Why have video games become so terrible in recent years? You know, games used to make me forget the real world existed. Hours would literally disappear.
You'd look up at the time and realize you'd missed dinner and you didn't even care. As when I look back on those times, it all just felt so pure and simple, like the developers had built something for you to just enjoy with no strings attached. Once you purchased the game from the store and loaded it up, it was a ritual to stand outside waiting for the new game, going around the entire store browsing the physical copies.
Gaming shops would be full of people all just looking around wanting to [music] play new things or just testing out new games in store. This is why ownership and player control really was the DNA of the entire [music] gaming industry. You could play Destiny with your friends every evening after waiting for the hype since Halo.
Call of Duty matches that didn't require a credit card to win. Even mobile games like Angry Birds [music] only cost 99 cents with the intention that you'd own them forever. Gaming truly was a magical period [music] a decade ago.
But we only realized how amazing we had it when it was taken away from us. And just look at what replaced it. Call of Duty Black Ops 7 has you fighting giant monsters and dodging massive machetes falling from the sky.
Zombies everywhere. Physics breaking brain rot that looks like Fortnite. Because when you look back now, that did a golden era has just completely shattered.
You get pummeled with microtransactions for things that should just be free. You simply can't compete or win without burning through cash. even though you've paid for the game.
Sometimes the game promised won't even work if you don't get the next DLC. And then when the game does eventually dry up, you're left sitting on thousands of dollars worth of purchases that vanish into nothing. Zero value, zero transferability.
But here's the bit that most people overlook. This isn't just about gaming getting worse. It's about something far more insidious that's spreading into every corner of our lives.
It's getting clear that the studios that once built the worlds we loved helped pioneer a system that's now cannibalizing everything from the products we buy to how we consume entertainment to getting [music] an entire generation of children addicted to gambling and ultimately how corporations keep us hooked on things that make us miserable all whilst robbing us of our money. Now, at this point, it almost just seems obvious that this is the way the gaming industry is. But it never would have seemed possible back in the golden era of gaming, which wasn't even that long ago.
rushing home from school, throwing your bag down, racing to turn on the console before anyone else would claim the TV. When you had no work, no to-do list, grating at the back of your mind. All you wanted to do is just keep playing.
Whether it be Fallout Elder Scrolls, World of Warcraft, Knights of the Old Republic, Destiny, Mass Effect, The Witcher, the original Borderlands, GTA, Halo, Age of Empires, Call of Duty, it doesn't even matter. There were so many crazy good games, but all of them were similar in the fact that they gave you something the real world couldn't. a place where your decisions actually mattered, where you could socialize with people you wouldn't normally talk to.
At school, you just felt like another kid in the crowd staying with the same friend group. But in a game, you had control and power, all while having lots of fun and socializing. It was genuinely escapism in its purest form.
You could spend your Saturday completely alone, lost in these massive worlds. But it didn't feel lonely. It just felt like an adventure.
It felt wholesome, stimulating, but it was also social in a way that it isn't now. That's why Saturday mornings meant coordinating with friends hours in advance. Why pizza nights in someone's basement for Halo tournaments felt more important than anything else.
Gaming didn't just entertain us. It built our social world. It gave us a sense of community in an age of loneliness.
You'd play endlessly with friends and strangers and strangers who became friends, sometimes even meeting them in real life. Some of your deepest childhood friendships were forged in these digital environments. It was for me at least.
But that's when you realize that something about those experiences felt fundamentally different. Games used to respect our curiosity and intelligence. Painstakingly crafted so every detail was exquisite and perfect.
They required you to think strategically, to pay attention, to engage rather than mindlessly consume. That respect for the player. Companies built their entire reputation on it.
Take Bethesda's Marowind in 2002. a vast detailed environment containing loads of cool creative architecture and some 200 books documenting the world's history. It's actually unbelievable how much work went into this.
And all that hard work did pay off massively. Oblivion then arrived in 2006 and instantly [music] topped it. Then it was Skyrim in 2011 which blew people's minds again selling even more copies.
It is still one of the bestselling games of all time with a 96 Metacritic score and 227 gaming awards. These games were among the best for giving people [music] total autonomy and control. You can go anywhere, do anything.
Ignore the main quest entirely, and just wander into a cave, find a random book that tells you the history of some obscure guild from 300 years ago, or just find yourself immersed in a quest line you had no idea existed. I'm sure we all know people who sunk hundreds of hours into Skyrim and still found new things. I used to be an adventurer like you became a meme that transcended gaming itself.
Games like World of Warcraft became [music] cultural icons, appearing on TV shows like South Park. Everyone relied on War Zone to stay connected with friends in 2022. And you've probably got something else to add to this endless list of amazing gaming experiences.
It was practically endless. And you honestly realize that we had it so good before the course of gaming was steered onto a different path that no one wanted or asked for. Because somewhere along the way, games began to change in ways that didn't feel important at first.
You might even remember when things started changing around 2014 [music] 2015, right when corporate money started flooding into gaming like never before. Big tech spotted an industry bigger than Hollywood and wanted exposure. With low interest rates and cheap capital, the culture [music] surrounding tech changed too.
Move fast and break things became the mantra and the patient methodical strategy that defined the golden era started to break apart. Then came a tidal wave of acquisitions. In 2014 alone, Microsoft bought Mojang, which created Minecraft, for $2.
5 billion. Facebook then paid $2 billion for Oculus VR. Amazon [music] grabbed Twitch for nearly $1 billion.
And once that happened, the floodgates were open, and it never really stopped. Of course, the massive institutional investors like Black Rockck, Vanguard, and State Street also quietly became large shareholders in major gaming companies. Unsurprisingly, Black Rockck alone owned over 7% of Activision and held major stakes in [music] EA.
Crucially, they started to control the voting rights that influenced corporate strategy. Big tech is one thing. Black Rockck is another, but what about when entire governments get involved in gaming?
Well, this is exactly what happened when EA changed hands at an insane $55 billion. the buyers, Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, Silverlake Private Equity, and Gerald Kushner's investment firm, Affinity Partners. So, the Saudi government now owns the company behind FIFA, Madden, Battlefield, and The Sims.
I mean, EA's already hated enough and has already destroyed more Cherish Studios than any other publisher in history. And I mean systematically. Here's how it tends to play out.
They acquire an innovative studio, force a live service pivot, meaning pivoting closed loop games to something that evolves constantly with ongoing costs for players, or just set unrealistic sales targets and squeeze the company for everything. Then they shut down when the creative team can't transform a game into a microtransaction factory. So, let's start with the biggest names they obliterated.
First, we have Westwood Studios, which created Command [music] and Conquer and pioneered realtime strategy games. EA bought them in 1998 for $122. 5 million.
By March 2003, they were gone. One underperforming title when EA closed them down entirely. The co-founder said the shift from passion to profit took its toll.
Then there's Bullfrog Productions, who invented the God game genre. We're talking Populist Theme Park and Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper. EA absorbed them in 1995 and by 2001 the studio was effectively dead.
Partly due to pressure from EA and partly because their own bosses succumbed to greed and money. EA eventually forced the team to make licensed Harry Potter games instead. Anthem by Boware practically failed under EA 2, leaving the sequel cancelled.
Then we have the case of Visceral Games in October 2017. Their Dead Space series defined survival horror and was profitable. But EA looked at those numbers and said that's not enough.
They cancelled Visceral's ambitious singleplayer Star Wars game mid development and shut down the entire studio, meaning 80 developers lost their jobs just like that. But why does this matter? Well, because EA decided single player games obviously don't make enough money compared to live service games with endless microtransactions, which are a massive part of all of this greed and destruction of video games as a whole.
EA brought the very worst form of this to gaming. It's a form of gambling, and they pushed it to kids. This is an outrage that should have been spoken about more by our politicians.
Kids are obviously the giant market for video games. And when you push microtransactions, loot boxes, and all of this digital form of gambling, you're really just training a habit in kids to gamble when they're older. Which is why they don't want you to just finish the story, be done, and move on.
As you get real satisfaction from that, when the credits roll on the campaign, and now you're just off to multiplayer. Whereas live service games with endless microtransactions, those never end. and neither does the spending.
Gaming was changing into something more predatory that ruins people's lives. There were a few early warning signs like Bethesda's infamous horse armor, which costs $2. 50 back in 2006.
It sparked massive backlash, but it proved that people would pay for in-game equipment. They later tried to monetize Skyrim's modding community and take a big cut of the profits. The community lost its mind and within 72 hours, Valve pulled the entire thing down.
The CEO said, "Pissing off the internet cost you a million bucks in just a couple of days. Those early in-game monetization attempts are trivial compared to what came next. " But before we continue, I want to thank Clean My Mac for sponsoring today's video, as it's that time of the year when everything just starts piling up.
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And they wouldn't let it go. Call of Duty introduced loot boxes with powerful weapons in Black Ops 3. Destiny took it even further when they locked base game players out of weekly content unless they bought DLCs.
Activision even filed a patent for systems designed to manipulate players into buying microtransactions through matchmaking. Basically pitting new players against those deeper into the game to force them to upgrade their loadouts in order to compete. Mobile game is an even more hellish environment for loot box mechanics and laid the groundwork with Candy Crush and Farmville.
I mean, just take Angry Birds. When it launched in 2009, it cost 99 cents, a complete game that you owned forever. Because it was made with love and it was a fair transaction, it became a cultural phenomenon.
But in 2015, they couldn't let that go. Angry Birds 2 then launched as freeto play, but with aggressive monetization. Revenue soared 50% annually, and they ended up deleting the original entirely.
When fans did petition to bring it back, Roia re-released it for 99 cents again in 2022. It immediately became the second best-selling paid app. Then in 2013, they once again deleted it, admitting the paid version had an impact on our wider games portfolio, which in other words means people preferred the version without predatory monetization and that was threatening their free-to-play profits.
Genshin Impact generates an average $1. 6 billion in annual revenue and is another heinous example of loot box mechanics. The system comes with low drop rates for under 1% for top tier items, costing approximately $25 for 10 pools, but there's a pity system that guarantees a fivestar after 90 PS.
This means potentially spending $900 on a single character for a single item with the added pressure that you know you will get it eventually if you just spend more money. It's just a classic case of the sunk cost fallacy where someone resists abandoning a strategy because they're invested deeply into it. It becomes so tempting to just do one more pool, but it was EA who brought [music] the very worst form of loot boxes to gaming and pushed it to children.
FIFA Ultimate Team is a perfect example of this. It generated 29% of EA's entire revenue. And it works like this.
You buy packs of virtual cards. You don't know what's in them. It's pure RNG, meaning it's using a random number generator, just like a slot machine.
Then they used influencer marketing at a massive scale, [music] advertising unrealistically impressive card pools to get everyone hooked. And suddenly, if you didn't do this, you would always be at a massive disadvantage compared to others who spent more on this. That's why there's tons of stories of people losing thousands on these games.
Kids buying hundreds of packs on credit cards that their parents can't afford. People have literally gone into rehab for this. Belgium and the Netherlands eventually declared EA's loot boxes illegal gambling.
They threatened fines up to €800,000 and 5 years imprisonment, doubled if you're selling to miners. EA tried to fight this in court and lost. But practically everywhere else, it's just business as usual.
When Star Wars Battlefront 2 came out with its brutal loot box system, EA finally felt compelled to defend their business practices on Reddit, saying, quote, "The [music] intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment. " This became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history with 673,000 down votes. This is exactly what big tech, Black Rockck, and the Saudi government want a piece of.
Gaming had cracked something that social media platforms had been chasing for years. People willingly paying money to stay hooked. Facebook could keep you scrolling, but monetizing that compulsion was tricky.
Games just asked you for your credit card and you practically handed it over. The other difference was scale and precision. Gaming companies knew that loot boxes worked.
Tech companies knew why they worked and how to maximize their effectiveness to generate more value for shareholders. They had the testing infrastructure, the behavioral data, and the models that could predict exactly when someone was about to quit versus when they were one purchase away from staying. I do wonder though whether we might have actually accepted the rise of aggressive microtransactions to some extent if the games themselves kept improving and blowing our minds.
But it's been the exact opposite. And this shows you what they stole from the gaming experience itself. That feeling of a shared memory with your friends is all just been ripped away by games that just suck time after time.
Imagine something as beloved as Call of Duty, which had Han Zimmer composing the music and MLG memes completely taking over the discourse online. But in the same last 10 years, it's now one of the most hated franchises in history. The Infinite Warfare trailer that dropped in 2016 became the second most disliked video on YouTube with over 3.
9 million dislikes. But at least you could pay for some weird camo. Then they held the Modern Warfare remaster, which is the game everyone actually wanted behind expensive Infinite Warfare bundles.
When Microsoft later bought Zeni Max, Bethesda's parent company for $7. 5 billion in cash, they had one chance to prove it could work. And to be fair, their first game, Starfield, got decent scores.
But once people got stuck in, it just felt so empty. Thousands of planets to explore, but few of them had anything interesting on them. Then came mods, except this time they were called creations.
We're talking an absolutely outrageous $7 for a 15minute quest in a $70 game. Within 2 years, players dropped 97% to around 3,700 average players. For perspective, Skyrim still has some 20,000 daily players.
Other new games don't even work when they're released. [music] When the highly anticipated Fallout 76 dropped in November 2018, there were over 200 bugs identified at launch, leading to a 56 GB day one patch. They'd advertised a $200 Power Armor edition with a West Canvas duffel bag.
But what actually shipped was cheap nylon, and so everyone blew up about it. When people complained, their response was to offer a pathetic 500 atoms, roughly $5 worth of in-game currency [music] as compensation for a $200 purchase. It turned out they'd given actual canvas bags to influencers at a private event the month before, whereas regular customers, the ones dumb enough to pay $200, got the garbage.
That didn't just feel like incompetence anymore. It was just pure contempt for those who would love the franchise the most. Sure, there have been a few anomalies in recent years.
Red Dead Redemption, Elden Ring, Battlefield 3, but you get a game like that every few years, whereas it used to be a few every single year. [music] And even these rare exceptions are constantly pushed back or cancelled. Speaking of which, you've probably heard that GTA 6 is once again delayed.
It's a game that's expected to cost an unprecedented $2 billion to make, more than any game in history. And for some perspective, The Burge Khalifa in Dubai, the literal tallest building in the world, cost more like $1. 5 billion and was completed in just 6 years.
Since it was announced, we've seen 12 Call of Duty games and eight Assassin's Creed games released in that same time frame. And yet, the GTA franchise will always be better remembered. People don't care if it's going to cost a bunch or when it's even going to be released because Rockstar is seemingly one of the only AAA studios that still builds the magical game experiences that we had in the golden era.
But this super slow, expensive development model is just so incredibly risky because making a profit from this kind of game will just become harder and harder without charging through the roof. There's so much riding on it. It's literally a once in a generation event and probably the only game that can save gaming right now.
How crazy is that? A game people are genuinely excited for that might happen once every decade or so, if we're even lucky. But behind the scenes, while gaming profits are higher than ever because of all of these horrendous in-game transactions sucking money out of players, the working conditions have also become terrible, too.
We saw this clearly when the gaming publication Koutaku investigated behind the scenes at that car crash Fallout 76 release, where they found evidence of QA testers working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, with low pay being offered pizza and a $200 bonus to give up their weekends. Some testers had their bathroom breaks timed. One said they fantasized about breaking a bone on the stairs so they'd be too injured to come to work.
Think about that. That's the kind of thing that happens in a labor camp in China. And the gaming industry has laid off something like 45,000 workers since 2022.
When Microsoft bought Activision for nearly $69 billion, they immediately cut thousands of people. Unity, Sony, the same story. And a lot of these people were the OG developers of the greatest games, the actual artists with the creativity behind the games that made our childhoods.
Then one day they're just laid off in a Zoom call by these giant faceless companies or just finding out from social media before HR even tells them. And so you can see how anything remotely human has been hauled out of the industry in the name of efficiency. So they don't respect the studios.
They don't respect the developers. And you know what else they don't respect? the actual stories and was that made these franchises valuable in the first place.
Just look at what Netflix did to The Witcher. According to a former writer on the show, some of the writers actively disliked the books and games and would even mock the source material in the writer room. They hired people who didn't just not care about the thing they were adapting, they actively made fun of it.
Henry Caval, who was a massive fan of the books and games, spent three seasons fighting the showrunner to stay faithful to the source material. It got so bad they had to leave after season 3 and then the viewership collapsed with it. The prequel, Blood Origin, got an outrageously bad 13% audience score in Rotten Tomatoes.
So far, this all looks like a classic tale of corporate corruption and greed. But there's honestly a darker edge to this all. I mean, you've got to wonder, are people actually having fun when [music] they even play these games these days?
There's a crucial difference between fun and compulsion. Fun is intrinsic. It arises from genuine engagement with the game world, from solving challenging puzzles, from collaborating with friends, making memories, socializing, and feeling really immersed in a different world.
[music] Compulsion is exttrinsic, driven by the promise of external rewards, by fear of missing out, by the nagging feeling that you need to keep playing even when you're not enjoying it. Rewiring your brain with addictive gambling mechanisms. Scan Reddit and YouTube comments and you'll find tons of posts just saying the same thing.
I just don't enjoy playing games anymore. 63% of people don't even buy games now, an all-time low. And players no longer care about so many of the things that made those early games from the golden era just so magical.
Most gamers today care less about strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer did back in June 2015. The reality is hard isn't profitable anymore. Hard games might get a cult following, but they'll never be as profitable as easy accessible brain rock games like Fortnite or even just random stuff like Subway Surfers.
So, why are revenue still so high? Well, it all does really just come down to these random rewards and how addictive they are, but there's absolutely nothing random about how they're designed to extract profits from players. Back in the 1930s, a Harvard psychologist named BF Skinner built a box with a rat inside.
The rat pressed a lever and got food. That simple. But then Skinner made the rewards random.
Press, you get nothing. Press nothing again. Press this time, you get the food.
The rat went absolutely berserk, pressing thousands of times, never knowing when the next pellet would drop. Skinner said you could do this with any animal. He turned a pigeon [music] into a pathological gambler in a demonstration.
This is the mechanism behind every random loot box in every game you've ever played. Because they draw on the same underlying psychology. Genshin generates an average of $1.
6 $6 billion in annual revenue and is one of the most egregious examples of using addictive psychology for player profit extraction. Loot boxes come with low drop rates of under 1% for top tier items, costing approximately $25 for 10 pools, but there's a pity system that guarantees a fivestar up to 90 pools. This means potentially spending $900 on a single character for a single item with the added pressure that you know you will get it eventually if you spend more.
Valve even who once the good guys actually pioneered these exploitation techniques. Here's a stat that will truly shock you. By April 2019, over 71% of the most played Steam games featured loot boxes with 86% containing cosmetic microtransactions.
Valve earned nearly $1 billion from Counter-Strike loot boxes in 2023 alone. They claim they have no business relationship with gambling sites, and yet their entire system enables a massive gray market of skin gambling in addition to cryptocurrency laundering. In late 2024, Daisy creator Dean Hall finally called them out directly on what we've been talking about in this video.
Quote, "Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism. I'm honestly disgusted with the gambling mechanics in video games at all. They have absolutely no place.
Janice, who worked as Valve's economist, said in 2024 that Valve helped create a hellscape, which he described as technofudalism, a system where corporations profit from digital platforms they fully control. Consumers live inside what he calls a digital thieft, where they don't own anything. They're forever paying some form of [music] rent.
practically everything demands a subscription or a small ongoing cost, eroding our ability to own anything outright. And he's just right on so many levels. Levels that go beyond gaming and percolate into every inch of our digital society.
You don't own your software anymore. It's all subscriptions. You don't own your music or movies.
It's Spotify and Netflix until they decide to pull content you paid for. You don't own your home. Blackstone bought them all and now you're a permanent renter.
Even your job isn't stable anymore. Welcome to the gig economy where you own nothing, not even job security. You want to buy a car, you're going to start needing a subscription, too.
Once tech proved it worked, once they conditioned an entire generation to think you own nothing and be happy was normal, every other industry took notes. The gaming industry is a massive innovator of this model, making gaming companies [music] compulsive and endless and boring. You don't need to make people happy with creativity and immersive world building.
You just need to make them unable to stop and rake it in from ongoing transactions. Why spend 5 years crafting the next Skyrim when you can spend 6 months building a life service game with a battle pass, daily challenges, and FOMO mechanics that just keep people logging in every single day. You probably noticed that highly anticipated games just fail so often these days, but the truth is they rarely matter to the executives making the decisions because when it does work, when you get a Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and Apex Legends, the money is so obscene that it justifies every failure along the way.
But there is another side to all of this that does offer a small glimmer of hope. In 2024, indie games made up nearly half of all Steam revenue. Five of the top 10 highest grossing games in Steam were indie titles.
Tools like Unity and Unreal Engine made it possible for small teams to build games without massive budgets. Platforms like Steam let them reach players directly. When you're not answering to shareholders demanding massive growth every quarter, you can focus on making something genuinely great.
But it's not exactly a fair fight. For every success story you hear about, there are thousands of developers who spent years making games almost nobody plays. And even the successful ones are competing against a huge money-making machine.
AAA studios have marketing budgets bigger than entire indie development costs. They have established franchises, brand recognition, and algorithms that favor them. Small teams are making better games with a fraction of the resources, but the system is designed to crush them anyway.
And I think the saddest part is how we've just accepted this as normal. An entire generation of gamers has grown up thinking this is what games are supposed to be. And yet, they'll never know the feeling of buying a game, loading it up, and it's yours to enjoy without any intrusion or additional investment, except maybe the occasional DLC that you genuinely look forward to.
They'll never understand why you get that far away look in your eyes when you talk about Halo 3 or the first time you played Skyrim. What are we handing down to them? What world are we leaving behind?
The industry makes more money than ever, but we've lost something that can't be measured in revenue. Curiosity, adventure, discovery, and community. Whatever you used to feel, it's just fading away.
People keep playing even though they're not content or happy like they once used to be. We had something special. We had worlds we could get lost in.
Stories that stayed with us, moments we still remember years later. Now, you can see they just traded it all the way for microtransactions, endless gameplay seasons, and loot boxes for something that makes us all measurably less happy while they get richer and richer, destroying video games in the process.
