited seats so you have to turn up at dawn on the morning of the show and wait in line until the box office opens at noon and maybe you'll get one if you're lucky or if you have the money you can pay somebody to stand in line for you if you really want Shakespeare in the Park tickets then you will presumably pay handsomely for them or bid indirectly so the free market is a way of making sure they go to the people who want them the most if the person you hire to wait in line for you really wants your money they're going to work hard for you and people who don't want your money all that much won't take the job or they'll half-ass it and won't get hired again so you get what you want the person you hire gets what they want everybody's happy multiply that across borders and nations and you have successfully privatized world peace my friend the person you hire has an incentive to do a good job so the quality of the product goes up and not charge too much so the cost stays low and if they really want your money maybe they'll come up with some new way to make it sweet for you like they'll text you updates while they're in line so there's an incentive to innovate as well and the more people they're competing against the more these good effects get multiplied this is what economists mean when they say that free markets are efficient at maximizing utility utility is a philosophical term John Stuart Mill who is a philosopher and an economist wrote a famous book called utilitarianism in which he says that the moral thing to do is to maximize utility for the greatest number of people there are debates about what utility should mean but for now we can take it to mean happiness pleasure people getting what they want and that's what the free market does if I don't like your service I can go elsewhere if you don't like the job you can get another one and that my friends is the sweet sweet taste of freedom and do you know what else is about free market capitalism you don't get ahead by sucking up to the dictator or the king who's in power if you want to succeed you have to earn it by giving other people something that they want you might say that it's perverse to pay for Shakespeare in the Park tickets you might say that it's supposed to be for everyone to enjoy not just the rich but if I want to spend my money on it and somebody else wants to sell their time then it's voluntary and it benefits us both why should anyone stand in the way I say the free other markets the free other people markets don't ask questions they don't make you feel guilty for spending hundreds of dollars on a gold-plated lamb's leather dog collar and leash with customized engravings for instance the only question is how bad do you want it and all that innovation and freedom means that if we compare the average person today to someone living 500 years ago we have a much better standard of living a thing that can definitely be objectively measured 500 years ago nobody had gold plated lambs leather dog collars and leeches but now can you even imagine having sex without one I've made so many videos on this channel that have social or political messages and that's such a downer it's nice to finally make one that has absolutely no politics in it whatsoever the free market is just naturally the best system everything I've just told you is science stop shoving politics into my champagne look at any free market and you'll see people flourishing and happy pick any free market in the world pick I don't know video games the video game industry more than any other entertainment industry operates with as much clunk and dagger as it could friggin muster concealing sales figures budgets revenues profits as much as it can from us only ever telling the truth when talking to the shareholders aka the people they consider their actual customers fortnight is first and foremost a storefront Mario Kaltura's just a more lackluster mobile garbage who ubisoft swarm continuing to slap the name of a corpse onto it's hideous hyper capitalist live service garbage feels like a move specifically designed to annoy me the companies have seen something work and they're going to hump it into an oblivion leaving a trail of in steal and intellectual corpses in their wake [Music] this is a copy of the special edition of Skyrim for the ps4 it belongs to my flatmate and we're both replaying in at the moment he's a Khajiit mage and I'm a high elf sneaky Scouts type Skyrim was released in 2011 by Bethesda a video game company based in the state of Maryland USA the box and the physical disk were made by Sony the company that makes the ps4 they have a sub corporation called Sony dad C with manufacturing plants all over the world but according to the back of the box this particular copy was made in Austria which means it came from the factory in FAL Gao which is just outside the city of Salzburg which is where Mozart was born here's a look inside that factory you can see the room where the disks get made and they printed the artwork on and slapped it in a box and shipped it out to the UK where it probably went to the Sony dad seed distribution center in Enfield North London before it went anywhere else fun fact during the 2011 riots that building was burned down and then they reopened it although for thinking about closing it again next year possibly because there's a move now towards streaming media rather than having physical discs or possibly because Google reviews said they have very rude management most of them inside lazy people still gave it four stars though from Enfield it went 300 miles north to barrack which is a very beautiful town in Northumberland to a cex store which has since closed down where my flatmate bought it and he took it to a he used to live and then took it back down to London where we live now and then I took it to the studio here today the reason I'm telling you all this is that a lot of the time when we talk about videos game we think about them as stories or systems what they're like to play and not so often do we think about them as material things products that get made and sold and if we start doing that then some really interesting philosophy comes up materialism is quite a stretchy concept in ordinary language if somebody is materialistic it means that they're concerned with possessions and money and having lots of stuff but in philosophy materialism has lots of meanings but today's is where we go okay Skyrim was a lot of fun I enjoyed the bit where I got to use magical telekinesis to play basketball with cabbages but this didn't just fall out of the sky where did it come from who made it who makes stuff who owns stuff who has money if we sweep aside the PR what's really going on and when it comes to games there is one man who is excellent at cutting through the [ __ ] if you know him already I'm gonna help you step back and put his work in a bigger philosophical context if you don't know him then you are in for a treat Jim sterling is a video game journalist and a creator and some time professional wrestler best known for his series the gym quiz ition which you can see right here on youtube gov disclosure disclosure Jim and I worked together a tiny bit on a charity fundraiser thing that I did a while ago and he's very very lovely the gym quiz ition has been running for longer and I feel on YouTube which is a long time and I've been watching it since it began you might not think him but I I'm actually the world's most gamer I've gained the lot Derk souls tale of Zelda rad dad's redacted 100% it on rad dad I was in an advert for Australia a while ago with glaive and I only had to look up like half of what the script meant and I like listening to the podcasts and watching the videos because I like hearing what the gaming world is up to and according to Jim there's some pretty wild stuff going down because he doesn't just have his eye on the games themselves but also on the market and he even has a reputation for being able to predict what the video game market will do Jim has talked a lot in recent months about the epic games store epic is a video game company best known as the creators of fortnight in 2012 Chinese media company Tencent bought 40% of their shares and flushed with all that cash epic has been offering developers fat stacks of bills to sell their games on the epic store exclusively since gamers have to go to epic if they want certain games the company is essentially paying to avoid competition even if epic exclusives aren't what gamers want too bad tons of money and with tons of money you don't have to build a quality product offer a superior experience or otherwise give advantages to the end user you just have to have more cash than the others and crush them with it why bother being better when being richer gets you what you want quicker and this is a thing outside of video games - jim has mentioned on his show before about how broadband companies in the US have divvied up the country to avoid competing with each other all of the food that sold in supermarkets in my country is controlled by like five brands there's like six energy companies and this is called the tendency towards monopolies and before any gamers get worried there certainly isn't any politics here we're going to be talking about video games and philosophy and nothing else I'm not even gonna mention Lenin to be honest if you tell people that you've been reading Lenin there's this slightly awkward moment as they check to see whether you are carrying a gun I mean yes he was the most famous counter-strike player in Soviet Russia for a while and you've got to respect the graph but he also had a heated communist moment and team killed a bunch of dudes in concert anyway who wants to read about coal extraction in 19th century Germany when we could be talking about 49 no I actually didn't want to read about coal extraction in 19th century Germany but so ideally a free market means competition better products and freedom for the consumer but what Jim has pointed out with epic and what some philosophers who were talking about 19th century coal predicted is that once a company gets enough money the advantages of the free market can get undermined supposedly it means more freedom but hi I'm Pontius Pilate governor of Judea on behalf of the Roman Empire or as we're now rebranding ourselves empire a content delivery platform for a more connected world and if you're watching this it's because your city your state or maybe your whole country has just joined the Empire family congratulations the story of empire begins with a dream the dream of optimizing relationships between people and it begins with a lot of hard work and disappointment eight months ago my team made the decision to execute Jesus of Nazareth I'm sure you saw the headlines a lot of people had a connection to the Jesus brand and that aspect we didn't walk the line as well as we could have when I got in an elevator in Jerusalem a week later with my security team I noticed that nobody would talk to us nobody smiled and I realized that when you're a big platform you have to deliver value and always err on the side of delivering more value not less more choices not fewer so I came up with the concept of fulfillment living empires guiding philosophy a totally organized community we're all the difficult tasks and the hard decisions were taken care of leaving you more time to choose the life you want to lead and I spoke to emperor Tiberius and he said Pontius you got no chance there's no way you can disrupt something as big as the Roman Empire but I had big dreams just last month he apologized so as we begin the process you may notice some changes as we revolutionize your culture and your government public crucifixions allow members of our family to come together and bond over our shared values and enjoy community and they are really popular so we'll be increasing the number taking place each day as well as allowing you to purchase tickets in advance offering greater choice in seating if you order them through Empire the apps say I will recommend other community events to you that you might also enjoy we're also pleased to introduce new uniforms for all our execution assistance including customizable badges and hoods we want all our family members to feel free to express their unique individuality so volunteer for your local execution squad today hashtag squad goals these are just the first of the changes and I'm super stoked to be working with you guys if you have any questions feel free to visit the offices of your local prefect or talk to one of our friendly security officers you'll find on almost any street corner we our Empire and we're always right behind you Jim also has a bee in his bonnet about games becoming live services the live service model has been adopted by a lot of companies as a way to try and keep making money off you after you've already bought the game rather than just selling you a complete experience a lot of games will now come packaged with a subscription service or there'll be a very basic cut down game with additional paid content later or there'll be full of micro transactions little things that you can spend smaller amounts of money on like cosmetic upgrades to your character or even sometimes outright gameplay advantages micro transactions are big business Activision Blizzard claims that they made four billion dollars in 2017 from micro transactions alone and the majority of that money comes from what the industry calls Wales the small number of players who spend big bucks in these games either because they have the cash and they really want to or because the games are deliberately designed in such a way as to psychologically hook you into spending compulsively and I do mean deliberately designed I know that there are a lot of parents and teachers who watch my show and if you take nothing else from today then seriously I would advise you to go and watch Jim as he exposes the way that some of these systems are made a particularly controversial example is loot boxes mechanics that provide random rewards and can cost real-world money to roll the dice on they use all the psychological tricks and language of gambling unlike gambling are potentially very addictive but in most places loot boxes aren't currently regulated like gambling because you don't play with real money you buy an in-game virtual currency like v bucks or gold or donuts and you play with that and because you can't convert that virtual currency back into legal tender it isn't technically gambling at time of recording depending on where you are basically it's the plot of the villain from rush hour to imagine their business where people hand you money and you hand them back absolutely nothing that's a real American dream the goal of the live service model is to keep you in the game for as long as possible so you encounter as many opportunities as possible to spend money often games are constructed in such a way as to psychologically pressure the player into coughing up the dough a great example would be for tonight again which youtuber Dan Olson has said is basically just a storefront with a video game attached given that most of the world does not use credit cards and does not have stable internet access the move towards always online live services with loads of micro transactions is a bit of a weird one as Jim has said it seems like they're trying to make more money off the audiences they have rather than making new games that reach new audiences and this is a nice illustration of another weird problem that markets can run into in 1866 there was a bank called over end gurney and company who sound like they should have been selling mortgages to build their wagons but they went bust they invested a whole bunch of money in the railway industry and then the railway bubble burst thing is if you invest a bundle in railways and lose it there are still railways people can still use them but that's increasingly not how investment works a lot of companies especially tech companies borrow money not to make anything just on the promise that they will eventually make it back let's take a case study we work we work are an American company that provide office space they dress it up as revolutionising your workplace and bring a people closer together but we're doing materialism remember they own a bunch of offices and if you need one you can rent it from them their landlords easiest job in the world a job so easy you can literally inherit your way into it in summer of 2019 we work was valued at 47 billion dollars now just a few months later they're worth well actually it's not clear how much they're worth but nowhere near that so what happened was that some kind of disaster did the officers burn down no the truth is they were never worth 47 billion at 47 billion which is a little bit of an illusory number it's not real illusory number is false it never happened it's a fake it's fiction it never happened if I'm a CEO of a company and I convinced you to invest a million dollars with me because I've got this great idea that's gonna change the world look at my hard-working team of go-getters on a mission in our swanky offices then I can go to the next investor and say hi I'm a million dollar company look at this great investor I just got lend me two million and I'll make you huge profits and the next investor I can go lend me five eight ten fifty a billion and I can keep going without actually generating any profit we work lost three billion dollars from 2016 on but all of a sudden I'm getting invited on the news to talk about what a great businessman I am and what a fantastic family I'm building 47 billion is how much I think I could get if I sell it but that's like me claiming to be the best gamer in the world because I could totally beat sonic Fox at MK 11 if I really wanted to understand want it and when we worked tried to go public they had to disclose their financial documents and everybody realized that they were full of [ __ ] [Music] your landlords all you had to do is sit still and wait for house prices to rise how did you [ __ ] it up it would almost be funny were it not for the fact that thousands of people got fired and the top guys resigned with millions of dollars in severance packages does not just sour your champers and here's the kicker when over end journey and the other Wizards went bust there was still some railroads but we work didn't make anything that wasn't already there their business model was just owning stuff and charging rent and if nobody wants your stuff or nobody can afford the rent then all the money that was invested in you can just vanish games as live services and disasters like we work and the 2008 financial crash are examples of what's called the rentier economy they get money less by making stuff and more by owning stuff licenses platforms property debt and sucking as much blood as possible from the people using it you'll remember from the start that one of the advantages of free markets is they stimulate innovation and to a point that's maybe true but as the tendency towards monopoly and the rentier economy grow and combine that might happen less and less why bother making anything new when you can get more money by owning the stuff that other people made and I remind you there is absolutely no politics here this isn't Marxism this is something that John Stuart Mill talked about and John Maynard Keynes famous economist and even the Financial Times a magazine that is purely about video games so how come all this happened remember the example with the Shakespeare tickets it all seems so neat and perfect what went wrong and how can a video game critic predict the market better than an executive Jim has talked about some other problems in the video game industry too like nasty working conditions crunch periods companies getting big profits but then firing lots of workers he's even managed to successfully predict that some studios will be shut down and what he's doing is called dialectics really boring philosophy apps absolutely nothing exciting they're dialectics is when you want to understand something so you imagine it as a Unity containing opposing forces like yin and yang Chinese philosopher Loud say he said oh you understand the world you've got to understand yin and yang they're opposing energies there and everything another example would be atoms if you imagine atoms as containing positively charged particles and negatively charged particles that are in tension with each other then you can do chemistry and predict how they're going to react a German philosopher called Hegel picked up on the idea of dialectics and wrote a whole bunch of stuff about it I've talked about Hegel on my show before if you're curious and then some other philosophers whose names I can't remember right now said that's you know society is kind of kind of a little bit like that in a purely philosophical non-political way obviously you know this is like different groups in society that oh that oh that kind of conflict with each other like like a like a like a group that makes money by making stuff and a group that makes money by a by owning stuff some of the problems Jim has talked about might make sense if we think of the people who make the video games being in tension with the people who own them and sell them when they're done a lot of companies like to talk about oh we're all one big happy family and we're on the same team but the dialectical way of looking at things anyway is to say well actually if you work at a company you're doing a very different job than somebody who owns a company and in fact there's some tension there and what's really interesting about that tension is that it's nothing to do with greed or evil Jim does recount the hilarious antics of CEOs in the video game industry people like Randy Pitchford a man who left important work documents on a USB Drive containing squirt porn which he then forgot at a medieval themed restaurant but even if randy was a saint and very good at his job that tension would still be there as much as i satirize them as vampires there are people who sincerely believe that free markets and privatizing everything would be great and that the problems can be contained the philosopher Michael Sandel the guy with the Shakespeare example from the start says that the problem isn't greed people haven't gotten more greedy or selfish it's that markets have gotten into more and more of our lives and that hasn't really been a serious philosophical examination of them in science if a theory can correctly predict observations that's usually a sign that it's a good theory and if it doesn't look like it's working we've got two options one is to say that actually the theory is great but you kind of suck if you're working two jobs just to keep a roof over your head then that sounds like a you problem maybe you should get a cheaper roof or we could put on our compassionate faces and say it's not your fault you can't find your place in the market we just need to make it easier for you to get the skills and education you need to crush the competition maybe you could start by taking out a nice big loan or maybe the theory is the problem remember with the Shakespeare tickets the idea was that they'll go to the people who want them the most the people who'll enjoy them the most the people who pay for them but how much you're willing to pay for something isn't just about how bad you want it it's about how much it costs relative to how much you have if I'm a millionaire with bad taste I might not really give a toss about Shakespeare in the Park but I'm damned if I'm waiting in line all day so whatever I'll give you 100 bucks it's down there and then I might not turn up to the show so the idea that free markets are the most efficient way of maximizing utility kinda has a big hole in it we assumed that people who need money will take the job work hard and innovate but we didn't stop to ask why they might want money in the first place if they have medical debt or legal fees or they're just struggling to put food on the table the market doesn't really address the root cause of what they need and what if the work is so exhausting or degrading that they don't have the time and energy to work hard and innovate because they're just trying to get through the shift we also assumed that voluntary transactions in a market are the same thing as freedom but are they if you work a job that you hate just to make money for somebody whose job is owning stuff then are you free just cuz you can choose what color socks you wear and what to have for lunch I've been at Empire for over 25 years I still struggle with the external perception that were just a bunch of bad guys some people are skeptical and that's healthy but our mission is bringing people together and helping them organize their whole lives more efficiently and I'm proud of the progress we've made we're offering flexible fulfilling jobs protecting Empires community in an internal poll our legionaries reported high levels of job satisfaction and said they didn't feel they needed to unionize in the last year alone membership of our execution squads has gone from 82% mail to just 63% reflecting the diverse and inclusive atmosphere we want our families to have during Pride Month our security officers wore the rainbow flag for the first time and we've invested over 20 million dollars in recruitment to our security services from racially minoritized communities I think it's a small number of people who are stuck in the past I think the average citizen enjoys what we do and gets what needs to happen for a family like this one to exist and evolve and grow we don't need combativeness or divisive nesara litical not capitalist or socialist in the end everybody on earth is just Roman we work hard to ensure that we stay true to our mission of bringing people together and allowing them to be part of something greater than themselves and that something is Empire empire shake hands with the future in today's video we've learned about the tendency towards monopoly and the rentier economy and the financial crash and dialectics and it can be a bit overwhelming this is all really hard stuff and it's frequently very depressing but if you can understand what Jim is saying about video games then you can understand this stuff and once you understand it you can decide what you want to do about it if we were to do a material analysis of YouTube we would quickly see that YouTube are beholden to advertisers if your videos routinely get demonetised because they aren't advertiser friendly like mine do and also they're expensive to make because you put things like musical numbers and fancy costumes in them like I do then even if you're lucky enough to have the support of patrons on patreon like I do you might find yourself a little short one month and have to take a sponsor Nebula is a new platform that's trying to not do that instead of being paid for by advertisers viewers like you pay a subscription and there are no ads some creators have big plans to make original content for nebula and I've got a way that you can try it for free you see some of that original content is being funded by companies like curiosity stream you know them that a subscription streaming service they host documentaries they've got thousands of them I watched a really cool video about parasites there's a fun original one David at Umrah made about ants normally curiosity stream is $2.99 a month but if you go to curiosity stream comm slash philosophy tube then you can get it and nebula free for a month thank you for watching and thank god forgive [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 1,247,255

Rating: 4.8782477 out of 5

Keywords: video games, gaming, philosophy, jim sterling, jimquisition, capitalism, economics, epic games, fortnite, wework, free markets, privatisation, privatization

Id: IYkLVU5UGM8

Length: 33min 19sec (1999 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/callmekizzle]

Video game company employees need to unionize.

[u/[deleted]]

I did not realise this was a topic I wanted to see Philosophy Tube deal with but now I see that it is.

[u/Generic__Eric]

finally, a video about dialectical materialism with no politics or, god forbid, marxism in it

[u/selwun]

Good topic to draw in the gamers.

Workers of the world, rise up!

[u/LivingstoneInAfrica]

Having just seen the video, I really enjoyed it as an examination of the video game industry. What I found most interesting is that segment at the beginning, where a bunch of other pretty prominent channels were shown to be talking about the problems of markets within the video game industry.

I think if you're anything like me, in that you spent your childhood watching lets play videos and then started general video game review shows, you already know a lot of the 'crimes' of corporate bad actors within that industry. A lot of my really early thinking on capitalism was informed by those shows, such as Angry Joe ranting about preorders or people like Boogie talking about EA, and I could go on for hours about the nintendo-let's player controversies. There's a very serious strain of anti-corporatist thought within gaming circles, where I believe a lot of times it's just sort of assumed to be there.

I've since grown a bit apart from that culture, especially in the wake of things like Gamergate, but I think this video is a very good primer who grew up on those review channels, as well as connecting people who aren't familiar with that culture with some of the complexities found within.

[u/Terker2]

I am super interested, he got Jim Sterlings image down to a T in the thumbnail. Jims' criticism of video games has increased to hate of publishers and then even further to hate of AAA games corps and every now and then just blatant flaws of capitalism.

Curious how this will unfold.

EDIT: Perfect outro music.

[u/FiViNess]

Skyrim was released 3 years before GamerGate and it's a game about white supremacy.
Games aren't political at all, mhm, mhm.

[u/JGraham626]

I’m telling my kids this is Todd Howard

[u/Ymir_from_Saturn]

What’s up with the premier thing? I don’t see the point of it