The Trouble With the Video Game Industry | Philosophy Tube

GAMERS RISE UP

Well you handsome Galoot, I caved and became a Patron. Thanks for doing what you do. HUGS

Lynn Short

I nearly came when you started stretching on the pink gloves, hottest crossover ever!

Wodenborn

I work in the games industry and this was FABULOUS.

Dani McKenzie

I don't think I was in the credits for this one :(

mimouroto

Great one

I like discovering that I'm basically supporting Jim through two different patreons.

Spencer St. James

Good video but I would make two points/corrections. (1) Micro transactions are not a way, as you and Jim say, to make more money from existing users. They came into the industry to expand into emerging markets where players didn’t have credit cards. Most of the early micro transaction successes happened in developing countries in Asia in the early 00s. I spent about 10 years in the game industry with much of it either at one of the largest publishers or selling services to publishers (you can find my name in the credits for many games in the late 00s). The lack of credit cards in developing countries also gave rise to Free To Play; FTP and Micro transactions go hand in hand for much the history of games. People paid the micro transactions using their phones — i.e., feature phones — or buying gift cards for in-game currency. By the early 00s, AAA Game publishers realized that the number of people who would spend $60 for a game had been saturated, wasn’t growing, and so they needed ways to reach other markets. Thus came micro transactions; copying/buying smaller developers from Asia, notably South Korea. In the 00s it was pretty common for versions of game would be made for developing markets that were just stripped down versions that were either free to play or very inexpensive to get started then the main source of revenue were micro transactions. The advent of the iPhone / mobile gaming and Facebook games brought this model to developed markets. And in the late 10s that micro transactions have now been brought into developed world AAA games. (2) When referencing Laozi, you use the Wade-Giles romanization and write it as Lao Tse. This comes off as a bit colonialist. It’s generally considered improper to use Wade-Giles as it was a colonialist creation and the preferred romanization system is the natively developed Pinyin. It has the added benefit for English speakers as Pinyin’s pronunciation is much closer to English than Wade-Giles. For example, Beijing (Pinyin) and Peking (Wade-Giles) are both pronounced the same. The same goes with the Dao De Jing (Pinyin) vs Tao Te Ching (Wade-Giles).

Shawn MacIntyre

Beautifully made, wonderful stuff; I LOVED the full-throated vampiric defense of capitalism at the beginning, I have a feeling that will help the sort of folks who really need to see this to watch it all the way through. Although I am painfully disappointed that André Malraux did not make an appearance, I hope we'll see him in a follow-up.

Glyph

Fun and informative... just what I needed on Black Friday.

Great video, as always. This month's topic reminded me of the last project I had when I worked for a quite famous consulting company. We had to develop an algorithm that would predict the company's growth in certain periods in a certain region; the results were to be shown to the investors. So the more positive the predictions were, the better; otherwise it could cost potential jobs or people's salaries could be affected. So every time we got a bad result (bad meaning not as positive as they wanted it to be), we changed it so that everyone (managers, inverstors, and workers) could be happy. Made me realise how much the system sucked.