Video games being both an art form and a multi-billion-dollar industry means that economics tends to infringe on their creation. That’s not always a bad thing — a crucial part of the creation of home consoles was the realization that they opened the door for more profits than arcade cabinets ever made — but in the modern day, it’s a Faustian relationship. Grand Theft Auto 6 being the first game to spearhead Sony’s initiative to eliminate physical disks, the Blade video game being potentially canceled due to mass layoffs from Xbox and Microsoft... it increasingly feels like the relationship that movies, as art, have with the studio system.
It’s a situation that’s poised to get even worse, thanks to the push for a digital-exclusive landscape (which will allow game publishers to control pricing in perpetuity) and the ever-ballooning costs of consoles themselves. Now, another major development has rocked the gaming industry, and it’s one likely to have massive consequences considering it affects one of the biggest companies in the entire landscape.
