We Must Unite Against Anti-Consumer Policies

As I'm writing this the Switch 2 has been out for around 2 months and every few weeks we have discovered more anti consumer practices Nintendo is thoroughly leaning into this generation of their console. Recently, we found out that if you, as a customer of theirs, buy a used game that the prior owner ripped from the card, you will be banned from using your entire console. Not from that game, not from online play in that game, the entire console that you buy becomes a useless piece of e-waste until Nintendo graces you with their infallible decision to either, unban you and let you use the console you spent your hard earned money on, or for them to tell you "Too bad. You should have bought a new game instead."

Now, them hopefully unbanning you has nothing to do with the fact that these are the actions Nintendo has decided to take. They have decided they don't care about their customers spending money on their consoles. They're willing to punish people who don't deserve it. And they want you to strictly follow their rules because otherwise you don't deserve to play their console even if your already bought it.

This is the most recent development in Nintendo's anti consumers Switch 2 saga. One that includes such realities as joy-cons that still drift and are now harder to repair, the craziness that is their 3 versions of the kinds of "physical" games they sell (full game on cartridge, only a key on the cartridge for you to download, and just a digital key on a piece of paper), selling you not the console but a "license" to use the physical console that you bought which they can revoke at any time (something other console manufacturers are seemingly also doing), charging 10 bucks for the tutorial game that should have been free, banning people who mod their switch even if they only do it to make their UI look less bland (Nintendo could always just offer themes to solve this), having some kind of tech that keeps third party docks from working for the console, requiring use of a type of micro SD card that is unnecessarily fast and far more expensive than normal micro SD cards (256gb normal SD card is 25 bucks vs the 256 express SD card being 70) in order to store games on it, and of course being the first company to introduce 80 dollar games for no reasonable reason (other companies have since come out to say they aren't going to increase the price and even Microsoft backtracked on their price increase), raising the prices of their prior gen consoles because of Tariffs just to keep their margins even though do they really need to when their margins were probably already really large given how old the tech is. This is all true and all insanely convoluted and stupid and I'm sure there will be more revelations after this comes out or that I have missed.

Of course, Nintendo isn't alone when it comes to this type of Anti-Consumer BS, but they are by far leading the damn charge, even beyond their most recent console by doing everything they can to shut down emulators and then steal their work, or their limited runs on games or mini-consoles, or making basically the same game over and over again with limited improvements because consumers will eat it up since its Pokemon, or many other policies they partake in. That said, this article is not just me shitting on Nintendo, that'd be too easy. This is me shitting on the industry refusing to put customers, and players, first. In this article I'm going to go over some other ways this is happening, talk about how we got here, and then end at a point where there's a way for us to fight back that is, hopefully, actually feasible.

Micro-transactions/Season (Battle) passes/loot boxes/Game Pass/DRM

We all know about the horrible standard in gaming that may as well have started with Horse Armor back in Oblivion. Micro-transactions earn companies billions and should be contributing to keeping the prices of games low overall but has really just continued to grow and grow until they became standard in almost every single game out there. The anti consumerism nature of these is plain if you really just think that they don't make the majority of their money off of the people who buy sparingly. They make the majority of their money off of the people who buy a fuck ton. The whales define this feature and they ruin people's lives, pushing them into debt and depression.

Loot boxes are even worse micro-transactions that were based on the idea of "let's keep our players from buying what they want to own and make them buy random boxes instead so they just keep purchasing to be able to get what they want. Eventually. Maybe." This largely has fallen out of fashion in much of the gaming industry for one reason that I will cover in the next session. The problem here is that it just pushes the Whales to spend even more money pushing them further and further and further down the hole that they had already gotten them stuck in. These are anti consumer because it doesn't matter if they benefit some, it actually matters if they are harmful to anyone. Micro-transactions and Loot Boxes are harmful and, again, ruin peoples lives. This is also ignoring how kids will sometimes get a hold of their parents cards and manage to spend thousands driving their parents into debt that they did not choose to be into. Whether this is on the parents or not isn't important, they're still damaging and anti-consumer.

Of course, then we also have Season passes or, for some games, battle passes. They're both the same thing. The problem is these might often seem to be beneficial to people, you pay 10 bucks or whatever and get a bunch of stuff you can grind out and get for your money without hoping, desperately, you'll get something you want out of the ranks. The problem arises that these are simply ways to further the investment of players into a game to keep them playing so that they buy items on the store. It tries to create a sunk cost fallacy.

All of these above are made even worse with how you purchase them. It's not for simple cash but instead for "in game currency" that never evens out to what you actually need. I, among many others, have purchased in game currency and ended up with left over. That is them trying to keep you coming back. There's people working to combat this that I will cover in the another section but come on, it's obvious that the whole point of this is to create a store in a game that continues to create a sunk cost fallacy.

Companies use this against you, they make you think that you should just keep playing because if you don't then you'd have wasted all that money. That is horrible and viciously anti-consumer. They are feeding off of you and don't want you to second guess yourself. It's fucking awful and the number of people who have had their lives ruined by it is unconscionable. Steph Sterling did a depressingly wonderful piece on this that's linked below but just be warned, it's all about stories of people who have had the greed of the industry ruin them.

Meanwhile there's Game Pass, a service my fellow writer JM Mendez did a recent article defending a couple weeks ago. I'm not here to say Game Pass can't be a great deal right now and isn't pro consumer. I'm here to say that it's only a matter of time until it's not. Microsoft wants it to be the Netflix of videogames, a seemingly worthy goal. But Netflix has also become incredibly anti consumer, offering more and more tiers in order to take away certain features that used to be standard (like day one games on Game Pass now only existing on Game Pass Ultimate and PC), charging for more and more screens, stopping password sharing. These are all anti consumer practices that don't need to happen.

Game Pass is easily one of the best deals in gaming right now, I've used it myself to play some games, but that doesn't change the fact that it will eventually not be. That things will eventually fall apart. Enshittification will come about sooner rather than later.

And then there is DRM, a system for PC games that makes it so you're often not able to play games without an online check with the internet. It's supposed to combat piracy but people still pirate and we have an EU Commission study out there that shows piracy doesn't really lead to decreased sales (referenced below). If anything it allows for a kind of demo for a lot of people to see if they actually want to play your game. DRM is also often commonly known for breaking games, making them unplayable for long stretches of time or causing your game to run significantly worse because it takes up so much of your computers processes. It's also a way that companies keep their customers from truly owning their games. There's a reason that so many games actually sell more copies when they have DRM removed, it's because consumers fucking hate it. And they have every reason to, modern DRM like Denuvo is basically spyware and allows companies access to monitor anything on your system. There are companies that are anti-DRM thankfully, mainly CD Projekt and GOG are great companies to support but even games on Steam can have no DRM. These games with DRM also often lead to you not being able to play games offline, hence the mention of the online check earlier. Imagine you have a handheld PC and you are on a train ride or plane or something and you just want to spend time playing something, because of DRM you are limited to which games allow you to play it offline. This is annoyingly common in the PC gaming space for larger companies and is utterly anti-consumer with it basically keeps you from actually owning your games at all.

Note: we recently found out that Rockstar, and likely other companies eventually, will introduce age verification into their games to make sure kids don't play it, as if that's not the job of parents. This is just as anti consumer as the other things we have talked about. Pushing for age verification is a massive violation of our privacy as consumers to be able to consume how ever much weird or kinky or GTA-like content we could possibly want. Age verification is hopefully an action that will push more people to fight back and drive down sales of games but who knows, it's GTA VI, that shit is likely to sell like hotcakes because it's been so long.

How did this even start?

This is actually rather interesting because so much of it comes down to two things, lack of regulation and the age of people in government. I'm going to get rather political in this section because, well, I'm going over how we got here so I have to.

Okay, first, regulation is supposed to exist for one simple reason, to protect the consumer by regulating the corporations. This has been used many, many, many times to help hundreds of millions of people survive their day to day life. From keeping us from getting salmonella from chickens and eggs, to keeping PFAs and lead out of our water supply, to capping how much of certain chemicals are allowed in pesticides, to keeping people safe in cars by mandating seat belts. These are all things done by regulation in service of protecting citizens. But in recent...decades, we've refused to regulate the newer industries, or ones that have only come into their own during that time, out there. Which leads to Social Media companies helping destroy elections, pushing consistently far right ideologies into the mainstream, and leading to an increase in teen depression rates.

Videogames are like this, an industry that has, only in the last couple decades become so influential which means that no one really knows how to regulate it effectively. This has lead to companies having free reign to push the industry down a path of anti consumerism. Arguably this began with oblivion but it's just gotten worse and worse. Especially with the invention of Live Service games and Free-to-Play stuff as well.

We got here because people didn't fight back enough, people didn't push back enough. We went "well it's just this one thing, its not gonna get worse, its even positive for the industry to give us consumers more options" but that was naive.

Politics also played a key role because we have people in a multitude of countries that have decided to vote for people who both don't understand modern technology and actively fight for the right for companies to fuck over their consumers. We got here because people voted for it with their wallets and with their civic fucking duty. We have no one but ourselves to blame.

How we can fight back.

Well we kinda already are. At least some of us. Specifically in Europe people are actually working towards a better, pro-consumer, videogame industry. They passed legislation that regulated loot boxes as gambling (hence why it was removed from a lot of different games), the Stop Killing Games Initiative has been incredibly important for keeping online only games from becoming non-existent the moment the company no longer wants to pay to keep it online, they're working on getting rid of in game currencies entirely so that you just see the dollar amount and can just buy it instead of having to spend 15 dollars for enough currency to buy something that is only 10 dollars (looking at you Destiny 2). They're doing a lot of good work and one major market making these strides impacts us all. They're the entire reason why all new phones now are using USB-C. They're the ones that stopped how frequent loot boxes were in games when they designated them as gambling which comes with it and 18+ rating in the entire European market. They're the whole reason we have made progress fighting back against these things not just in the videogame industry but the entire tech sphere.

But what about those of us in other areas of the world. What can we do. Well, to put it simply, vote. Both with your wallet and with your right to vote in elections. Voting for people who are young enough to understand these things, who are pro consumer enough to be able to adequately fight back, who are not actively currently trying to push censorship of videogames through the use of payment processors.

Refusing to buy things are also really important of course as I said but there's really only so much we can do as an individual, it's when we join together that things can actually change. Like, for instance, the infamous case of Star Wars Battlefront 2. An EA representative comments on a post on the reddit (picture of comment above), that was complaining about the in game economy, with their reasoning for why they had such brazen loot boxes and anti consumer practices in their game and it was characteristic corporate BS like "giving the player a sense of pride and accomplishment" and shit. It was horrible. So horrible that it became the most down voted comment in reddit history and remains to this day. This caused a massive backlash and EA was forced, because of public perception driven by their horribleness, to walk back how brazen the loot boxes were. People joining together forced EA to back the fuck off and stop being so shit. That's how we make change, we unite.

In the case of Collective Shout, the best way to fight back as a united force has been to call Mastercard and Visa so much that they just get tired of it and back down. They'll say to just email them. Don't. Call call call. Being annoying is a great way to try and stop this. Here's a link to more info about what you can do and where to contact.

At the same time, there are two sides to the coin of possible regulation. Like the age verification I have already mentioned and how Balatro was regulated as an 18+ game because it had poker mechanics so was obviously gambling (thankfully this one was fought against by the Dev and they won so that's positive. Or, as I also mentioned but is far more worth repeating, we are currently in a crisis of the supposed feminist group Collective Shout trying to wield regulation against free expression of games to be NSFW or have NSFW themes. Itch and Steam have caved, at least for now and things keep developing on a weekly basis. A fellow writer of mine has written about this recently with a wonderful write up that I have linked below. Regulation is obviously incredibly important but we as consumers are still the last line of defense on this situation. We are the ones who can stop this, the only ones, if we unite and fight and take a fucking stand.

Why NSFW games were removed from Steam and Itch.io

The influence of advocacy groups like Collective Shout, and what it means for LGBTQ+ and indie game developers.

Exploring The GamesKevin T.C.

Now, an important note when it comes to Nintendo is that they are actually asking for feedback on some of their decisions, specifically their digital key card cartridges for some games. This is the moment when people could unite to force Nintendo to make a change and get rid of that terrible decision. Or it could be a moment when people roll over and let things go. When we had an opportunity to push back and didn't do it enough. Just like with Oblivion.

The Conclusion

The industry has never been entirely pro consumer, we've always had issues with companies making horrible decisions, that's how we even got here to begin with, as I covered. But that doesn't mean we cant fight back now. I'm not saying you need to do much, any amount is positive. If you want to wait for sales to buy games, that's enough. If you want to not buy anything from a company that supports these kinds of things, that's enough. If you want to push for change by voting for better representatives, that's enough. If you just want to speak out about it on social media or write about it, that's enough. If you want to support people who speak out about it either through views or financially in whatever way possible, that's enough. Any amount has to be enough because otherwise we get into purity test areas that lead to just never doing anything and letting the bad guys win.

Personally, I'm going to keep writing about this, I'm going to keep calling this shit out. This is going to be a thing going forward where I call this out because I don't see a whole lot of people doing it in writing format, it needs to be done and I'll do what I can to bring a voice to it. All I can ask of you, reader, is to just try to do better and to remember that we are all in this together.

Meow,

Cat