This argument would seem to make sense, but from what I gather Bezos and Zuckerberg have lots of control of their respective companies, and can push around the board - yet they do what they do.
Oh, I mean within the realm / market sector of video games.
Both Meta and Amazon have been uh, extremely expensive failures when it comes to anything other than MTX, game-as-a-job style video games.
Amazon Game Studios proved throwing near infinite money at making games doesn’t work if you have no idea what you are doing. Luna also failed. Lumberyard, essentially a fork of CryEngine, is essentially abadoned and spun off into O3DE.
Facebook literally rebranded to Meta as they were trying to convince everyone they had essentially invented the VR Internet… and to prove this, they gave us essentially an alpha version of some Mii-verse style VR experiences.
Google tried to do Stadia, promised us you would not need a local machine powerful enough to render a high fidelity game, because they had invented negative latency.
Apple fairly recently released $3000k VR goggles that uh… kind of let you do some extremely basic office work, awkwardly.
Etc etc.
All of these very major tech companies that decided they were gonna be video game companies too? Pretty much all their endeavors were total internal failures, net losses for them, but, it doesn’t matter in the long run because they all make so much money from their core business model, which for all but Apple, is spying on consumers and selling them hypertargetted ads.
A lot of people give Valve a lot of shit for MTX in terms of things like tradeable CS2 weapon skins, and a lot of that is deserved.
But they’re forgetting that Facebook actually invented that entire thing, with Farmville.
It was with Farmville that Facebook realized you can gamify anything, and then you can monetize that gamification.
Farmville is what kicked off the transition from MySpace 2.0, into the gamified, data mongering, hypercapitalist hellscape attention based economy.
All mobile gacha games with massive MTX and gambling/loot box/dark pattern style mechanics can basically trace their lineage back to Farmville.
This argument would seem to make sense, but from what I gather Bezos and Zuckerberg have lots of control of their respective companies, and can push around the board - yet they do what they do.
Oh, I mean within the realm / market sector of video games.
Both Meta and Amazon have been uh, extremely expensive failures when it comes to anything other than MTX, game-as-a-job style video games.
Amazon Game Studios proved throwing near infinite money at making games doesn’t work if you have no idea what you are doing. Luna also failed. Lumberyard, essentially a fork of CryEngine, is essentially abadoned and spun off into O3DE.
Facebook literally rebranded to Meta as they were trying to convince everyone they had essentially invented the VR Internet… and to prove this, they gave us essentially an alpha version of some Mii-verse style VR experiences.
Google tried to do Stadia, promised us you would not need a local machine powerful enough to render a high fidelity game, because they had invented negative latency.
Apple fairly recently released $3000k VR goggles that uh… kind of let you do some extremely basic office work, awkwardly.
Etc etc.
All of these very major tech companies that decided they were gonna be video game companies too? Pretty much all their endeavors were total internal failures, net losses for them, but, it doesn’t matter in the long run because they all make so much money from their core business model, which for all but Apple, is spying on consumers and selling them hypertargetted ads.
A lot of people give Valve a lot of shit for MTX in terms of things like tradeable CS2 weapon skins, and a lot of that is deserved.
But they’re forgetting that Facebook actually invented that entire thing, with Farmville.
It was with Farmville that Facebook realized you can gamify anything, and then you can monetize that gamification.
Farmville is what kicked off the transition from MySpace 2.0, into the gamified, data mongering, hypercapitalist hellscape attention based economy.
All mobile gacha games with massive MTX and gambling/loot box/dark pattern style mechanics can basically trace their lineage back to Farmville.