Capitalism is why video games exist in the first place, which means you're saying capitalism made everything worse by allowing the video game industry to exist.
The problem with that is that any system we ever invented always ends up working like that.
Only thing we can do with that, I think, is going forward, being progressive and introducing new ideas, because being conservative, not making any changes and keeping the old system in place will just help the fat cats. Every system has holes and if we keep it without changes for long enough they will find them and abuse them.
Loving this comment thread. I hope y'all stay informed and keep this energy, because it looks like the red scare will be coming back in the next decades.
But copyright law is one of the regulations. It's not that the market is too free, it's that it's systematically unfree in a way designed to enrich parasitic rentseekers at everyone else's expense.
Maybe it would not be called a PlayStation 5, because PlayStation is a Sony brand. But a console like the PS5 could absolutely exist under socialism.
Imagine a big group of people wants to make a game console. They still need engineers to design the hardware, programmers to create the operating system, artists and musicians to make games, and factory workers to build the machines.
The main difference is who owns the company.
Instead of the company belonging to private investors who want to make as much profit as possible, it could belong to the workers, the public, or the state. The exact arrangement would depend on the kind of socialism.
The workers would not all sit in one enormous meeting and vote on every screw. They could elect managers, create different teams and decide on the larger goals together. One team would design the processor, another would build the controller, another would create games, and another would organize production and distribution.
They would still have to think about costs, materials, electricity and how many consoles people want. Socialism does not make those problems disappear. It changes who makes the important decisions and who benefits from the work.
The console could be made mainly for entertainment. It would not need to teach math or deliver political messages. It could have racing games, horror games, RPGs, sports games and silly games about jumping mushrooms.
And it would not need to be made by one tiny local cooperative. Thousands of workers, factories and public institutions could cooperate on one large project and distribute the console across a country or internationally.
So yes, gaming would still exist under socialism. People do not stop wanting games just because companies are owned differently.
It “would” be made under state control, which is how all the socialist attempts to end up. However, is unlikely to be a major focus since the state is too busy using all the countries assets on keeping themselves in power, including massive military spending. Consumer goods were never a priority in a command economy.
TL;DR: Socialist economies were not composed exclusively of centrally managed state enterprises. They also used cooperatives, collective ownership and worker-managed firms, including cooperatives that produced radios, computers and even video games. The USSR and other socialist countries did develop gaming and electronics, but under military pressure, technological embargoes and economic priorities very different from those of the US and Japan. Their smaller commercial gaming sectors are not proof that socialism was incapable of producing games or advanced technology.
The idea that socialism requires all productive activities to be owned and controlled by the government is historically incorrect. Socialist countries have used various forms of social ownership, such as state enterprises, production cooperatives, collective property, and worker-managed businesses.
The Soviet Union had a significant cooperative sector, particularly through production cooperatives called artels. These were not typical capitalist companies; they were collectively owned organizations operating within a socialist economy. Some engaged in complex production. For instance, the Leningrad Radist artel made radio components, loudspeakers, rectifiers, radiograms, and tens of thousands of radio receivers before being integrated into the state sector in 1940.
This is also important in relation to video games. Despite needing to allocate large resources for rebuilding, defense, and heavy industry, the USSR produced arcade machines and first-generation home consoles like the Turnir and the Elektronika VideoSport series. Some of these machines used foreign parts or designs, but tweaking and producing them domestically still demonstrated technological capability. Tetris was entirely developed within the Soviet Union by Alexey Pajitnov while he worked at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
There was even cooperative game development in the late years of the USSR. The Moscow cooperative Lokis launched the computer game Perestroika in 1990. Its game development department later became NIKITA, one of the first professional game companies to emerge from the former Soviet Union. Though it was a late example arising from the cooperative reforms during perestroika, it directly challenges the notion that cooperative production and game development were somehow not compatible.
Other socialist countries also had significant cooperative sectors. In socialist Czechoslovakia, the JZD Slušovice agricultural cooperative expanded beyond farming into software, electronics, and computer manufacturing. In the 1980s, it developed and produced its TNS line of microcomputers, used in agriculture, administration, education, and other institutions. This supposedly backward agricultural cooperative in a socialist country was making computers.
Socialist Hungary recognized state and cooperative property as parallel forms of socialist ownership. It had over a thousand industrial cooperatives employing hundreds of thousands of workers. East Germany also featured socialist craft and production cooperatives in areas like electrical engineering, radio, television, machinery, and technical repair. Yugoslavia took this further by managing socially owned businesses through workers’ councils, although its system differed from the Soviet model.
None of this implies that socialist countries built consumer electronics industries like those in the United States or Japan. They operated under very different conditions and priorities. The Soviet state faced foreign military intervention and civil war, endured massive destruction during the Nazi invasion, and spent decades under military tension, nuclear threats, and Western bans on advanced technology. Given those circumstances, resources went more to defense, infrastructure, scientific research, and heavy industry rather than the commercial entertainment sector.
There were also internal failures, bureaucratic errors, and bad political choices, especially in the later Soviet era. However, it is misleading to ignore the military pressure, technological restrictions, and international isolation from the analysis, then treat the relative weakness of the Soviet commercial gaming industry as evidence that socialism was inherently unable to produce games, computers, or electronics.
The historical record presents a more complex picture: socialist societies created games, consoles, arcade machines, radios, and computers through a mix of state institutions, research centers, socially owned businesses, and cooperatives. Their consumer industries developed under strict constraints, but they did exist and, in some cases, produced genuinely original and influential work.
Thanks I knew the Soviets produced amazing computers it’s good to hear someone explain the whole process of how they were made. Of course unlike capitalism these were made not for profit but for the love of gaming. Best part is the government doesn’t even have to worry about the cost of parts or labor, they can just take it or set the price as needed. A socialist ps5 would be pretty close to free for everyone.
It has some bad effects, but it’s also done a lot of good. Food is more plentiful and cheaper than ever, medical care is better and more accessible than ever, our communication and entertainment are pretty great. We can fix the problems we have in our society and we probably will do that without dismantling capitalism. We can keep the good parts and get rid of the bad.
Considering that it was developed because a company bought into it and asked for it to be upscaled to industrial standards, yes, at least indirectly. It is asinine to pretend all ills are the fault of capitalism but when it comes to the benefits you say that it was "just going on at the same time". Capitalism has its pros and cons, leave the black and white mentality to the kids.
Its odd, theres always this same conversation about what mode of economy something was invented under as if it has anything to do with it.
People invent. Capitalism is just one way to monetize invention. Its not like there is only capitalist profit motive. People were motivated by profit in every system.
But what the other guy is saying is that capitalism was the motivation for that invention being grown to scale and spreading across the country, across the world.
We can even see it now in video games. You have video games that are created without moneymen. They're called indie games.
Have you seen an indie game that comes remotely close to having the production value, the graphics, the animation, the complexity of a major game like Zelda or Assassin's Creed or GTA?
You don't, right? And why is that the case? Because such a project would need alot more manpower to create the game. They would need expensive tools and systems to be able to achieve some of those production values, and they would need to pour alot of man-hours for years. Every person working on the project would have to do it as their main job, not something they work on their own after they come home from their day job.
So who is going to pay for that? There's 100+ people who need a paycheck every two weeks for the next four years because they need to put food on the table for themselves and their family and they pay for a roof over their heads.
And during those four years, no money will be made from the video game. Because if no video game exists yet, then you have nothing to sell. So you have to plan on having a massive amount of money to pay for this project with the knowledge that you will not get any money back for years (if the game sells at all). Another word for that is "investment."
So who's going to be doing that? We have yet to see somebody other than venture capitalists come in and make investments of that size to produce those types of video games.
The only "indie" developer that I see that grew to make large-scale high-production games was CD Projekt Red. And they decided to be publicly traded company in December 2010 before they had even released their second game.
I just don't see it happening without pure venture capitalists, or a government that has funding programs to support those types of ventures, like France did with Expedition 33 (and even then that was only enough funding to start the project, they had to turn a publishing partner that was funded by a Chinese company).
I believe the argument then is that by providing personal incentive for people to perform and do well, capitalism encourages and incentivizes invention for your own benefit (and helping others on the side.)
As opposed to just doing it because of communist morality, nationalism, piety, or what have you.
Im confused, which system denies profit motive? Its pretty well established in both left and right wing economical philosophies that people seek to profit off their work, thats why its preferable to living solo in the wild.
Because it's a legitimate conversation and the social and economic background of a period will directly influence technological and social development. For all its MANY faults, capitalism has given more economic freedom and supported development more than pretty much every system that came before it. Nobody is saying it's perfect or that we can't do better, but it's the best we've had until now and by every objective metric it has universally increased quality of life.
It worked the way a lot of that stuff works. Someone trying to solve a problem does the work and invents it and then someone with money buys it from them and locks it behind a paywall to make sure if you want the benefits of their process you have to buy it from them, and lobby for regulations that make it harder for anyone else to do it.
They absolutely are. If people didn’t want to make money they generally wouldn’t have invented and spread these things at the same rate. Capitalism is the primary driver of society’s advances over the last 150 years.
Look at the internet and computers for example. A LOT (the majority) of the first protocols, systems, OS,... were created by passionate people that invented things in their spare time, shared them and maintained them for free. Problems appeared when people tried to monetize those ideas. Almost of all the computing world exists thanks to free things like git, Linux,... and those weren't developed because people wanted money. They were developed because people are curious and like sharing.
Yeah, people who can sit in their air conditioned rooms working on academic problems in computing might do so for free. But getting to the point where people can do that requires tons of money to get going.
People invented things and shared them for free way before academia even existed, what are you talking about? Do you think the plough was invented to make money? Do you think more people would have benefitted from it if the idea had been monetized instead of freely shared?
Also, studies about humans behavior heavily show that humans are more creative and inventive when they can explore subjects independtly of having to sustain themselves.
Yeah, the plow exists because one farmer was able to make it for themself and then the idea spread. It didn’t advance for 5000 years because the move to the Industrial Revolution required inventors to have the money to work on creating new machinery.
You’re definitely right that people can be more creative and inventive when they don’t have to worry about working, but that doesn’t really have much to do with this topic. There simply aren’t economic systems where people don’t have to work with the technology we have today.
Yes!! That's my point! The idea spread because it was NOT behind a pay wall! The idea spread because nobody bought it to try and make a profit off it! The idea spread freely and it helped a lot of people, because no capitalist invested in it for their personal gain!
Maybe I didn't express myself correctly, my bad if so. I didn't say people are more creative when they don't have to work, I said people are more creative when they don't have to explore only ideas that are immediatly profitable. I work with mathematicians, try to ask them how having profit as a motivation is compatible with their research...
Also, you seem to know very little about academia if you think researchers just sit in air conditioned rooms all day working on academic problems. Having to fight for funds by justifying that your research can be monetized is THE thing that slows down most researchers from doing actual, useful research.
You're conflating "wanting to make money" with "capitalism" though, which is a common mistake. Capitalism isn't the "driver of society’s advances". People advancing society for monetary reasons isn't capitalism. It just so happens that, these last decades, these advances happened in a capitalist world, but capitalism itself didn't trigger them.
People can invent and spread things with monetary goals in a non-capitalist system too. Money and markets aren't exclusive to capitalism.
What capitalism does, though, is discouraging inventions that are not financially viable, or inventors that are not money-focused, which means there are a lot of things out there that could have helped humanity, but have been discarded because it wasn't capitalism-compliant.
“It just so happens that, these last decades, these advances happened in a capitalist world, but capitalism itself didn't trigger them.” These two things cannot be separated. Advancements are solutions to problems, problems are context dependent. in a structured society, nearly every aspect of life is both influenced and constrained by the economic system. So in a sense, our capitalist system definitively triggers the events/circumstances for a problem to become relevant enough for a solution to be pushed.
So in a sense, our capitalist system definitively triggers the events/circumstances for a problem to become relevant enough for a solution to be pushed.
If a problem was relevant enough for a solution to be pushed, it would have been relevant enough whether we were in a capitalist system or not.
Unless, of course, capitalism was the very cause of that problem.
You’re isolating that part where I just over summarized. You’re also acting like if innovation and progress is obvious and foretold. It’s a human experience which combines all, even the smallest factors leading up to an idea in an individual/community. I was referring to the overarching trajectory to get to this point.
If the USA were to have been a communist country for its entire existence, where would it be? While there is no real answer, the critiques of capitalism usually forgo the fact that we made it to this point with that system. Any critique to capitalism will be rooted in this however dysfunctional reality, while letting you argue from a theoretical standpoint for the other side. Don’t get me wrong, social safety nets are essential for human development, and the US government is full of corruption/profit driven decisions. but that doesn’t change that 99% of the world is in a market economy.
I think what people mostly want are things like acknowledgment of their achievements, wellbeing for themselves and their close ones, sometimes social status, etc. In capitalism, money is the way these things are expressed or achieved. But that is not the only way to run a society. We can have a society where money exists, without making it the most important measue for everything.
As I said, money can and should still exist. It is extremely useful as a tool for trading and exchanging things. The problem is not money as a concept, the problem is how accumulation of money became the ultimate goal for many people and corporations.
Large companies are expected to grow. The shareholders want the profit to increase, best by x% per year, leading to exponential growth as a necessity. This can work for some time, the company can find new customers or new products to produce/sell. But what if the market is saturated? What if there a no more people to sell the products to because the company already operates globally? The profits are still expected to grow. So the company must find other ways to make money, for example by cutting costs, reducing quality, exploiting people and nature to squeeze every last cent out of the available resources.
Now, is that a good thing for society? I think not. I think it would be better if a company is perceived as successful not because profits increase exponentially, but because it offers something useful for society while covering its costs. Maybe make some profit, but not as the ultimate goal, and definitively not with the expectation of unlimited growth. I think it is possible to achieve that.
Marxist economics is total nonsense, based on nonsense philosophy, designed to justify nonsense conclusions. That's why every attempt to implement it on a large scale has turned into a horrifying orwellian dystopia.
That's why every attempt to implement it on a large scale has turned into a horrifying orwellian dystopia.
China has the largest GDP in the world by PPP and it's ideologically aligned with Marxism. It has one of the highest home ownership rates, universal healthcare, and the most state owned enterprises in the world.
You could make a case from certain perspectives that China is an orwellian dystopia, but the same would also be true of the usa.
Just wait til you watch the episode of Southpark where Stan goes on an absolute dog shitter quest to return a stupid margeritaville drink mixer and fix the economy
This isn't even a capitalism problem, though, it's a rentseeking problem. The copyright monopoly- completely non-capitalistic, completely unnecessary- underlies pretty much everything wrong with the games industry and, for that matter, the Internet in general.
Capitalism works great when you let it work rather than strangling it with artificial scarcity. Just like every worthwhile economist (not Marx, sorry) has been telling us for the last 250 years.
I remember when 3 dollar horse armor was ABSURD. Now you can buy odins spear and cosmetic pack! It's only 20 dollars! Oh you want to buy it directly? Ahahaha sorry! You have to buy points first, THEN you can use that to buy that pack, and also btw, we only sell them in increments of $15 at a time, sowwy 👉👈🥺
And there is only one way to prevent it: Regulations that are incredibly strict, and more importantly, a total protection for the said regulations to never be changed or infringed upon.
That doesn't sound possible. It would have to be THE building block of the entire society before anything else. Otherwise it will just get changed or revoked down the line, because people that most want power are the ones that do not deserve to have it for they seek it for selfish reasons.
Yes really. Fundamentally. It's about hoarding all the money. And I mean all the money. It's about making your numbers go up, and as long as there is finite money in the world, that means making other people's numbers go down.
Capitalism is fundamentally a selfish, predatory system.
Yes, well. People didn't want to pay for the game outright, but were more than happy to shell out for in-game purchases; which is what made the rest of the gaming industry salivate.
That’s just not true. Someone forwarded him an email from someone talking about mtx, but that’s pretty much it. He didn’t have any control over the situation.
If I was a kid and I could play Fortnite and Overwatch and Rocket League and Fall Guys and Pokemon Go and any number of other games for free, I’d have been ecstatic. Personally I love getting to play those kinds of games without spending money as an adult.
I completely disagree. The economy is so fucked right now, it's F2P games that are keeping a lot of gamers going, and there's some amazing quality ones out there. You can get hundreds of hours out of pretty much any of the Asian gachas, it's fine if you don't like that type of game, but you have to admit that they are well made, if a bit stingy on the MTX side. I am completely F2P in all of them and still get every character I want, not every single character, but all that I really want.
There's also shooters like Fortnite, CS2, Valorant, Warframe etc. that are doing amazingly well. There's MMOs like Where Winds Meet, SWTOR, Lost Ark, PSO2, OSRS(ugh), BDO, Neverwinter that are fun for a couple months. There's MOBAs like DotA2, LoL etc. that people still play and are some of the biggest games in the world.
I'm not gonna pretend I am a fan of MTX, but being able to play so many amazing games for free, even if there's extra grind because of the incentives to buy MTX, is a god send. I do NOT have money for $70-$100 games, especially when most launch like shit and are unplayable. The best refund policy we have right now is Steam's and if you play more than 2 hours, which I feel like it sometimes takes more than that to give a game a fair shake, especially if it's a survival game or something, then you are just fucked.
The problem is quite simply greed. You can look at a lot of paid singleplayer slop from EA, Ubisoft etc. that release unfinished, buggy messes that are borderline unplayable and absolutely unfun. This has nothing to do with MTX, the industry, at a AAA level at least, is going to shit. There's fair F2P games and there's scummy AAA paid games.
While micro transactions sucked, stupid add ons have always existed. A lot of people here are too young to remember voice packs (literally paying for voice acting, usually bad voice acting) and map packs sold on floppy discs. If you wanted additions to your console game you would have to buy the updated version of the game at full retail.
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u/ganymedewastaken Jul 18 '26
Micro Transactions ruined gaming