Organizing and Fighting Back Politically

My generation was the first generation to really grow up as them real gamer boys. Counter-strike bunny hop maps, witnessing hate crimes in Call of Duty lobbies. Sinking a thousand hours into a game called Big Bass Fishing, because you and your dad found it in a discount bin. It was actually really good. But you see as I grew up, right? I witnessed this thing I loved gaming go through a transformation. And you see with this monumental growth, there has been some incredible things. And some less incredible things. But those games might not be as harmless as you think they are when it comes to gambling. 100k packs! 100k packs! Cyberp unk 2077 refund. Other costs are driving these GPUs to go up as well because AI data centers are eating not just the RAM, but they're eating storage, they're eating PCB production. They're like literally eating everything out there, right? And all of this can sometimes be a bit depressing, right? There's loads of videos going through the decline, and it can be kind of confusing. Why is this happening? And by the end of this video, it'll all make much more sense. Once you understand the market mechanics that are creating these outcomes. And you might feel a little bit more hopeful as gam ers aren't just sitting back and letting the thing they love die, they are actively organiz ing and fighting back. So today we will explore what went wrong with game. Come on in. It's almost another world here in the video arcades of America. A billion games are played every month, a quarter each for Escape, which can last a long time if you're skilled. Okay, so when you analyze any industry, you know, if it's films, if it's fashion, it's really important to understand how the financial incentives of that industry shape the final product that you get. In the early days of gaming, it was all arcades, right? In the 70s, the only people who could afford to pay for video games were the arcade owners. The technology was young, the machines were really expensive, so they would buy these machines and put it in an arcade, and a load of snot-nosed kids would grub all over 'em and spaff their quids in it. So what that gives us is a economic model called pay to play. And pay to play creates a very specific type of game. Tetris, Pac-Map, Street Fighter. These are like short, fun, very competitive games and very addictive. They were built on basically giving you just enough of the game to get you in, like, oh this is fun and then bang, you're dead. BC would be in the 80s with the rise of home consoles where this dynamic would completely change. We go from pay to play to pay to own. Gamer ownership changed everything, right? Because now the game developers were directly marketing towards those snot-nosed kids. You grease up your home controller all you want, Billy. Just keep buying our games. Just having an arcade inside your room. But in this new context where you don't have to keep putting a pound in the machine every few minutes, it creates a space and an incentive. An incentive to make games that are richer in story, characters, ideas, mechanics. Because effectively, if Snot knows Billy really likes the game, he's gonna tell all his buddies. And that's gonna end up on the Christmas wishlist. And that's like the market logic of the gaming industry from you know, the, 80s until into the 2000s. I mean, there was a few hiccups on the way, but by and large, we get some absolute beauties. We go from Super Mario Bros. Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, to the Rise of PC gaming. You get Half-Life 2, Quake, Counter-Strike, 1.6. Although for some reason I played Condition Zero, I have no idea why. But basically, as games got better, the market grew. More people heard about them, went to their friend's house and played them, and then wanted to buy their own consoles. And with that, money came flooding in. Investment came flooding in. With all this money, developers go, what can we do with it? And they go, well let's just make the consoles better, right? Invest in technology, better graphics and big budgets for big games. Now we're getting the real bangers, Grandface Auto San Andreas. Crash Bandekeat and Call of Duty Modern Warfare. And it just keeps going. And these games, they just they just feel big. They feel enormous. So much character, so much life. Us young bros, like we damaged our brains in those games. But you see, right, whilst all this was happening, down in the deep dark depths of parents' basements, through the mist of Doritos dust and the stench of urine bottles in the corner, slowly, quietly, brand new economic model arrives. Pay to access . Beyond the gates of mighty kingdoms lies a vast , unexplored world the wor ld of warcraft so with this game right instead of waiting up till midnight and saving all your pocket money to go and buy it on release day, then holding the physical game and then you hold it and you own it forever. With World of Warcraft, it isn't quite like that. Now you pay the money every month as a subscription to access the game. If you stop paying, then you stop playing. And like look, this was fair, right? Because those games, the MMO RPGs, they required far more infrastructure. They needed online servers that were physically based in a location. These are like massive machines holding data. They cost money to run. You know, you need to moderate the games. You need to update them. You need to fix things. The games were an ongoing service. So obviously paying ongoing was fair. It made sense. But you see, that makes a fucking shitload of money. My god. ISP, right? World of Warcraft, around 2010 to 2011. It had roughly 12 million monthly players, which roughly works out to about 2 billion a year in revenue from a single game. A year. Let me just stress that. A year. This isn't just a one-off spike on release date, which then dies down. That is it it just keeps coming, baby. The lifetime sales of World of Warcraft that I found here is estimated around about 15 billion US dollars. So if we compare that to other games of its era, if we look at Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, which came out 2007, which was a massive hit, relative, that only made $716 million throughout its lifetime. Only. Imagine saying only to that sort of fucking hell. What is capitalism? By 2016, World of Warcraft had clocked more lifetime revenue than every other major game. Becoming the most profitable game ever. Ah bar, you know, a few older arcade titles from the past. In twenty twelve, WoW's yearly revenue was third on the most profitable titles list, outpacing games that had been released that year. Remember, this is a game made in 2004 with 2004's technology. And I want us to look back at this list, right? This list is very important. If you want to understand the the modern world of gaming we're in right now, this list of games that are the most profitable will tell you everything you need to know. Flick through it, you see some names that you recognize. FIFA, Borderlands, that makes sense. Hold on a second. What the piss is crossfire . Before we go any further with this video, I want to give a massive shout out to today's sponsor, CyberGhost VPN. If you spend as much time as I do on the internet, you might think that the incognito mode keeps you private. Unfortunately, that's not really how it works. Your internet service provider, your school, or workplace network, even public Wi-Fi's can see a lot more of what you do than you might expect. Whether you're browsing at home, in a cafe, in an airport, a hotel, your data is exposed. And that is why I use CyberGhost VPN. 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And like instead of fighting the losing battle, which is trying to stop piracy, in a market that just wouldn't have the money to pay for 40 pound, you know, new releases, a few Korean companies come along, like Nexon and NC Soft, and they start to develop a new economic model in gaming. Don't fucking worry about the piracy. Give them the game for free. But then allow players to buy cash in the game and then they can spend that money in game on cosmetics, character customization, little advantages in the game. And like in-game item lotteries, microtransactions. What you need to understand about the free-to-play monetization model is that it doesn't expect everyone who plays the game to spend money in the game. They understand that most people won't, but they rely on what is called the whale model. I'm not talking about your mum. So the whale is like a high-spending player. These players can spend genuinely thousands to hundreds of thousands. They spend so much money on random bullshit in a in a video game that it subsidizes the whole game for everyone else. This motherfucker got 43 49 Why you got 49 fucking thousand V AT this is a strategy that is borrowed from you guessed it the gambling industry This game is a Star Wars themed online casino designed to lure kids into spending money. It's a trap. So you see all these free-to-play games pop up, like lineage to and changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize, and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With MedExpress, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to learn more. Crossfire, games that no one in the West has fucking heard of. And they make so much money that they blow all these West ern games out of the war. I'll give you some numbers here, right? In 2016, Crossfire, which is a game that looks like this, its lifetime revenue was $6.8 billion . Lineage 2 was $1.74 billion . For comparison, FIFA in 2014, its lifetime revenue was 6 billion. Halo was over 5 billion in 2015. And so you might be there wondering like, okay, I get that they might make some money, but why were they so good at making money? How do they make so much money? Well, the reason is very simple, my friends, and it comes down to a little thing called behavioral science. One of the very underestimated parts of the behavioral mechanisms in video games is that games have become like social spaces. This is a place where young people spend a considerable amount of their childhoods interacting with their friends on. And so in this environment where all your friends are and the people you like are, cosmetic items on your character become a way of you know signaling status or expressing your cool individual personality and I know that might sound weird like I play video games that have skins and I don't really buy 'em, I don't think about it. But you have to bear in mind this is just a new iteration of what has always been done. When I was young, it was about owning that Abyssal Whip in Runescape. If you owned that bad boy, you were the alpha. It's no questions. You decided who played football and who didn't. OH MY GOD OW A FUCKING WHIP! He has a fucking whip! If you go a little bit further back, it was about you know who owned the the Pokemon edition of the Game Boy. Or like you know, I'm sure if we go even further back, when kids were working in the mines, who had the diamond enchanted pickaxe? So knowing that, what these games do is you know make, it so that your ability to get these items are structured in psychologically manipulating ways. They implement a thing called variable rewards through things like loot crates where you have a chance of winning . Most of the time you're gonna get a shit skin, but every now and then you might get the rare one. Maybe then your friends might respect you . What's that? Huge default losers. And this too is well documented. From the skinner box experiments and work done since, basically, I'm just gonna bastardize it. They got a rat, put him in a box. If the rat clicks a button, he can get some food or get a reward food. Clicks it, gets it, he's happy, and then he stops, right? Because he gets the reward every time he clicks the button. So he does so until he's satisfied and comfortable. However, if he hits that button and doesn't get a reward, and then hits it and does get a reward, the anticipation of not knowing when that button gives the reward basically will lead the rat to clicking it until they sort of kill themselves. They'll just keep clicking this thing. I want to give me some more. So what these games were doing, we're configuring well-known behavioral mechanics that are used in the gambling industry into what was basically a low resolution, shitty Counter-Strike 1.6 ripoff and turning it into one of the most profitable games of all time. And so you've got to put yourself right in the shoes of the executives of these big Western gaming developers, and they're looking at their beautiful polished AAA title. Wow! And then they see Crossfire 2. And they turn to each other and they say, What the fuck are we doing? Alright, late 2000s, early 2010s. We're still seeing bangers. Bangers after bangers. I'm talking Far Cry, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Portal 2, Battlefield 3, Big Bass Fishing 2. It didn't come out, right? They didn't they should have done the open world, but they didn't like some of the most beloved games came out in that period, and my god, it was fucking sweet. I was there and I was playing them, babies. It was com outing at so much free time. Oh, and like studios in this time, they were taking risks. They were coming up with new, I hate the term, but IP, you know, new ideas, new franchises, new characters, new worlds, right? They would they were experimenting and they had the money, the resource, and the time to experiment, and they made our childhood. And like in this time, there's such an optimism. Like you can see it, you know, as the technology keeps improving with the new consoles, the whole industry is just in this euphor ia. Like if back then I remember we were typing in Xbox 720, and we believed that the next generation of console will have a controller with extra controls, I guess, for your toes. I think you probably use your toes on the top bit. We had lost our mind. We were so spoiled in that period of time. But you see, in making games bigger, more immersive, bigger budgets, new technologies, it does something to the gaming industry and the culture of produc ing games themselves. Gaming development teams go from being these like ragtag band of nerdy neckbeards and they were just basically thrown a load of money and told, crack on, lads, make us something amazing. But then, right, from their hard work and their creations, as serious money started to flow in and serious investments, so too does management, boardrooms, spreadsheets, the horse riding g ame is good, I get it, but could we add a car so we could get the you know the motorist audience? You know need for speed was pretty big and we kinda we want to catch at that corner of the market, so I'm gonna need that by Friday. Yeah, I'm gonna equip myself with a little uh four wheels of fury ! No way . There's no trucks in World of Warcraft. With all this growth comes expectations. For other two thousands, right , the company, EA, it is expanded aggressively. Buying up studios, it's consolidating the best talent, it buys out massive franchises, and they start to apply pressure on the developers. And very quickly , with all this resource, they start to make annualized releases of games every year, a new game. And this becomes the industry norm. Franchises like FIFA and Madden, NFL. They get pumped out ye arly with barely any changes, any updates to the mechanics. It's just like, here's another one. And that's okay with sport, I guess, when the ch the teams changes, etc. But then they start doing it with beloved franchises, like Call of Duty, Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Battlefield. They start expecting these game developers that have created these masterpieces to do it again basically every single year. And the reason they do this is because of risk management. They put a ton of work in to make these titles well known and build a loyal fan base. To make new products and new ideas requires a risk. You have to do it all again, and it might not work . So the big money starts saying, let's do another one, a sequel, a reboot, a revamp. And EA really bring about the major turning point in 2009 when they launch FIFA's ultimate team. Hi there and welcome to FIFA 09 Ultimate Team. A brand new game that allows you to play football like never before. The new game lets you build, train and manage your ultimate team by buying packs and This was an in-game lottery where you buy with real money packs, you open the pack, and maybe you get something good, maybe you get something bad. Some time it's maybe good, some time it's maybe shit. Yes, they bought in microtransactions. They rolled this model out throughout most of their sporting franchise. And like you wish that it didn't work, but obviously it worked disgustingly well. In 2016, the EA CFO Blake Jorgensen he said that the ultimate team modes were making around about $6 50 million a year. Just like, okay, bear in mind, Utimlate Teams is a very, you know, low effort mini-game inside of a game that you didn't have to even touch. It wasn't a full game, it was just a mini casino inside of a bigger game, and that mini casino brought in more money in the same year than Call of Duty Black Ops 3, which brought in $5 91 million . So corporations, they see this, and because it's optional, and there wasn't that much backlash, they realize that there is basically free money sitting there on the table in games that they had already made. Literally, just throw this tiny mechanic in, and you will generate more than some of the biggest triple A titles of the year . And I think probably somewhere around here is where EA just went into full like villain arc, going from a company that was previously known for how much it praised its developers into some horrific corporate culture environment synonymous with making their developers work super long hours, unpaid overtime, constant crunch of like tight deadlines. And it's in this time where you know the effects of this start being noticed by gamers in the games they love. And I think like the big obvious thing was a wave of games that were very hyped up that seemed amazing, like looked like they should have been incredible, and then they came out and they were like half finished with the rise of downloading games, the buying the physical disc became less and less important. Because in the past, you know, you made a game and that was it. Now, with the ability to download content, it meant that if there were problems with the game, you could just download the fixes called patches. And in the beginning, this was a very useful tool. But very quickly it turns into a way of releasing a game completely broken, charging seventy dollars for it, just get the cash in the door, get the cash up front, and then letting the players ity test it and, you know, find all the bugs. And then after enough of an outcry, the company fixes them. You get a ton of these terrible releases. Cyberpunk 2077 being, you know, probably the most notorious. Because it was so bad that they had to refund players. But you know, No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, Anthem, Battlefield 2042, gaming was really changing. It was not the same industry that it was in the 2000s and early 2010 s. And all of this change really comes together with the release of one game in 2017. Alright, it's real simple. If you guys have all flossed before. I mean like with your teeth here, I mean you're just going in out out in in i mean it's just it that's it oh it's all wanna see some movement i'm not seeing enough movement so i'm gonna be super clear right fortnight is fun it's a it's a good game it was a great game in 2017 it comes out and it's just a breath of fresh air. Not only was it good, it was a good game, and it had a new game mode because people were kind of bored of like endless first-person shooters. This bought in the battle royale, it was a third-person shooter, but it was free. What could go wrong? So, guys, I have my dad's credit card right here, and they're about to spend a thousand pounds on his card to try and buy all the battle past tears to try and get tier one hundred but on his card. But literally you download the game and you can just jump straight into a a match without knowing what you're doing, but it's fun anyway. And then after like 20 seconds, some 12-year-old kid builds the fucking sh ard around you and kills you. And then you go again. It was really a contrast, right? Because it was a very bright, silly, fun game. It didn't take itself too seriously. That was an era defined by serious dark shooters. And most importantly, Fortnite was built perfectly for the new social media era. Fortnite wasn't just a game that you played. Fortnite for a period of time was the culture. Greaseman ready to strike. Greasman goal! France win Because Fortnite realized something that other games didn't and that was that Fortnite is not just competing against other games. Fortnite was competing against YouTube, Netflix, Marvel, hip-hop, group chats, celebrity gossip. Fortnite realized in this newly emerging attention economy, the best way to beat all of those other mediums was to tie themselves to everything. Fortnite takes popular viral dances and puts it in the game, gives us memes. It implements famous characters from Marvel and DC. You have celeb crossovers, anime characters , streamers, and a cosmetic shop to capitalize off it all. And it was great. It was great. We have to remember that. Despite what it goes on to do, it was it was fun. The Travis Scott thing was pretty cool. Fortnite 's lifetime revenue is $20 billion . This is the fifth most profitable game of all time. So all of the other studios, they look at Fortnite and suddenly Fortnite becomes the dream. And what this brings is the Fortnite fication of gaming . Okay, so games like Grandfare 40 online, PUBG Mobile, League of Legends, Warzone, Roblox, Fortnite. These are the forever games. What this means is a game that you make once and people play it forever. And they keep spending money in the game forever. And once publishers saw this model work, the entire industry just became obsessed with chasing it. And like, let's be fair to them, business boys, you gotta see the temptation. A normal triple A game is a terrifying investment. All in it can end up costing you 300 to 500 million to make. You invest five years into making it, you release it, and most of the money is made in that first spike, and it might be a flop. But the live service game, my friends, is a different beast. Even in the way the player plays the game, right? They don't just play it for a you know a couple months whilst they complete the story. The games are engineered to be constant and evolving. They have updates and seasons. They change. New things get added to the game constantly, and players keep coming back constantly. So after Fortnite, a ton of games like this get made, and a few of them win. And like, you know, so what if Call of Duty goes from looking like this To whatever the fuck this is. I am Cormoreo! I need Tippee for my bumper! And so what if in the pursuit of trying to make a forever game, you have some absolute monumental flops, games like Anthem , Marvel's Avengers, Concord, to name a few, all of these games that look and seem amazing, that had so much potential, flopping so bad because they were made just not good, and some of the games end ed up being so bad that they just turned off the servers forever. Reportedly, Sony have had a ton of these live service games that they made completed and just never released because they decided that it would be better for business to not have the game come out and flop and get all of the negative publicity that comes from that. So they just literally didn't bother putting the game out. But like with every one of these flops, right, there it there's all this media shit storm, but there's something that people just don't talk about, and that is that resources are finite. When a flop happens, those world-class developers, that labor, that money, that time, that energy could have been put on something else. Something that maybe isn't a 10-year money printer, but something that is still profitable, interesting, unique, new, beloved, and culturally meaningful. And this is the thing, right? This this model, this this model that the gaming industry has created, it is absurd, like it can't work, right? Because fundamentally, to make a forever game, it requires players to treat the game like it's their hobby for the game to be their default social space online and like a routine, you know, with daily quests and updates where they build up a library of cosmetics and things in the game that they have value over to keep you coming back and playing continuously. Oh god, I'm gonna have diarrhea again. Uh uh You can't go to the bathroom, you're stacking sunder armor. But in the pursuit of trying to make every game like this, it ironically erodes the trust of the gamers. Like literally the just a decade of terrible releases and all this live service bullshit has conditioned the consumer base to be suspicious of new releases. 63% of US gamers buy no more than one or two new games a year. Around a third buy less than one game a year. Only 4% of gamers buy new games more often than once a month. 67% of PC gaming hours are spent on games that are at least six years old with Fortnite, Minecraft, and Counter-Strike dominated. And so with all that in mind, you start seeing this logic, these market logics reaching their final form. The first game sold you a product, then they sold you access, then they sold you items, and then they sold you a routine. What if there was one more model? The final level, the big boss. What if the game was no longer a game, but instead a platform ? Right, we'll do it right. We'll talk about Roblox. So Roblox isn't just the shitty little game your brother plays. In fact, I you could argue that Roblox isn't really a game at all. Not in the traditional sense, right? So Roblox, despite being released in 2006, in 2025, it had 4$.9 billion in revenue. Whilst not being in profit, you know, they posted major losses. But in the same way that Amazon and Uber did for years, Roblox is following the model of platform capitalism for gaming. The idea is simple. You don't take any profit, you just use the money to keep growing and growing the ecosystem. You get more and more players in the game, you own the currency in the game, you own the marketplace in the game, you just keep expanding and worry about profit later. So Roblox is free. It's nothing is free. Just remember that. But it is a platform where basically people who are on Roblox make games in Roblox, kids play them, and as you expect, there are tons of layers of microtransactions using the games inbuilt currency called Robux. This all happens, right? All these games that get built in Roblox happens in this hyper -algorithmic marketplace where a handful of developers that make the games for it they make serious fucking money. All while millions of mostly very young users provide many of the games, the labor, the culture, the trends, and the social online environment that keeps the world alive. Roblox are very smart as a company because they saw that right gaming. When we were all gaming growing up, we would make maps for games. We would come up with like hide and seek, bunny hop, surf, jail mods. Like all of these games that were inside a game were just things that people came up with and they were super popular and everyone loved it. Roblox saw that and went, oh , they'll work for free. They'll make the game for us. So they allow monetization in these games, which creates enormous revenue, which attracts investors. This is what we call the games as a plat form model. What's fascinating about Roblox is their margins theoretically should be a lot higher than traditional game makers and traditional platforms because that content that's driving users is being created by the users. The cost that they have in content's really only in building that Roblox game engine for you and I to be able to easily make content. Fortnite has been doing the same. They have a similar thing as well. The platform doesn't have to come up with and create the value itself anymore. It just needs to own the marketplace where everyone else inside will generate the value, the ideas, the creativity, the player base. And it works in the same way many other big tech platforms do, which is that once they've got everyone inside it, it wins by simply being the place where everyone is. If all your friends are in it, then it's the same like Facebook and WhatsApp, where trying to tell everyone, hey guys, that's all leave and go to this other place, it's very hard to do, and no one does it. So even if there are better services or better things, they could they just don't do it because it's too much effort to move everything, especially once you put so much time into it. And if Roblox itself houses all of your favorite games within it, why would you move? The company lists itself as a player in the attention wars, fighting for the user's time. One way the company is going beyond games is through virtual events. In April 2020, the social gaming platform started allowing players to host virtual events, like birthday parties. But all of this, right, all these economic models that have changed in gaming has overall started to have a negative effect on the gaming industry. On Steam, there was research where they basically tracked the top 50 games that were new and not free to play over the period of February 2023 and December 2025. And they found that the median price of the best-selling new games fell by around about 20%, while the revenue weighted medium fell from $23.70 to $20.35. This is a period of time, right? As people's will ingness to pay money is going down in gaming, where the gaming industry for their triple A titles are trying to normalize a new price bracket around about $70 to $80 a game. And there's a lot of rumors that Grandfare 406 is probably going to be pri ced at $100 . And like, okay, I know cheaper games sounds good, right? I like that. I think. But in reality, it's not actually that good of a thing. Deflation can often imply that an industry is shrinking. Because if you think about it, if the world is getting more expensive ready to launch your business, get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. 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Eating plus scammeraware. From inflation, that means making games is getting more expensive. It costs more to do it. You have to pay more wages, higher bills for your studios, energy, labor costs, equipment. If people are paying less money as prices go up, this means that really you're gonna start seeing budgets for games get a lot smaller, which will make it even harder to make these more ambitious AAA tiles. And probably it will incentivize games to incre asingly go towards the free-to-play, live service, you know, the daily challenge, this kind of model, all with microtransactions, etc., which will further worsen the spiral. And then there is other forces, not just the gaming indust ry itself, but outside, they're also starting to have a massive effect on the future of gaming as well. Other costs are driving these GPUs to go up as well because AI data centers are eating not just the RAM, but they're eating storage, they're eating PCB production, they're like literally eating everything out there, right ? So you gotta remember, gaming isn't just competing with other games or even just social media and other media products like films, as it fights. for your attention Gaming now has a new rival on the block competing for physical fucking resources. The earth minerals that are used to build the technology itself. Talk abouting chips, memory, GPUs, data centers, electricity, water, and invest or attention. All of these things are now in a bidding war against the AI industry. They're not necessarily buying the same thing that you and I would buy, for example, but you can't really blame the the manufacturers for uh pivoting what they're building to the higher price. Instead of prioritizing the small Exactly because uh the the monetary pressure to do that, they're just quite frankly paying more. So kids who are saving up all their money to buy a nice big gaming computer, they are now bidding against Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Venture Capital, Sovereign Wealth Funds, and every single fucking billionaire that is convinced that the next industrial revolution will come from their chatbot that can generate the finest quality AI slop that's radicalizing your uncle. So sorry, kid. No no gameies for you, my friend. And this right here is a really important , an interesting lesson in how increasing wealth inequality in the world how it starts to distort and affect markets and resources. Because inequality isn't just about, you know, rich guy has a bigger house than me. It means that large holders of wealth get to command the world's factories on what it produces, where energy supplies are driven toward, and which supply chains get priority over others. So what that translates to is they get to decide whether the finite amount of chips are used for gaming hardware or for another warehouse full of servers hallucinating legal advice. And right now the market is pretty clear. It is saying AI wins. Data center revenue in the fourth quarter reached a record $62.3 billion , up 75% from one year ago, and making up over 91% of the company's sales. NVIDIA, which you know, I remember buying graphics cards from them for gaming. It was a gaming first thing, basically. Recently, they've reported that their revenue from gaming was 2.4 billion in Q4 in 2025, which is down 11% year on year. And that's because the market's moved, right? It's gone from rendering your games to powering AI. An IDC analysis suggests that data centers could take up 70% of memory chips produced in 2026. So now your PlayStation, your Xbox, your Switch, your gaming PC, fucking your phone, your laptop is competing against that. With reports showing that the average price of video game consoles have just hit a record high, people actually spending money to buy those consoles fell by 27% in one month, with unit sales at their weakest since 1995. So all of this, what this all teaches you is one of the most important lessons I think you can understand about economics, about free markets, about capitalism, is that why all of this is happening to gaming is because gaming has gone from the phase that we were in when we were growing up, which was a phase of market expansion, into the phase we're currently in, which is a mature industry. But in that period of growth, in that exp anding phase, it has to convince new people that it is good, that gaming is something you should do. And it does so by making incredible games. But once you're in the door and once gaming becomes your habit, your lifestyle, the thing you do in your free time, and once the market reaches that mature point, finding new growth gets a lot harder. For big corporations, extraction becomes much more attractive than innovation . But why I find this important, right? Why why I don't actually feel so pessimistic is because once you understand why this is happening, it's not just like a state of mind thing. It's not that we're bad, we've become too picky. It's the opposite. We know what good games are now. The developers, their expertise and knowledge and their tools and resources are the best they've ever been. We have the ability to make incredible shit. However, the market incentives are drawing all of that talent, all of those resources away from making great pieces of art and great games that we love toward making more profitable, extractive games. That's the incentive. Like to be clear, of course, there has been loads of good AAA games that have come out recent where a studio just manages to fight th allrough this bullshit and drop a banger. Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Helldivers 2. These lot are doing it despite the odds. So the argument isn't just that modern games are bad. That is far too simplistic. It is that the wider industry as a whole is pulling its elf down in a race to the bottom, which makes it harder to make good games. But after all of this, or else it might seem negative and like a doom scroll, slowly gamers have started putting the pieces together and figuring out what is causing this. And most importantly, gamers are organiz ing and fighting back politically. Coming in the form of a movement called Stop Killing Games. Honestly, uh we are trying to prevent video games from being destroyed. We see video games not only as part of our culture but also as products and in both cases worthy of preservation. But unfortunately, the practices in the video games industry are hindering both of these and threatening uh video games as a medium. What we hope to achieve today uh for you is to explain the problem, what we have done to uh try to fix it at least, and why we believe new regulation or new rules are necessary. This is a movement by a YouTuber called Ross Scott, known as Accursed Farms on YouTube. So he does a big campaign, eventually, it gets tons of signatures and it reaches the European citizens' initiative threshold and gets submitted to the Commission. And it forces EU lawmakers to respond to a simple question: Should companies be allowed to destroy games that people have already purchased. And like this has prompted a really important deep question around whether digital purchases need clearer protections. And, and I think this is very im incredible, whether games should be preserved as culturally significant. Like, you know, like pieces of art. And like look, stop killing games is not the entire solution to inshitification. They're focused on one specific thing,. But it you know, it's a first step. Because it it's marked a point where gamers have realized the problem isn't individual bad developers, individual bad studios, but the issue of modern gaming being in shittified is systemic. And they realize that in order to fix it, the gaming industry needs rules, and players shouldn't just accept that they are shitboy consumers to just be exploited by any company. But instead they're fighting back. They're organizing, protesting. And they're supporting legislation, signing signatures, and working to support preservation to protect the cultural significance of the very thing they love, which is gaming. And the other positive thing is despite triple A titles, you know, struggling a bit, it has given rise to the indie development industry. Tools for making games have become incredibly good and way cheaper now. Like you got Unreal and Unity. So now small teams of passionate developers are making games that would have been impossible to make 20 years ago. Minecraft being the big one. Stardew Valley, Undertale, Lethal Company, Battle Bit, Schedule One. These became major hits and it made a ton of money. Now, personally, I would always, you know, take this with a pinch of salt. Whilst these tools, Unity, Unreal, are cheap now. As we've learned from this video, it is very likely that over time they might start in shit if I'mselves. It's very possible. And also, as these indie development teams get bigger, they will be thrown a ton of cash to go work for big people and they'll be bought out. But that is why the Stop Killing games movement is very important because it sets a precedent and shows the possibility for using political power to establish long-lasting rules over the industry itself. That is the only way of making real lasting change is by setting the rules that enforce it and not allowing the market to just do it itself. And so not only is this hopeful for gaming, but stop killing games if successful is very hopeful as a wider symbol for a younger generation, you know, our generation who grew up on these tech platforms and we saw them getting shittified and go from being things that were kind of good and nice and positive, communal, into things that are hateful, extractive, addictive. For this generation , if Stop Killing Games wins, they can see that actually, if they organize and come together, they can find ways of pushing for real political change to stop these exploitive companies acting like they fucking own the place. When we say a game has been destroyed, what we mean is a publisher has permanently disabled all copies of it that have been sold so no one can ever play them again. It would be like removing every single copy of a book or film in existence, efectively erasing it from the culture. Before you go, don't forget to check out CyberGhost VPN. Using the link in the description or the pinned comment, you get 84% off, four months for free, and a forty-five-day money-back guarantee. A super easy way to protect your privacy online. Whether you're browsing on public Wi-Fi, streaming content from different countries, following the World Cup, CyberGhost has you covered. Check out the link below and give it a try.