Meanwhile, in 2024, the video game industry will turn a staggering $282 billion in revenue. Video games worldwide make more than twice the money of all film and all music combined.

OK, but how much did actual game sales make? I’m willing to bet the proportion of that money this is citing that’s hyper-exploitive microtransactions is pretty damn high.

I have no real interest in a library over owning games (I did pay the ~$30 difference in Black Friday sales to add the library for a year on PS5, but I own my games for the most part), and I think everything being day one gamepass on Xbox weakened their already not great first party ecosystem and encourages microtransactions to an extent.

But the biggest existential threat isn’t “pay $x a year to rent a library”. It’s lootboxes and other microtransactions built to milk everyone they can for every penny they can. It fundamentally alters the design of games when “how can we extract more cash” is part of the process, and it’s not something that just happens after the fact. It also, unlike renting games, actually pushes invasive anticheat, always online requirements, and onerous mod restrictions on games that should be single player, because they can’t milk you for cosmetics if fans can make their own for free.