1. Next generation systems may disregard what we actually want, but we need to “get with the times” and support one of them anyway
This is a dangerous and shitty idea.
There was a time when we bought stuff because it seemed futuristic and cool. We thought it was legitimately exciting, and — when we found out our friends had it — we became jealous.
Now we buy stuff because we hate ourselves. In the back of our minds, we believe that we actually deserve the punishment corporations are giving us. We tell ourselves that, hey, we had it pretty good for a while, but let’s face it, now it’s time to accept the inevitable. They’ve got important needs too! Profit margins, bonuses, and the economy is rough for all of us! We should just make the best of it, swallow our pride, and go with the flow, because we’ll never have it the way we want it again anyway.
I’m sorry, but fuck that idea with a euphorbia horrida (look it up).
2013 has — for reasons I don’t understand — allowed American gaming media to take off their blindfolds for a moment and acknowledge the stagnant bullshit in the industry; but we need to go further. We realized that we prefer indie developers, miss the days of our youth when we never knew what to expect, and have become starved for real innovation. “I’m tired of playing the same game over and over,” we say, “I want something new. Where’s the new shit, publishers? Stop giving us the the same shit with a new paintjob! Stop giving us distractions like Netflix and Hulu and ordering fucking pizza and give us something good! Stop selling our loyalty to your conglomerate partners!” We keep saying it, and they keep ignoring us. The next generation is your chance to starve them until they listen.
Let them get with the fucking “times”. We’re fed up with shiny disappointments, boring gimmicks, and hollow hype. Let them find out the hard way that their corporate hegemony has a fatal weakness: we don’t need them. They’ve expertly alienated intelligent people from the gaming scene with their showers of blood and their testosterone and their treadmill of unoriginality, and now they don’t even pretend to care about what we (the shmucks who stuck around and hoped for something better) actually want.
Don’t buy a new console this year. Let them sweat. I guarantee you, the smoke-and-mirror trick is going to fade fast this time; there will be no honeymoon. You’ll buy a console, plug it in, and instantly regret it. You’ll try to wring a few dollars worth out of it, tell yourself things might get better, but then you’ll realize the current consoles are better, the PC is better yet, and things are only getting worse from here if we indulge this endless slide into bullshit. The old formula is already struggling to hang on, and they need us to survive despite their showboating. Their desperation stinks. The next generation is not for us, my friends. It’s for them, because they’d have us believe that they’re the victims. We pirate their games, buy used copies, don’t spend money to unlock the content on their disk (also called “DLC” (for some reason)), and didn’t buy 200 million copies of the Tomb Raider reboot in the first month! We’re villains, and this is our punishment. It’s their turn to have fun! It will never be your turn, you bloated, corrupt, diseased sons of bitches. It will always be ours. You serve at our pleasure. Fuck your grand 8 year plan to destroy customer rights and “control the living room”.
This brings me to my second idiotic idea:
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