Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 1, 2025 21:08 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Unintended consequences by farnz
Parent article: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

> It hasn't, however, happened in models and games, magazine or book publishing; the quirky, niche cultural activities have continued to happen.

It has happened in games. The websites and forums are mostly dead, and even professional review magazines are more dead than alive. Most of the new independent content is on Youtube. It's pure natural selection: authors who publish on Youtube can actually get some income stream going. And so they produce more content, as a result. Some of them even become professional Youtube content creators.

And it's terrible. Youtube has content guidelines and will gladly fuck up your channel for any reason (or no reason whatsoever). To give an example, there was a channel RZXArchive that contained playthroughs of ZX-Spectrum games. Its author passed away, and a couple of years later the channel got nuked by Youtube, presumably as a result of a copyright strike.

So yeah, I think that the way forward is to make it possible for websites to accept micropayments. Ads had served as a way to do that for a while, but they are now completely useless.

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 2, 2025 16:34 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

You say it's happened in games - but you then tell me about magazines and forums, and not games. As far as I can tell, looking at my shelf of board games, while Hasbro does indeed dominate, there's plenty of smaller publishers still out there, from people like Asmodee and their various brands, down to small companies that still keep putting out games (some of which have only put out a single game so far).

And yes, the content put out by enthusiasts currently goes to YouTube, because it's the cheap way to do it - you can even get paid. But when that goes away, enthusiasts can, and will, go elsewhere - even if they have to pay to get their message out. They did in the 1960s, they did in the 1990s, and they will in future, as long as the cost of doing so isn't prohibitive ($100/month is doable, $1,000/month is not).

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:14 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

I meant "computer games".

> They did in the 1960s, they did in the 1990s, and they will in future, as long as the cost of doing so isn't prohibitive ($100/month is doable, $1,000/month is not).

I don't think so. Younger people will just not be interested in it. In 1960-s there was no other alternative, now there is.

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:20 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

Even computer games seem fairly healthy to me; yes, Sony, EA, Microsoft and Valve (Steam) control a lot of the market, but I'm seeing plenty of indie devs putting stuff out on itch.io, on their own websites (with their own payment mechanisms) etc. It's not gone away - it's just that (for now) Valve is being a good corporate citizen, so everybody's using them.

If Steam, YouTube, TikTok et al go away, or start charging insane amounts to host with them, or put in restrictions that are too painful to comply with, people will move.

After all, in the 1960s, there absolutely were corporate-controlled alternatives on offer; there was even an official Star Trek magazine. It's just that the enthusiasts wanted to get their stuff out, didn't want to comply with the corporate restrictions, and could afford to find an alternative. And that last bit is crucial to what enthusiasts will do when the corporate platforms lock down - they will find alternatives, and as long as affordable (hobby price grade) alternatives exist, they'll move.

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 2, 2025 18:57 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, I keep being unclear. I mean magazines and sites that are _about_ games and gaming. Not the games themselves.

The sites still exist, but they have only a small percentage of the overall gaming population and are clearly in decline. While YouTube channels are flourishing (e.g. "Linus Tech Tips").

Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 3, 2025 9:24 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

From my perspective, that's just the normal shifts in the marketplace, and if YouTube becomes unviable as a place for content creators to put up content (e.g. demands $1,000/month just to keep your content available, plus subscriptions from viewers, too), the content will move elsewhere. It happens to be focusing in on YouTube right now because that's a platform that will pay you to provide content, whereas you'd have to pay to host it ad-free on Vimeo or similar.

I don't however, see that this means that the content will remain on YouTube forever; for now, YouTube offers a great deal for hosting content (it pays you a considerable amount), so that's where the creators of interesting content are congregating, but as YouTube puts limits on creators, they'll sort out things like Nebula, or even just paying for private video hosting from platforms like Vimeo. Thus, I'm not concerned about the risk of everything congregating on YouTube; people can, and do, move away from platforms where the alternative is better value to them.