The Patreon Letter - 30th August, 2019 (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Em here today with another in our fine tradition of late letters. Thankfully it's only a day this time, but once again thank you for your patience. 

I've found myself getting back into video games again after about 15 months of just being miserable every time I had to play something, and as much as I hate to admit it part of that has to do with Apple Arcade. The new service is $5 a month for a curated selection of microtransaction free apps on your apple devices from an array of developers of various renown. It's been criticized rightly for its nebulous payout practices for devs, all of which sounds really bad so please read that and understand the material realities of these services before you consider my general positive impressions here. 

But also it's $5, and I regularly find myself skipping games at the $20 tier just because $20 is more than I want to spend to try stuff out. That's not fair as a games critic, I know, but being a games critic is only a fraction of what I do and we don't cover new games anyway, so it's mostly me being extremely price conscious. $20 is roughly half of what I spend on groceries a week, or two or three books. It's not nothing. 

Normally I wouldn't be so excited for a bunch of mobile games, even good mobile games, but this launched at the same time apple began supporting normal video game controllers on their devices. Which means that apple arcade has a lot of games that are just built for a controller like a normal game you'd get on the eShop or the Epic Game Store. Which means this $5 a month service can just have full sized games on it. Sayonara Wild Hearts, one of the big launch games, is on Switch right now for $13, which is more than two months of this service for a 90 minute game. When you're trying to spend a little money wisely, it becomes almost a no brainer. So here I am, playing a lot of apple arcade games.

The verdict so far? It's weird. 

This isn't a review of the platform itself or individual games in it, but instead the whole impression I get from apple arcade so far: it makes me wonder just how much video games are shaped by the economic conditions that exist around their creation. 

The app selection is all over the place in terms of genre and scope, but because all the games are micro-transaction free, they bear as much resemblance to the mobile games of 5-8 years ago as they do the Xbox Live Arcade games of 5-10 years ago. Back then there were many (but not too many) small indie games that cost $10 a pop (<$5 on mobile) that were just a few hour experience that you'd enjoy and then put aside. Some games were enduring like Spelunky or Super Crate Box. Some came and went like The Novelist or The Dishwasher. But they all entered a marketplace where the assumption was most of them were going to make money just by selling the games. It was an amazing time to be playing games, for sure, because you could feel reasonably caught up on what was coming out for a reasonable spend (and in my case, I had much more money to throw around back then) and few companies had really perfected the huge money pits that were monetization strategies at large.

For whatever reason the 'indie boom,' which only became the boom in retrospect when it turned out that wasn't a stable economy, didn't last.

Much ink has been spilled on why, from big games sucking away time and energy with slot machines, to everyone being poor as wages stagnate and we have no fucking money, to projects scoping too large and game prices getting too big sucking studios under as the supply and demand slips off. Maybe it's Steam just being bad at a storefront. Maybe it's Switch being a race to get there while the store was anemic that has fallen apart under the weight of 8000 games that run like shit. There's a new thread or gamasutra post about this literally every week. Nobody knows. Could be all of these, could be none of them. 

But games changed. What was considered indie got more expensive, more polished, more professionalized. The $10 game became the $20 game ($25 on switch). The $5 mobile game just went away, replaced with a game that has a gacha mechanic and also a $5 monthly subscription to improve your slot machine rates. One of these is a Mario Kart. People hate it, but its incredibly popular online right now. All the experiments turned to itch, which remains great but is also its own hard to navigate storefront, where the demo of an h game lives next to a game jam prototype lives next to a 20 hour visual novel. It's exhausting just to look at. 

Which is why apple arcade is so surprising. It launched with quite a few games, but not an impossible number. They're all there to get so its very easy to graze. And because they have the lack of expectation for what a game looks like in length vs price and the capacity to play either like a mobile game or a traditional controller driven game, you get entire experiences that would have been right at home on XBLA a decade ago hanging out with the best iPhone games of five years ago (some made by the exact same people, having held on this long), and all for a relatively low (dangerously low, and obfuscated, see above) entry fee. 

It's weird, this apple arcade. I've enjoyed most of the games I've played so far, and I don't feel bad when something overstays its welcome or reveals that it has tower defense mechanics because I'm paying the $5 a month regardless. I might as well just play what I like and not stick with what I don't out good old fashioned sunk cost fallacy. This ability to graze without guilt is worth $5 to me, but it's strange that repackaging the last generation's social structure about the act of browsing and playing games is really the thing on sale here more than any individual work. 

We say a lot about how gamers playing patterns are conditioned by their environment, and sometimes we talk about how companies are also conditioned by this hell economy to extract maximum profit, but it might also be true that the very types of games being made are also products of the market even when you're talking about creators that always seemed to have their own voice. It's strange how much this new platform seems to use the hot model of the moment to fund a walled garden that is devoted to the gaming of the past. Is it sustainable? Is anything? But it reminds me that enjoying art is also an active function of society, and changes with the times. To see my own habits of 7 years ago thrown back at me for such a low price invites worry and delight in turns. 

I really like apple arcade. But ultimately my takeaway is that the game industry of 2019 is irreparably broken, and not likely to get any better. And that's not a takeaway that's going to keep this one moment of recaptured dreams going as it expands and people start losing money and apple starts not giving a shit. It's just how it goes. The enemy, as always, is capitalism. This is just a more interesting permutation of that struggle than most, to me.

Thanks everyone, see you next time.

Em