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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Will enshitification accelerate with even more monopolistic behavior?
You know you are well within your rights to never play any Blizzard/Activision/Microsoft/EA games....right?
Vote with your wallet
Someone on reddit put this perfectly in my opinion. Saving you the trip:
You know how it goes: Some video game developer or publisher does something uncool - release a singleplayer game with predatory microtransactions, make a new game that is just a copy-pasted version of the last installment, lay off hundreds of employees for thinly disguised reasons, use some draconian DRM, get called out by an insider report for abhorrent labor conditions, etc. - and the forums and subreddits are full of comments like:
"They get away with that because you keep on buying their games!" "Hit them where it hurts: Vote with your wallet!" "They will continue to do so as long as the games sell!" “Just don't give them your money!” And I think this sentiment is utterly, totally and hopelessly naïve. Publishers don't care about your 60 bucks. They don't care about the 20 people you might convince to not make a purchase. They don't care about the loss of 1000 consumers that won't play a game because of some unpopular decision. All this is but a tiny drop compared to the sheer uninformed and uninterested masses that make up the bulk of consumers and their revenue.
The "vote with your wallet"-mantra is indicative of a culture that puts the burden of action on the individual instead of the collective. It banishes the obligation to act to the private sphere instead of the public or the political one. It's indicative of a mindset that every problem should be solved the capitalist way, i.e. by using or not using money.
I would even go one step further and say that it is actually harmful to achieving change. The political theorist Chantal Mouffe points out the importance of affects in politics: passion and emotions are strong motivator for calling for change and participating in collective movements. A person that cannels his emotions into the decision not to buy something will feel like they have done their part. This hinders their will to participate in other maybe more effective ways of problem-solving (lobbying for political regulation, exercising public pressure, initiating coordinated campaigns (petitions, shitstorms, etc.), take part in a union, etc.). […]
Link: https://reddit.com/r/truegaming/s/KnxzgKuk3o
If the "problem" is that you are unhappy when a shitty new product appears, then the problem is you. Because you've embraced consumerism so deeply that you don't know what to do with shitty new products.
Here's an idea: don't buy them. Not in order to send someone a message, "vote" for a better product, or otherwise take on the burden of product development. Don't buy them because you don't need an endless stream of new products, especially shitty new products. You don't even need to buy great new products to be happy.
Just to take one example, I open Word docs on Office 2010. Not because I have been trying to send a message to Microsoft for over a decade. Maybe their newest version of Office is great. I wouldn't know. But Word 2010 still works fine, so I don't need another one. Diablo 3 still works fine too. I don't want or need to convince a company to build a new improved version. They need to convince me to buy it.
I agree with you on all accounts. You should not buy stuff just because it is new.
But I think you didn’t get the point of the text that I posted:
Companies abandon their old products which leads to security risks due lack of updates. Same goes btw for kitchen appliances. If you bought a fridge 10 yrs ago it might still work, not super effiecient and maybe missing the newest gimicks but that is fine with me. What bothers me is that you won’t get a technician to repair your old fridge for less than you pay for a new one. The parts are too sparse and expensive for that.
And it is the same with nearly every product out there. You used to be able to buy shoes that make it 10 yrs. Today that is rare not because companies want that but because most people have no need for it.
And that is where policy comes in. Consumerism needs to go. Only way to do that is either information (which I doubt will work) or outlawing large parts of it and forcing sustainability on everyone.