As someone who believes that capitalism is perhaps the most efficient economic model we have yet as a species, there is the undeniable fact that – like all other economic models – it has its flaws. From the communist reliance on dictatorship and tyranny, to the socialist reliance on other people’s success, capitalism has its own self-destructive reliance; on other people’s failure. The problem with capitalism is ultimately the fact that it ends in a zero-sum game. When you are not out-earning your competitor, your business is threatened. If you have a competitor, your business is threatened. This problem is offset however by the net benefit that the best overall product usually comes out ahead, and it also allows things such as tools, food, technology, education, and even art itself to become refined through the process of customer-filtering. Unfortunately, it also causes the psychotic anxiety of businesses trying to find the most effective means of stability. Ultimately what this has meant for the times we live in today, that means finding the loop-hole of “evergreening” themselves, regardless of the impact it has on the quality of their product, and regardless of whether or not it fits within their niche.
For those of you who are not aware of what an “evergreen model” is, in economics it is the concept of a market model that will always turn a profit (Always sell), like the evergreen tree which remains green all year round, essentially never needing to course correct or offer an alternative. These used to typically be exclusive to a few niches, like selling certain types of foods or clothing, things that are always in demand – year round – regardless of fads or even cultures. You know, things that are actually necessities and naturally incur themselves towards being evergreen markets to begin with. The problem is, as with all zero sum games, now that niche has broken out and turned into a business strategem in and of itself. Except now they use the term “evergreening” as a verb within the closed marketing conferences of the world, shut out from the “normal customers” (which they now refer to as “consumers”, just ever-gaping maws that will swallow-up whatever slop a corporation hands out) who are growing ever-more-ignorant of the business practices of the modern age.
Well, what happens when you try to “evergreen” a gaming product? They technically already had that happen to them. Back in the 70’s we saw the birth of arcades. Large hubs of gaming content filled with arcade cabinets and pinball machines, whose gaming models targeted endless play or endless replayability. Over time, these arcade games evolved towards making games harder on purpose in order to swallow more of your coins, cheap-shotting you to drain your health, forcing you to drop more money on them regardless of how well you were playing. It was heavily criticized, people even coming up with names for such a practice, calling them “quarter munchers”. It was a slur used to denigrate games with unfair gaming practices that deliberately halted your progress in order to earn more money, and became somewhat of a stigmatizer that black-balled certain arcade machines for people in-the-know and, at times, worked against the success of an arcade machine. As a whole, arcades filled that small evergreen niche of gaming, and arcades were the neatly confined backbone of many companies of the time, while those same companies also had other teams developing titles that would sell as stand-alone products for individual gaming platforms at home. This separation of markets kept the evergreen (generally) from mixing with the quality individual products offered elsewhere in the market. There was essentially a balance.
Eventually arcades would fade away, becoming nothing more than a small attraction at carnivals and shopping malls. Online gaming was growing in prominence and people did not need to go to the arcade to get multiplayer gaming anymore, we had it available right inside our own homes. For around two decades, from roughly the mid-90’s to 2013, gamers had it good. Plenty of online gaming without the frustration of added artificial difficulty, mixed with high quality products that achieved commercial, social, critical, and artistic success. Slowly, gaming companies were concocting a monster behind the scenes.
Born out of the success of MMO’s like ‘Ultima Online’ and ‘Everquest’, gaming was building its new “evergreen” model to fall back on. The steep monthly costs of many of these MMO’s of the time kept them confined within their niche, but as time went on and technology advanced, we saw the rise of the “Free-to-Play” model. This model would become exemplified in the release of ‘DOTA 2’. The game was free, all characters and gameplay was accessible immediately upon download, and it was massively popular. The only thing you had to pay for were the cosmetics, which even then, you had the chance of earning for free every now and then.
Over time we would see more and more games begin to adopt this model. From ‘Fortnite’ to ‘Apex Legends’ to now ‘Overwatch 2’, the free-to-play model has become the go-to for any company seeking long term financial stability with a minimal amount of effort, using easily recycled arena-styled gameplay while adding nothing more than fancy skins and cosmetics to support the economic side of things. The only problem is, we see this seep into other avenues of the gaming world, subsuming the whole of gaming.
With the insertion of this model into franchises wholly unbecoming of the evergreen model, we have seen a steady decline within gaming as a whole. ‘Ghost Recon’, a once famed tactical shooter, turned into a free-to-play nightmare in the name of ‘Ghost Recon: Phantoms’, which did nothing but alienate fans and attract a minority of players that would be interested in this model and this franchise simultaneously, resulting in the very predictable collapse of the game years later, and a return to the previous style of gameplay with ‘Breakpoint’. ‘Battleborn’, ‘The Culling’, and ‘Evolve’ all ended up becoming free-to-play, either from the start or later on, but all failed, and one by one their servers were shutdown. But the specter of the evergreen model would not simply die with the failure of various free-to-play models for gaming companies that attempted to dive into them. No, its deeply infectious, cancerous roots pierced down into the heart of gaming. For the advent of online gaming brought both a boon to itself and the community surrounding it, while also bringing a bane; DLC.
Games which are not free-to-play could always fall back on the lucrative model of DLC to fill the profit-void between the development of titles. Previously DLC had existed as an extension of the gameplay and even the story, existing in the form of “expansions”; offering novel approaches to sustaining an IP and a userbase with reasonably priced content that could greatly extend playtime. Now with the gradual procession of time and with the twisted evolution of “expansions”, we have content that is minimal while costing exorbitant amounts, with companies sometimes even holding content from a game’s release in order to release it later on for an additional fee, or as a pre-order exclusive in order to ensure guaranteed income.
One of the biggest abusers of this model that I am personally familiar with was ‘Payday 2’. If you buy that game today, you are looking at a steep price of around $200 USD for all of its DLC, when it is not on sale that is. There are other games that do this as well, oh god do they do this. ‘DCS World’, a popular “free-to-play” game that offers incredibly realistic flight simulations, offers DLC in the form of detailed vehicles. You can fly things such as the F/A 18, the F-15, the Black Shark 3 helicopter, all within the framework of the DCS game. I just hope you’re ready to shell out 50, 60, 70, or even 80 dollars for each one of those individual vehicles though, and if you want the complete library of vehicles, be even more ready to spend a jaw-dropping 3,438 USD.
While you could argue that “this is content that is still high quality”, I would argue against that claim. For ‘Payday 2’, you are paying roughly $10 for a single heist mission, half of the grand total of what the original game’s asking price was; $20. For half the price, one would expect half the content of the original game, at least. The quality-to-cost ratio is being masked by the continued support of a game when that continued support is only at the expense of over-priced fees for minimal content. For ‘DCS’, you pay up to $70 or more for a single vehicle, but it comes with nothing other than the base components of said vehicle. It does not come with any campaigns or missions or special utilities, it simply exists within a vacuum. If we take a look at the previous model for flight sim games, you paid anywhere from 40 to 60 dollars, usually for a single vehicle, sometimes with a couple of playable vehicles, but they also came with their own fully fledged campaigns, unique assets, specialized gameplay mechanics, and even exclusive multiplayer features. In essence, you paid for just as much, if not less than a typical ‘DCS’ vehicle, while getting more content. If you want fully-fledged campaigns for ‘DCS’, well, get ready to shell out an additional $13 for the vehicles you already own, to play something that is equal to much of which you could download for free from the User Created Missions for the game on its forum – it does not even feature STEAM workshop support, despite having a wealth of mod support.
What I am essentially boiling it all down to is that the evergreening of gaming has turned into paying a premium for what was expected to be offered at the point of purchase only a mere decade and a half ago, while also seeing beloved franchises turned into money printing schemes for business stability, causing a foreseeable secondary collapse of the gaming market. Only instead of it being the result of 8 different consoles all with the same exact game like back in 1983, it is going to be 80 different games requiring hundreds of dollars for the “complete experience”. And on top of that, it is killing franchises that were once successful, by forcibly inserting mechanics that are at odds with the gameplay style that the customer-base has come to expect from these franchises, veritably destroying them in the eyes of fans, and needlessly diluting them in an attempt to create a money-siphoning paradigm.
While I can see this from the business perspective as being a reasonable “out” against the backdrop of spending tens of millions of dollars on a single release title that may or may not even do well, while competing against the veritable behemoths of companies like Naughty Dog, Capcom, and Rockstar Games who specialize in making said products, this is a mistake, and one that is now beginning to cost companies money of their own, spending millions to create games and transform franchises into these evergreen models, only for them to start becoming rejected by the communities at large. The only true “out” I see for companies, from a survivability and viability avenue without relying on expansive and costly DLC or free-to-play “evergreen” models, is the restructuring of what a single title release means, both in scope and cost. It is no longer financially viable to spend 2 to 3 years developing a single game that will retail for 60-70 dollars and hoping it succeeds when up to 100 million dollars are at stake. The only viable route I see, while still maintaining the integrity of the content for the customer, is releasing smaller scale titles that cost overall less to the customer. Episodic releases are one avenue that companies could take, with pitfalls of their own, but at least the customer is receiving a product that is self-contained, not reliant on the addition of DLC to extend its life. Releasing cheaper and shorter titles for 30 or 40 dollars instead of 60 or 70 is another option, one which has worked incredibly well for titles such as ‘Robocop: Rogue City’ and ‘Terminator: Resistance’, and which have been received well by the users around said games.
Companies have a responsibility to their customers, not the other way around, which is what this evergreening model has become. They are putting the onus of their existence onto the player, blackmailing them into sustaining them with crooked business models instead of actually providing them with worth-while content to justify their own existence as a company. Players do not “owe” you anything. Companies owe it to themselves to release something that players want to play, and not bait them into supporting them with the hopes that they release something in the future that will adequately entertain, or being drip-fed content with highly inflated costs. Because just remember, we as customers can always go into our backlogs of older media and finish/replay those games instead. We do have alternatives, ones that you provided already a mere decade ago.
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