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00:00Remember, no Russian.
00:06Welcome to Mojo Plays, and we think we've narrowed down the exact moments that damage the video game industry,
00:12and almost all of them are self-inflicted, enthusiastically repeated, and still somehow treated like unavoidable progress.
00:22New for 2078, PlayStation 9's new electronic scores tap straight into your adrenal gland.
00:30Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest
00:35videos.
00:38Endless Acquisitions
00:40It wasn't the plan.
00:41It was a spontaneous creative decision made after years of careful research.
00:45One of the largest deals in industry history didn't just move money around.
00:50It further concentrated power among a tiny group of platform holders and publishers
00:55until the idea of a truly independent major player started looking quaint.
01:00Consolidation has a way of making every future decision safer
01:03and become more focused on protecting the existing empire than building anything new.
01:08The trend didn't arrive overnight, and suddenly studios that once took big creative swings
01:13now spend more time surviving inside larger machines that prefer predictable returns over original risk.
01:19The industry congratulated itself on the scale of the transition,
01:23while the number of places willing to fund ambitious, unproven work continued to shrink.
01:28Power likes company, and it has spent years collecting as much of it as possible.
01:33The result is a business that looks bigger than ever,
01:36while the range of what it is willing to attempt keeps getting narrower.
01:40Almost dying is the best way to learn how not to die!
01:43Or something.
01:44I knew this was gonna work!
01:46E.T. The Extraterrestrial
01:48E.T. The Extraterrestrial combined a rushed license game with massive overproduction
02:00and ended up causing a market collapse that did more than bury cartridges in the desert.
02:05It permanently ended the free-for-all third-party publishing model of the early 1980s
02:10and forced the industry to accept strict platform holder quality control as the new normal.
02:15Nintendo's lockout chip and seal of quality became the template everyone else would eventually follow for years.
02:21The disaster was self-inflicted in the purest sense.
02:25Too many low-effort products chasing the same dollars until the audience simply walked away.
02:30Recovery required giving platform holders the power to decide what was allowed to exist,
02:35which is a trade-off the industry has been living with ever since.
02:39The desert landfill was only the most visible symptom of a business that had temporarily forgotten quality was part of
02:45the product.
02:46Sadly, the lesson didn't stick and seems hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of the past once again.
02:59World of Warcraft's success
03:01Beyond the gates of mighty kingdoms lies a vast, unexplored world.
03:11The unprecedented success of World of Warcraft proved that a game could generate continuous, predictable revenue for years after launch
03:19and changed more than one studio's balance sheet.
03:22It legitimized the games-as-a-service model so thoroughly that pure one-time sales started looking like a risky
03:29relic.
03:29Publisher expectations began to shift towards live operations with recurring income that treated players as ongoing revenue streams rather than
03:38customers who bought a finished product.
03:40The success was real and massive, which only made the lesson more dangerous.
03:45Once the industry saw that a title could keep printing money long after release,
03:50the pressure to design everything around that possibility became harder to ignore.
03:54A single extraordinary case study rewrote the definition of what a healthy game business was supposed to look like
04:01and finished products that didn't keep asking for more money started to feel incomplete by comparison.
04:06You have lost everything.
04:10There is only one choice.
04:15Drink and fulfill your destiny.
04:20Oblivion's Horse Armor DLC
04:22What can I interest you in?
04:25You've got to be kidding.
04:27Although miniscule by today's standards, Oblivion's Horse Armor DLC was the first major high-profile cosmetic microtransaction in a single
04:36-player AAA game.
04:38And it did exactly what it set out to do.
04:41Prove that players would pay for trivial extras.
04:43That proof permanently normalized paid DLC and, later, the broader microtransaction economy across the industry.
04:51What had begun as a novelty horse outfit suddenly became the standard that executives could point to
04:57whenever someone suggested the audience might not want to keep spending after the initial purchase.
05:02The item itself was harmless, but the precedent it set was not.
05:06Once the industry learned that even the smallest digital frills could generate revenue,
05:11the temptation to treat every game as a storefront became difficult to resist.
05:15A single piece of horse armor taught an entire business how little it needed to offer in exchange for more
05:21money.
05:22And the industry has been applying the lesson ever since.
05:31Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare
05:40Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare not only reinvented the established military shooter,
05:46but also became the dominant AAA template that proved the annualized multiplayer-focused model could generate enormous recurring revenue.
05:53This one game permanently raised the commercial bar for what a successful shooter looked like,
05:59and everything that followed had to chase similar numbers or risk being called a disappointment.
06:04The game itself was polished and influential, but the industry's response was to treat its formula as the new minimum
06:10standard
06:11rather than one successful approach among many.
06:14Suddenly, annual releases with a strong multiplayer priority along with the expectation of massive ongoing engagement became the safe path.
06:22Originality that couldn't guarantee the same revenue profile started to look like an unnecessary risk.
06:28Somehow, one excellent game accidentally taught publishers that variation was optional as long as the numbers stayed high.
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06:57Free to play.
07:08Once major publishers saw the revenue potential of free-to-play combined with microtransactions,
07:14the pure premium single-player model that had defined generations of gaming
07:17was suddenly treated like a relic that needed to be left in the past.
07:21Funding and design priorities shifted towards systems that could extract money over time
07:26rather than deliver a complete experience up front.
07:29However, the change didn't happen because premium games stopped working.
07:33It happened because another model promised larger and more predictable returns.
07:37Games that once would have sold as finished products
07:40started carrying the structural weight of live service expectations and battle passes
07:44even when the genre didn't ask for them.
07:47The industry didn't lose the ability to make complete games.
07:50It simply became less willing to bet on them when a different,
07:54more shareholder-friendly approach looked more attractive.
07:57Free turned out to be one of the more expensive words in the business.
08:01I wish you could have been there.
08:08Yeah, me too, kiddo.
08:10But hey, I'm here now.
08:14Pandemic over hiring.
08:15At least I'm not a big hero turned stooge for a spaceman!
08:23Okay, boomerang.
08:25You want to see what a real hero can do.
08:28The idea of hiring thousands of new employees during the height of the pandemic
08:32was always going to have a reckoning.
08:34And the mass over-hiring of the early 2020s followed by tens of thousands of job cuts
08:39when growth slowed has done permanent and irreparable damage to institutional knowledge
08:44as well as studio stability and affected the career path for many developers.
08:48The industry expanded as if the usual conditions would last forever,
08:52then contracted with the same lack of foresight.
08:55Risk-averse decision-making at the top only hardened afterward,
08:59as executives who had over-hired now treated every project as a potential liability.
09:04Studios lost experienced staff and the survivors learned that loyalty and institutional memory
09:09ranked below short-term financial optics.
09:12This damage was entirely self-inflicted.
09:15A boom-time fantasy that was followed by a predictable correction
09:19they somehow never saw coming that treated people as the most adjustable line item.
09:25We have to die to save the world.
09:32Launch Disasters
09:34The practice of extreme over-promising followed by hollow or broken products
09:38used to be niche and expected by certain developers.
09:41But somewhere along the way, it became a recurring feature rather than an exception.
09:46Launch Disasters like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077
09:50permanently increased player skepticism toward marketing claims
09:53and contributed to the decline of blind pre-order culture.
09:57Day 1 patches, once considered rare,
09:59have also since turned into the expected baseline
10:02for nearly every game released on modern hardware.
10:05Games began shipping unfinished
10:07with the assumption that players would download large fixes later
10:10or simply act as unpaid QA.
10:13The industry learned it could survive these moments,
10:15which only made the next over-promise easier to justify.
10:18Shipping games incomplete became less of a crisis
10:22and more of a release strategy
10:23and, naturally, trust eroded,
10:26not because players became more cynical by nature,
10:28but because the product baseline
10:30kept giving them fresh reasons to doubt the next big trailer.
10:33The violent video game myth
10:35I think it's time to draw the line.
10:38I know that one place parents want us to draw the line
10:42is with violence in video games.
10:45The moral panic around violent video games in the 90s led to the creation of the ESRB,
10:51which was useful but also entrenched the framing of the medium as something inherently suspect.
10:57That framing has contributed to ongoing cultural stigma
11:00and occasional political targeting that treats interactive entertainment as a special category of social threat.
11:06The industry spent years defending itself against claims that have never held up under scrutiny or even scientific studies,
11:13while the established narrative refused to fully die.
11:16Games became an easy scapegoat for broader problems,
11:19and the medium's public image absorbed damage that had little to do with the actual content being released.
11:25A myth that should have collapsed under evidence instead became a recurring background tax on the entire form,
11:31as well as an argument that keeps returning long after the data stopped supporting it.
11:36Help me, please! You're the only one that can save me!
11:39You're all mine now!
11:44Culture Capture
11:51It's hard to ignore the noticeable pattern of high-profile releases openly treating the game itself as secondary to
11:58The Message, in which games prioritize contemporary political and cultural signaling
12:03over a coherent world-building and competent writing,
12:06so it's no surprise large parts of the traditional audience simply leave.
12:10Parts of the industry and its surrounding media apparatus have developed an open contempt for large segments of their own
12:17customer base,
12:18and this shows up in review scores, targeted articles, and the rapid abandonment of certain titles.
12:23When criticism of writing, character designs, or overall tone appears,
12:27the response is often moralized rather than engaged with.
12:31The feedback loop is straightforward.
12:33The product dress further from what the majority of buyers actually wants,
12:37and the audience grows more cynical,
12:39while the next cycle of decision-makers doubles down because their peer group rewards the doubling down.
12:44The result is a self-inflicted narrowing of the audience under the banner of progress.
12:49You came a long way and made a valiant effort, Varric,
12:53but this story does not end with my downfall.
12:56Digital Only
13:08What was once considered the standard, to simply own what you pay for,
13:12has been replaced by the push for all digital and constant online checks
13:16and has gradually replaced physical ownership until the ability to truly own
13:20and permanently keep games without corporate permission became the exception.
13:24The idea of convenience won, but with it came the transfer of control from the buyer to the platform.
13:31Games that once sat on a shelf now exist at the discretion of servers and licenses,
13:36hamstrung by corporate policies that can change without notice.
13:39The industry gained easier distribution and tighter control over the product after purchase,
13:45and players gained the permanent possibility that the thing they paid for
13:48might simply stop working one day through no fault of their own.
13:52Ownership became a legacy concept, and the transition was handled as if it was inevitable,
13:57rather than a deliberate choice the industry made and then refused to revisit.
14:02Won and lost more than you ever knew you could.
14:08Done things you wish you could take back.
14:10What do you feel has done the most irreversible damage to gaming?
14:14Share your thoughts in the comments.
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