Well Played: Store Credit
The media businesses that have relied on brokering attention are mostly shrinking. The cable TV model is teetering on collapse, newspapers and magazines have spent decades consolidating and cutting staff and coverage to no avail, the movie business has bifurcated its own markets while almost fully shifting its attention to China and other emerging markets, and the music business has shrunk so dramatically (and been so thoroughly “disrupted” by Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms) as to be an almost unrecognizably different industry.
Video games, on the other hand, are flourishing. Their market and market share are growing every year. That is because, despite some similarities to traditional media, the games industry has structural, ideological, and technological factors that make it particularly well adapted to an increasingly polarized consumer economy.
On its face, it would seem absurd to claim that the popularity of video games might reflect a shift away from conventional consumerism — that is, the system whereby mass consumption rationalizes and justifies wage work and consumer goods are the major engine of the economy. After all, games, understood mainly as products, seem to support those established business models so well. They rationalize the purchase of ever more expensive computer and network hardware and assure the serial obsolescence of consoles every three to five years. Games generate endless franchise sequels and are supported by a boosterish press focused on telling consumers which games to buy. The games themselves have seemingly no use beyond their pleasurable consumption, and produce in their wake legions of “gamers” whose identity, like consumers more generally, is linked purely to their consumption habits, patterns, and preferences.It may not be the case that ads aren’t working; it could be that there’s no one to sell the products to
In the early days of video games, in the 1980s and ’90s, the cultural product they were most similar to were toys or models: a somewhat niche cultural market that made money almost exclusively through the sale of commodities themselves. Games and the means to play them were mostly sold in toy stores. This longstanding association with toys has contributed to the aggrieved defensiveness in gaming’s adult fans about its cultural importance, an attitude that still drives much of video-game criticism and debate. (Are they art?)
This defensiveness about video games has proven to be a significant boon to developers, as organized gamer-rage has helped crush union efforts and assisted in generalized labor discipline across the industry. But this embattled defensiveness to the medium-qua-medium has also meant that many of the fans, consumers, and even harsh critics of video games still identify the health of their favorite hobby with the health of its biggest studios, which is to say, with the profits of the industry’s owners. (This has also played out in “console wars”; loyalty to certain studios, brands and franchises; and other perverse forms of “fandom.”) The consumer base committed to the health of the “video game industry” long past the point at which it needs any defending has meant that fans often accept or even support and rationalize increasingly exploitative and predatory models of sales and consumption.
And that’s been important for video games growth, because, as a form of cultural entertainment, they push forward a different model from the one that supported most 20th century media. For most of the last century, media businesses were basically parasitical on marketing: They predominantly made money from ads for other products rather than the direct sale of their own. Media companies gathered and held an audience’s attention with entertainment, and then showed that audience ads that promoted brands and products and naturalized the idea that what we consume constitutes who we are or how we are seen. Advertising and entertainment programming were integrated but largely distinct: Without the pleasures of television, for instance, most people wouldn’t agree to sit through 18 minutes of advertisement every hour....MORE
Social media and web-based “traditional” media have, for the most part, attempted to continue the model, but they are failing: Advertising-based business models are collapsing. Part of this has to do with how metrics have merely underscored the inefficacy of pay-per-click advertising models, but the real problem is the collapse of America’s consumer base. Technological changes have facilitated (and have been used to accelerate) the automating, globalizing, and deskilling of production labor, a 45-year-and-counting process, and this has decimated the spending power of the middle and working classes. In 2012, the top five percent of income earners in the U.S. accounted for 39 percent of consumption spending, most of that on luxury goods (expensive jewelry, vehicles, fine art—purchases that are also often investments). For the bottom 60 percent of Americans — who account for less than 15 percent (!) of national spending — the biggest expenses by far are food, housing, transportation, medicine, and debt servicing. In other words, there is a much smaller market for nonessential consumer goods than there used to be. So it may not be the case that ads aren’t working; it could be that there’s no one to sell the products to.
In a world of growing consumption inequality, consumer purchases like cars, appliances, vacations, and the like become out of reach for more and more people. They were part of a consumerism that featured a range of products and brands, from low-end to mid-tier to high-end, which required and facilitated their own assembly lines, showrooms, and distribution networks. But as the middle falls out and people at the bottom spend less and less on consumer goods, supporting production at those differing scales just isn’t profitable. When the top 25 percent of Americans are doing nearly 80 percent of the consumption, it just doesn’t make sense for most companies to market to anyone below the rich.In the world of platforms, consumers become less like owners of commodities and more like workers who produce their own entertainment as self-exploitation
But the video games industry is particularly suited to a more unequal society. As with all digitally managed products, the games industry facilitates rent-to-own models, but those models make more immediate sense in the context of gaming than other cultural industries dominated by digital rights management. Apple removing a copy of Spy Kids 2 from your laptop as a result of a rights dispute just feels like they’re taking something from you. But when game developers remove content or discontinue support for a video game through updates, changes, or sequels, such clawback behavior suddenly feels technologically sound, reasonable, and part and parcel of making gameplay more enjoyable. And this continued, networked control of the product by developers facilitates more and more micro-transactions — technologically advanced innovations on an economic model that plagued the working classes in times of more explicit exploitation. (Think of the early 20th century electricity meters that apartment dwellers had to put a coin in to operate.) Games are products as platforms to the highest degree, allowing for an ongoing extortion of users on a variety of fronts, making for the perfect product to pull every last penny out of stressed out, broke, precarious people in the name of fun and relaxation.
As we spend more of our money in digitally enhanced marketplaces, the fluidity, rate and volume of economic transactions increase, even as the cost of each individual transaction decreases. This lends itself well to systems that are capable of ever more fine-tuned economic stratification....
