[AD-FREE] What Do Developers Actually “Owe” Us? | Windbreaker Podcast

Congrats everyone, over a month and I still can't stop thinking about it. So you're getting a comment just to get it out of my head. TL;DR: I disagree with the very concept of having to choose whether games are an art form or a product. They are both. As long as they cost me money to play, they are a product and I'm owed my money's worth. As long as they intentionally make me experience something noteworthy, they are art and I'm owed some artistic integrity. But we need to distinguish between the developers and the publishers, because they have a different roles in the process so they have a different impact on the issue. And we should also think about what we owe them in return. When I say that games are a product and I'm owed my money's worth, I don't mean I get to dictate what games are, just that I want to get what I'm promised. I wouldn't demand to remake The Starry Night into The Starry Day because I paid to see it. But I would demand that they don't force me to go through a dark corridor filled with rusty caltrops only to find out that the only thing they have there is a crappy xerox of a different painting. There's a ton of games on Steam with great reviews despite subjectively horrible content simply because everyone who would downvote it took one look at the trailer and knew it's not for them - and that's exactly what I want. Poor technical quality, false advertising, lack of support, aggressive monetization, making us pay for empty promises - those are the unforgivable sins that we've been actively conditioned to accept, and as Yahtzee put it, "gamers as consumers have conceded too much ground". Games are an industry now, they are used to make money, and money attracts predators. Unless we regulate it, this industry won't improve games - they will ruthlessly use games to improve their ways of making money. As consumers, we are owed reasonable pricing and quality, accessibility, and at least basic transparency about the product and the process of creating it, so the free market can regulate itself. When I say that games are art, I mean that they should be an experience. I understand that some experiences only work when what I get isn't what I expect or want, and I accept that. Having wide variety of experiences makes us bigger as people, so there should be a room for games that are unpleasant or take people out of their comfort zones. Take The Last Of Us 2 - I enjoyed watching the ZP of that because I enjoyed how passionate Yahtzee was about hating it. And I also enjoyed the Good Blood about it because it gave me a different experience-by-proxy than Yahtzee. But then we need to ask ourselves what experience the creators wanted us to have, and how often the answer is "the kind that will trick you into thinking that the game is worth the money and time you spent on it, and ideally make you want to continue spending" - the empty calories for the soul that ruin your palate. Intentionally making the game bland because that's the desired experience? That's fair, as long as you're honest about it. It's making the experience manipulative or bland and inoffensive (and usually inconsistent as a side effect) to forcefully broaden the target audience and maximize profit what's the unforgivable sin for me here. Experiencing art takes two - the creator and the audience. And as the audience, when I open myself up to the experience provided by the creator, I show them a great deal of trust, because I let them put in me something that will change who I am as a person. And to me, artistic integrity is about not betraying that trust so creator can benefit at my expense beyond my consent. I will also insist that we make one thing clear here. I'm a developer (not in the games industry, or at least not yet), and I know that the process of producing something like a game involves the makers, the organizers, and the sellers, usually because those roles require different skills and it's hard to find people who have them all. I personally experienced what it's like when the sellers promised the customer the world, and then talked the organizers into forcing the makers to take responsibility for those promises. I will insist on differentiating what the developers owe us from what the publishers owe us, because I refuse to frame everything as the fault of the makers. My usual go-to example here is V Rising - never in my life have I played a game where so much passion for the artistry of the game was completely overshadowed by the moral bankruptcy of the monetization mind games and algorithms. But then again, maybe they fixed it in the past year. Maybe the makers were again forced to pay the price for the promises that they never made, and tricked into maintaining something that deserves the dignity of death. I hate when a game I love stops being available, but maintaining my creation forever instead of moving on is my personal definition of hell. So that's what I owe developers - the right to move on and spend their life on something more worth it.

Maciej Myczkowski