GTA V! FOR FREE! - Capitalism VS Art (Patreon)

There is a tactile sensation to playing Grand Theft Auto - it’s like swimming in a stream. You can choose to struggle against the current, pushing against the flow of the mundane and banal, or you can just relax, let yourself drift along. The way GTA is played - to differentiate from the story, which is not what people historically play GTA for - usually involves a tight gameplay cycle. Reincarnated like your own personal Groundhog Day you stroll out of your house, or the hospital, or the police station, and you steal a car, or punch a stranger, or you throw a grenade under a bus, and you start to cause havoc.

Eventually maybe you start to set yourself goals - I want to break into the military base and steal a tank and drive it into downtown Los Santos and blow shit the fuck up - and it becomes reminiscent of a soulslike boss run, starting over, dashing to the main event, getting fucked up and returning to spawn until you eventually do what you set out to do.

Sometimes though, maybe you just drive. You just find a nice car that handles well, and you just glide along the highway like an Audi commercial - like you’re playing Cloudpunk instead of GTA - and in this moment you’re just relaxing your body and letting the stream carry you, just floating on the surface of the water. It becomes apparent through contrast that the sensation you felt before was this intense struggle against a system that more than anything, just wants to make you return to normal, stop fighting, conform, float.
It’s through this tactile medium that the game starts to deliver its satire of Americana - Police vans that say “obey and survive” on the side, radio ads that tell you “there’s nothing more American than being a man, and nothing more manly than buying our products” - and you start to maybe see the system of control materialise around you.

BUT WHO CARES ABOUT THAT, THE GAME IS FUCKING FREE!

Grand Theft Auto 5! For free! Only for a limited time, on the Epic Store! All you have to do is download the Epic Store app to get it, which is free! And then you get the game! For FREE!

Okay, we all get what this is going in, right? It’s a marketing strategy where Epic gets people to download their store by offering a famous title for free on their platform - the payoff for them is that at some point a bunch of people who’ve downloaded their app will use it to buy other games, giving them money. They’re in a market that already features a monopoly, with Steam being the go-to name for PC games online, GOG if you’re really into it, itch dot io if you’re all about tiny indie titles - so Epic needs to use their big bucks if they’re going to enter the market in a meaningful way. Shock and Awe! GTA V! For FREE!

But what’s the catch?

Well there isn’t one.

But data harvesti--

But you already use facebook and twitter and discord and there’s no reason to believe Steam isn’t selling your data just as much as Epic, right? And even if they were, is that actually a cost to you? No, it’s you becoming the product. That’s how these things often work - when you get something for free, it’s because you’re the product but OK, let’s put data aside for a second, okay?

What’s the cost?

Nothing. The game is FREE.

I wanted to talk about this specific marketing gambit after my experience of it, because it sat with me really weirdly. I think all art should be free. I think people should be able to make art and have their basic human needs provided for them, and I think people should be able to access art for free, and I find it interesting, coming from that place, to look at what Epic did here. I mean, from my point of view, they’re dangling the way things should be in front of people to get them to buy into something that is… not that.

And then there’s what happened when I downloaded the game. It took a solid day to download all 90 Gigabytes on my terrible internet, the installer brought up the “allow X to make changes on your computer?” prompt six or seven times, Rockstar (the publisher of GTA) required me to make a Rockstar Social Club account in order to play whether I want to use online mode or not, and even now when I boot up the game I have to load the Epic Store to load the Rockstar Launcher to load the game - oh, and it still brings up that “allow Rockstar to make changes” prompt every time, but maybe that’s just for me.

I want to be clear and say that I’m not simply complaining about this - I expected something like this going in - some kind of annoying download and installation process, and maybe having to create an account with someone I didn’t want an account with. Furthermore, I never want to give Rockstar my money because they’re a big company who treat their workers like absolute shit, but GTA V is a fun game. I’ve put dozens of hours in already and I haven’t moved along the main story at all. All I do is steal various vehicles and beat up pedestrians.

So no, I’m not just complaining, I got a cool game I like for free that I would never have bought. What I’m pondering over is the fact I expected it. I find it odd that when a game is offered - when anything is offered for free, actually - we go in with an expectation not logically of some sort of trade that will benefit the other party, but of a trade that involves us suffering in some way in order to gain anything.

And we’re conditioned to think this way about things - both in a broad sense with cultural slogans like “no pain no gain” “nobody gets a free ride” and “I had to pay back my student loans so therefore everyone should have to suffer forever” and in a more specific sense with the precedent set by freemium services we encounter - you have to listen to ads on Spotify, not because they make Spotify money necessarily but because you’re using the free version. Spotify even puts in a huge number of ads for the paid version rather than selling the ad space, because if they’re not going to sell the ad space they might as well remind you that as a free user, it’s your end of the bargain that you have to suffer and sit through ads.

For some contrast, while I am writing this I am downloading Civilisation VI on the Epic Store, which is also free, as part of the same “Epic MEGA SALE” and it is not demanding this same level of suffering in exchange for the game. The game is smaller, the installation process is smooth, I don’t need to make any new accounts. It’s just an accident that the installation of GTA V which was so clearly a ploy to make people sign up to the Epic Store also felt like a punishment - a trade in suffering for being given something.

Do I have a point I’m trying to drive at? A solid conclusion? No, probably not. Maybe I just wanted to struggle for a minute.