Technology

I think Baldur's Gate III Director/Dev Swen Vincke's comments on Ubisoft+ asking gamers to get used to "not owning games" is exactly about this.

Whatever the future of games looks like, content will always be king. But it’s going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what not. Direct from developer to players is the way.

Getting a board to ok a project fueled by idealism is almost impossible and idealism needs room to exist, even if it can lead to disaster. Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximize profit.

There is nothing wrong with that but it may not become a monopoly of subscription services. We are already all dependent on a select group of digital distribution platforms and discoverability is brutal. Should those platforms all switch to subscription, it’ll become savage.

In such a world by definition the preference of the subscription service will determine what games get made.

Trust me - you really don’t want that.

TLDR ; you won’t find our games on a subscription service even if I respect that for many developers it presents an opportunity to make their game. I don’t have an issue with that. I just want to make sure the other ecosystem doesn’t die because it’s valuable.

To me his thoughts are interesting, because he's basically describing what already happened to the music industry with Spotify. As he pointed out, discoverability on digital distribution platforms was already brutal. Even if you were buying music from iTunes Store or Bandcamp, you're still deeply limited on discoverability. That was kicked into overdrive in the music industry with Spotify.

Spotify's catalogue is anodyne and too heavily curated. It means the popular artists will basically always get paid, while the unique and different artists will suffer and fail and probably stop making art entirely because it has become unsustainable for them.

It's like how the story of Taylor Swift being a "real indie" is such a joke, especially with the leaked emails from her dad being angry about how he doesn't get enough credit for basically buying her her music career. Basically it took a massive amount of money and propaganda ("advertising") to get her career off the ground at all.

Any artist without a daddy with lots of Big Banker Money is basically twisting in the fucking wind at this point. Don't even get me started on how AI art and music is further dropping the bottom out of the artistic industry.

Art is quickly becoming ("always has been") something only available to the idle rich. Only the idle rich can afford to piss away all their time on something that could be completely unprofitable. While I'm sure some of it is good art, do we really think that art is deserving of only the ideas of the idle rich?

Further, Vincke is exactly right about the subscription service dictating what makes it to air. When banning an episode of Hasan Minaj's Patriot Act, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was quoted as "We’re not in the truth-to-power business. We’re in the entertainment business." They absolutely can and will dictate what makes it to their streams.

It's a complication of the nature of the art market, how we've hollowed out pay for artists over two decades (executives love to blame it on "piracy" but the real blame is "executives who are greedy fucks who want to keep all the money the artists made for themselves"), and the boom in generative AI "art."

I, sadly, don't see a good way out, but listening to people like Swen Vincke is a good start.

EDIT: One final thing. The "algorithm" is just something that The Suits rely on to justify any and all decisions. The "algorithm" isn't making the decisions, The Suits are, just like always. The "algorithm" didn't pull episodes of shows that were politically unpalatable to a certain nation, CEO Reed Hastings did. It's just one more way to obfuscate corporate decision making, so they can always point to data. Surprise: you can prove/justify anything with statistics (data).

EDIT II: In respect to this statement from the OP: "which is less about the design of physical spaces and more about The Algorithm" I think perhaps it would be cool to get a reading group together for Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. Not discussed often enough in the modern era, "the medium is the message" still resounds, and considering McLuhan argued a physical space could be a medium for communication (the advent of bright lights allowing night-time baseball games, where previously no one would have been at a dark stadium trying to talk or watch a game, for example), I think it's really time to be having more interesting conversations about digital spaces, their "shapes," how they function as a medium, and their impact on human communication.