The phrase “the best thing since sliced bread” often refers to a sense of excitement regarding a new invention. It’s historical origin lies in the very first bread-slicing machine, made in 1928 and advertised as a breakthrough moment in that industry. Since then, “the best thing since sliced bread” might have been a reference for television, washing machines, computing, and for some, AI. It’s a statement of extraordinary proportions for something that ultimately becomes a “thing”: usually cheap and often expected.

Video games are entering their sliced bread era. Thanks to the incompetent “leadership” of PlayStation, Xbox-Activision, Warner Brothers, Ubisoft, and more recently, EA, the differentiation between games from those companies (in terms of narrative, gameplay purpose, thematic approach, etc) is basically non-existent. Sega once did what Nintendon’t, but right now, almost every “AAA” game is as samey and boring, and certainly not as cheap, as sliced bread.

Is there a problem with this, given that the already pricey PlayStation 6 keeps selling, and will surely sell even more once the hopefully non-bread GTA VI finally launches in a couple of weeks? Not right now. But next year marks the apparent debut of the “new generation” of gaming consoles, and rumors about their prices are not comforting.

With at least $1,000 for the PlayStation 6 and Project Helix, we are looking at the most outrageously expensive bread of all time. And they are just like bread, because on top of that price, there’s seemingly no games for them. The PS6 could have at least launched with a Bloodborne remake, but there’s no sense in arguing that point until you’re blue in the face. EA could have debuted a new, next-gen entry in the Mass Effect Universe, but that’s as lost as tears in the rain.

Maybe titles like those wouldn’t have helped to couch the apparently steep price of next gen gaming, but their definitive absence helps even less. Unless video games are, by choice of seemingly everyone but the people who play and enjoy them, just a thing. That Mario vs Sonic, Master Chief being green, and PlayStation as the only door to Uncharted adventures were a long-winded and financially successful path towards the ultimate destination of very expensive and predictable bread.

Recent history doesn’t suggest this will be the case. Phil Spencer of Xbox once said, in what might be a retroactive speech for the Hall of Fame in incompetent “leadership”, that great games won’t push hardware sales. This only goes against Xbox being defined by Halo and Gears of War, and that PlayStation 4 won its generation through the sheer force of new IPs like Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, and even Death Stranding and Days Gone. It ignores the fact that publishers like Ubisoft became what they are today by the once novelty of Assassin’s Creed, that Activision and Warner Brothers rewrote Call of Duty and Batman to considerable success through (the first) Modern Warfare and Arkham series, that EA was actually interesting because of Dead Space and Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

But what if video games become bread? Bread itself is just a base, as the PlayStation 6 and Project Helix will be for just about any game. The “AAA” space, which includes PlayStation and Xbox, won’t implode overnight, if at all. But it will become as boring as bread, leaving space for many other types of ingredients. We’ve already seen this working, in that almost. every GOTY winner of this generation is either a new IP or the revival of a buried one, and most of them are made without billions of dollars and decades of development. While platform holders and other big publishers take the leading stance of losing any semblance of originality on their road to expensive boredom, the future will rest in the actual creativity of independent titles.

And maybe, those will also cause a reaction on the bigger companies, once the shock of their empty and expensive consoles not selling anything washes them by. Mass Effect is buried, but the possible success of other titles in the genre like Exodus, The Expanse, and even the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 (one of the very few examples from a big company that doesn’t make bread) might cause someone at EA to wake up and smell the money. This has happened before: in 2017, EA’s Blake Jorgensen said that people don’t like single player games so much, as he was shutting down the single-player studio Visceral Games. His visionary leadership and foresight was reinforced with the smashing commercial successes of Horizon: Zero Dawn, God of War 2018, Spider-Man 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 and even EA’s very own Jedi: Fallen Order. Single-player games were so much liked, that EA proceeded to remake Dead Space, a single-player title originally created by Visceral Games.

So, once the AAA bread burns to a crisp, its leaders might see the success of Exodus/The Expanse/Cyberpunk sequel/The Witcher 4 amongst their self-created smoke, and remember Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Maybe they never will.

But frankly, bread should be left in the kitchen. And games should be made, always and everywhere, by people who enjoy them. Not by idiots who dream of money from the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Around the same time that Nintendo revealed gameplay for the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, parts of gaming YouTube were flooded with lots of titles presented through DLSS 5: the latest iteration of an NVIDIA technology initially designed to increase frame rates without a necessary hardware upgrade. But this version of DLSS only applied that “AI slop” look to everything that it touched, burning through the highest-end of available GPUs in the process.

One of the complaints that emerged from this was that DLSS 5 negated most if not all of the original and artistic choices in each game. The Ocarina of Time Remake, despite not using this technology, has been labeled by some, without any endearment, as “what an AI would do”. Nintendo has claimed that, when remaking this monumental piece of video game history, they didn’t just aim for “realistic graphics”. And NVIDIA define DLSS 5 as a technology that “infuses pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials, bridging the gap between rendering and reality”

Video games have been chasing and selling the chase of visual realism for decades, but maybe this is the generation where some have finally achieved it: if you play Death Stranding 1 and 2, there’s Norman Reedus. Same goes for Keanu Reeves in the Matrix-Unreal Engine 5 tech demo. They’re real… until they’re not.

Defined as a region of negative emotional response towards robots and other things that seem “almost” human, the uncanny valley rears its peculiar, ray-traced head in these situations, but I think it also opens discussions about what we perceive as reality. If you look at Keanu Reeves (or the very accurate Keanu Reeves model) from the video above, is he/it “real” because of the isolated, white background he inhabits, rendered through a screen that’s separated by inches or meters away from us? Would he/it look Unreal (pun very intended) standing in front of me, affected by the gloomy lighting that envelops the room where I’m writing this?

Most importantly, does any of this matter in a video game? Even if you could render a “completely realistic, lifelike and believable” Link, or Neo, or Solid Snake, what use would they have in the non-real universes of fairies, superhumans inside a computer, and the adventures of a basically inmortal spy? Attempts at a “realistic” representation of humans and their environments have existed since long before video games could be imagined, but their effect, and perhaps their purpose, places emotion before any type of rationality.

Some works by Johannes Vermeer show very naturalistic lighting, but we don’t go to see them as a strict competition with “the real world”. Filmmaking is technically the closest we can get to “being” in places and with people from our own reality, but what we end up watching is only a creative point of view, from the documentary-like realism of Bicycle Thieves, to the sci-fi adventures of Star Wars. Grand Theft Auto VI, undoubtedly the biggest game of this generation, boasts the most advanced simulations of physics, lighting, and traffic and pedestrian density, literally taken from the streets of Miami over a decade plus of development… but it’s all in service of the exciting criminal hi jinx that you can virtually engage in, from the comfort and safety of your own home.

Another reaction from the Ocarina of Time gameplay was that “it looks how I remember the original looking” Indeed, If creativity has “a point”, it’s to play with reality, to shape it towards whatever you want it to be, not whatever it is. The realism quest of DLSS 5 not only makes everything arguably uglier, it completely misses that point. But Zelda and Nintendo, just as they did over 30 years ago, completely get it.

The Witcher is remarkable: a work of literature from 1980s Poland that suddenly enjoys the same level of recognition as Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. It’s even more remarkable that such worldwide appraisal doesn’t come from the original novels and short stories, excellent as they are, and it certainly didn’t appear after the Netflix series. If you ask most people about The Witcher, they’ll answer with details of a video game.

The Witcher 3 is one of the very few examples of something good happening during this disaster of a generation: remastered now, significantly enhanced before that, expanded upon again, mostly without charging a coin to the millions of players that already own it. (It’s safe to asume that the latest expansion will come at a price, but probably below the questionably standard $70)

This level of care and generosity makes quite a contrast to the harsh and morally dubious adventures of Geralt and co in the actual game, and even though the main plot could be somewhat adapted into another TV series or a long-ish movie (a mutant monster slayer searches for his daughter across a war ravaged land), replaying it reminded me why this is a video game, and why that’s probably the best way of adapting Andrzej Sapkowski’s work.

At first glance, it makes sense that the adventures of a dual-sword wielding monster slayer exist as a video game: they’re a perfect power fantasy for the medium. But despite the “combat enchantments” announced as part of the remaster, Witcher games aren’t exactly Devil May Cry. And while Geralt is an iconic character, he’s not the “ultimate weapon against all baddies” that you could expect from a Doom Guy, a Master Chief or even a Leon Kennedy.

The Witcher games are much more about the world a character inhabits than the characters themselves, and that world is more a metaphor for reality than escapist fantasy. While movies and TV shows are great forms of adaptation, their scope can be limited. Not so with these games, whose combination of stories, characters, art direction, music, sound design, and so much else collide to create a tactility, despite its virtual nature. Or, in the words of the developers that have made them, an atmosphere.

That’s not to say that The Witcher can’t be adapted any other way. But atmosphere, at its best, conveys a sense of place, that can often be imagined through reading, can be witnessed in amazement through film… but can also be comfortably “lived in” through games.

The Witcher games, despite their loyal adherence to the original literature, are a living story, because that’s the kind of story that only video games can really tell.

Watch Dogs is a good video game. It’s a puzzle game with a Max Payne-like third person shooter, or the other way around, or actually both, depending on how you play it. It’s a demonstration of gameplay choice that Ubisoft, the developer of the series, couldn’t even begin to imagine today. Maybe that’s why they seemingly abandoned it. But Watch Dogs is also a cautionary tale, that sadly hasn’t been learned just yet.

There is no more insecure industry than video games; not because the book industry has claimed that no one reads anymore before proceeding to reprint The Odyssey, and not because the movie industry has flirted with 3D (and more recently, AI) in an unnecessary attempt to move beyond good old fashioned filmmaking. Every handful of years, the video game industry stands in front of anyone that will watch, and boldly promises to reinvent itself: in its entirety, unprompted, and so far, unaware of the ridiculous failure that ensues after that bold promise.

We can see it during the first announcement of the PS3, with “game demos” that maybe not even the PS6 will be able to match. We all remember Todd Howard’s proclamation of “sixteen times the detail”, in a conference where he also presented a game that, 8 years later, is nowhere to be seen. It’s that time where Xbox decided that traditional game controllers were “a barrier”, and that the future was using our bodies to chat with a young boy that definitely wasn’t acted. It just works.

And there’s also Watch Dogs, a game that wasn’t presented as the puzzle-shooter-kind of immersive sim that it is, but as the future. “Who is really managing the world we are in?” asked Ubisoft’s CEO before presenting a foreshadowing tale of entire cities controlled by a software combination of surveillance, social networks and AI, and then showing that demo, which actually represented the gameplay aspects of the final title rather accurately… but looked nowhere near to what we got.

That massive (and unnecessary) visual distinction, alongside the notion that its signature hacking feature was too simplified, haunted this game (and maybe its two sequels) into irrelevance: not because the final game was bad, it just wasn’t “the future” that its own publisher chose to present, knowing full well that it couldn’t achieve it, and never wondering if it really needed to achieve it.

During the same year Watch Dogs was revealed as the next big thing instead of just a good game, a Polish studio announced the development of a sci-fi RPG. A few years after that, they became world famous and beloved for another RPG, and because of that, the other sci fi game became the game, the one that would revolutionize the industry, again. CD Projekt Red didn’t help anyone, least of all themselves, by carrying that revolutionary mantle in the early years of Cyberpunk 2077: they showed gameplay that couldn’t possibly look like that on the then current, now old consoles, they promised tons of different content depending on which “life path” you chose, they reassured us that each delay was for the guarantee of quality… and they also included Keanu Reeves in the game, in case you weren’t hyped enough.

Today, Cyberpunk 2077 is a remarkable case of redemption, and Watch Dogs is a good video game. But both arrived at this point after unnecessary ridicule, recently picked up by other titles like Starfield and Star Citizen. Everywhere, which became Mindseye, also comes to mind. The only huge, highly expected “revolution” that hasn’t declared itself as the greatest thing since the arcade stick is Grand Theft Auto VI. Its historical restraint is remarkable, but it shouldn’t be.

Entertainment, media, culture, and so much more needs to be sold in order to exit in the public mind. But the latest re-release of a Beatles album doesn’t boast “4K 60fps with Ray Tracing”, implicitly declaring every previous version as inferior. The latest reprint of the Odyssey doesn’t declare your eyes to be “a barrier” to the experience, forcing you to smell your way through the pages, or some comparable absurdity. But video games, perhaps the red-headed stepchild of culture, insist on being so much more than what they are, where in fact, they only need to be good. That’s often good enough.

If you had told me six years ago that PlayStation would remove discs from their next generation console, I wouldn’t have been too surprised. After all, one of the PS5 launch models was and remains entirely digital.

If you had told me that the announcement of that removal would lead to a level of public backlash and brand hostility that makes the PS3 announcement look like an April Fools joke, on top of an unreleased, ill managed and unneeded live service mess that took Bluepoint down with it, my reaction would have been like the guard alert sound from Metal Gear Solid, even louder now that Kojima prefers green.

But here we are. PlayStation’s argument for this removal is that basically everything is digital now. The counter argument is that having the digital version of something is not the same as owning it, and the counter to that counter, by PlayStation themselves, is that it’s true, and we’ll be reasonable about it.

Discs are a storage method, just like vinyl before them, and paper throughout millennia. They existed because there was no alternative (like digital), but also as a way of expressing value for that which they store: at some point during world history, someone decided that Shakespeare’s scribbles, Da Vinci’s strokes, Beatles songs, thousands of films, and plenty of other things were worthy of containment, preservation, and the occasional remaster or re-release. More often than not, physical versions of books, paintings, records and films are the oldest, most prestigious, and still commercially successful way of elevating anything towards that highest of phrases: “its art”.

But video games? Video games are silly toys at best, and tools of indecency at worst. That the original PlayStation (initially mocked by the rest of Sony as a toy doomed to fail) could play much more prestigious music besides those silly games was only a coincidence, and the same can be said with the storage link, through DVDs and Blu-Rays between the art of film and also “games” on PS2, PS3, PS4 and some PS5 models.

It doesn’t matter that Final Fantasy VII (which could only be made through the superior storage capacities of CDs) showed people that video games could provoke emotions, or that Medal of Honor came from Oscar winner Steven Spielberg. It. doesn’t matter that Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and the Last Guardian exist because someone at Sony chose to give them the same respect and care of their latest film or musical recording. It doesn’t matter that the Last of Us became an acclaimed TV series only because the “game” it’s based on has equal or superior artistry.

None of this matters, and not because Roger Ebert or your high-brow relatives say so, but because Sony says so, by replacing permanent and therefore valued ownership of their games with a “reasonable” and revocable license. The platform that established video games as not a toy now treats them, officially, as a disposable toy.

So, what now? Between the loss of discs and everything else PlayStation has done this generation, we might be at the start of an era where video games, both in their distribution model and possible artistic aspirations, resemble something from the good old days: Blockbuster.

For those born before 2010, this was a store where you could rent films and games, exclusively in their phyisical format. Because it was a massively popular and commercially successful brand, most of its product catered to both of those features, and you could argue that you were renting the same thing, several times, under slightly different names. But sometimes (at least in the store near my home), you could find something different, refreshing. Something that at least entertained you in unexpected ways. Or maybe, something that altered your previous notions of entertainment. Maybe it was art.

Video games are gone — if they were ever meant to stay — from their discs, from an internal definition of artistic purpose, and from anyone that doesn’t cater to the whims of a creatively empty, fundamentally impulsive, possibly AI-obsessed enterprise. All of this is true… for the most part. The digital (and only digital) storefronts will focus on more of the same, and ask for your reasonableness in return. But maybe, just like in Blockbuster, each of us will find something different… that we’ll eventually have to give back, because it’s not worthy of being owned.

But it is art, since that’s mostly determined by the eye of the beholding gamer.

It’s not good right now, at both a global scale and on the little things. On an average day, most of us might have to contend with stress, occasional stupidity, and perhaps that one annoying person. But then we can go home and play video games to relax, disconnect, and most importantly, have fun.

PlayStation isn’t fun anymore. It’s very stressful, very stupid, and very annoying.

It’s all of these things in the disappointment of Wolverine, in the riddance and pathetic cover-up of its relationship with Kojima, in the historically damaging shutdown of Bluepoint. But the most bewildering, mind-twisting, inconceivable aspect of this disaster of a PS5 generation, is that email.

That email, that goddamn email (that I didn’t receive) where they point blank say, to the people that buy their video games, and provide them with millions through those purchases, that:

“The Software is licensed to you, not sold. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to play or use the Software for your private, non-commercial use on the system or device it was intended for.”

Later on, when presenting their case on a lawsuit, they stated that:

Reasonable consumers understand they’re only buying a license to play a game, and that they don’t actually own it.

All of this stems from their pathetic attempt at damage control, in the wake of their choice to end of disc production for future games, and on the eve of a potentially, massively expensive PlayStation 6. It joins their choice of launching Concord, among other live-service titles, into an oversaturated market. It joins their choice of shutting down Japan studio, where they literally came from. And at this rate, it’s highly likely that next week will bring another horrible, terrible, not good, near death, bad choice.

But I keep thinking of “reasonable consumers”, and “software that you buy but don’t own”, because those phrases feel like something a judge would say at your trial. They’re a police warning, an IRS notification, a stupid little instruction from the highest underling at the office. They’re part of the world you occasionally escape from, through video games. Except that now, they come from a video game company.

Video games should exist to entertain. That entertainment can treat you like an idiot when you should feel like a hairy mutant, or it can be a souls-like. Kingdom Come Deliverance II represents the most entertainment I’ve had with a game in years, because it relentlessly throws me into the digital mud. It’s a type of entertainment that can (and should be) highly diverse and creative, both in how it presents itself to the player, and in the scale of its budget and development timeframe. But most importantly, it’s something that invites you to have fun, many kinds of different fun, instead of threatening to take away that fun (that you bought) with statements of “reasonable consumption”.

Video games also tell stories, and not only those they contain. Every PlayStation generation has been defined by titles that not only justified the purchase of each console, they also created memories of creative, unexpected, subtle, outrageous fun. It’s the memory card switch in Metal Gear Solid, the myriad methods of chaos in Grand Theft Auto III, the “unexpected for a game” emotions of Final Fantasy VII, Shadow of The Colossus, and the Last of Us. The artistry of Japan in Ghost of Tsushima, the frequent danger of Days Gone, the universal humanity amongst the robotic landscapes of Horizon.

But the stories of PlayStation 5 are of constant unemployment, cancelled games, shuttered studios, and lately, hostility. It’s no longer time to have fun, but to understand that you are a “reasonable consumer” and shell out $70 for titles that are, at best, rethreads of what you played before, and at worst, vanish in a literal matter of weeks.

And what about the PlayStation 6? The biggest problem for its story, aside from the probably high price, will be its considerable lack of first party titles. You can’t make games for a new console if you shutter studios, or massively waste the time and resources of those you still have, in making games that they shouldn’t have to make. And despite the unavoidable success of Grand Theft Auto VI, and the brilliance of titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Blood of Dawnwalker (none of which were made by Sony), it’s hard to ignore what should’ve been played, but was never made in the first place.

Maybe the PlayStation 6 will be an empty, expensive box, much like the PlayStation 3 was during its early years, until Sony’s own studios started producing completely new games for it. That would make perfect sense in a world where video game companies entertain and create stories of fun. But right now, we’re just enraged, depressingly bored, “reasonable consumers”

When I first visited London, I was amazed by the fact that cars immediately stopped at a red light, allowing me to cross the street without a literal second thought. For a city that features a giant clock tower, a river, and plenty of Harry Potter references, I’m sure that proper driving behavior isn’t that relevant, if at all. However, that bit of mundanity stayed with me, on par with the “big, tourist attractions”.

Years later, I was playing Red Dead Redemption II. In the early hours of that game, an NPC approached to remind me that the other NPCs in my outlaw camp needed food. This wasn’t a mission, or a shiny promise of more XP. Nevertheless, I proceeded to hunt (and later on, fish) every day, like the Wild West equivalent of stopping by the grocery store before going home. My only rewards for this were the pleasure of routine, and the comfort of knowing that all of these people, despite being made of pixels, were well fed and taken care of.

Ever since Grand Theft Auto 6 was announced, and then leaked, and then announced again, I’ve been pondering what’s so special about it. Part of that question was answered with its latest showcase: there’s no video game of such scale that looks like that, not even close. And Grand Theft Auto games have always had a tone, somewhere between satire and deep study of the human condition, that might have been cloned, but never replicated.

And yet, Grand Theft Auto 6 is just a game. It’s part of an industry that raises prices and fires people as an expression of success. It’s patient zero in a decades-long design trend that places quantity over any semblance of quality. It might be the saving grace of a somewhat failed console generation. And, unlike the rest of the “AAA” industry, it’s a massive exercise in restraint.

If video games theoretically exist to disconnect from real life, most titles since Grand Theft Auto work as a virtual form of 9 to 5: you land in a giant space, with a version of Google Maps in everything but name, and a list of tasks that can outgrow a spreadsheet. You move from point A to B, “achieving” objectives of rare (if at all) narrative and gameplay significance and that often block whatever might really interest you, unless you pay more real-world money to skip over them.

Grand Theft Auto titles also place you in a huge urban environment, provide you with a map, and feature content that reflects the dozens of years and thousands of people behind their making. But playing them is like visiting London for the first time: you can star in the long, highly detailed, and often hilarious and reflective main story… or you can see how cars line up on a street, and then blow them up (you play as a criminal, after all) You can see advertisements on the street, reflecting what most of the United States thinks and feels but doesn’t dare to express (or at least it didn’t, before the Trump era). You can watch TV, listen to the radio, surf the web, call places… and if you choose to engage with any of these elements of daily, urban lifestyle, much like you would in the real world, you might discover that Grand Theft Auto titles (and Rockstar’s games in general) are about aliens, big foot, time travel, catfishing and anthropology, as much as they are about the criminal hilarity that often seems to define them.

While other games show off big promises that usually become mundane, Grand Theft Auto uses mundanity as its biggest feature, and shows it with the simplicity of cars stopping at a red light on a London road. The shootouts and explosions that highlighted its latest showcase exist between moments of remarkable subtlety. And when you finally show the overhyped and frequently leaked follow-up to the biggest entertainment product of the past decade, that’s not necessarily the first emotion you would choose to show.

And yet, this is a game that promises a limited weapon arsenal, a police system that will challenge and punish you if you do actual grand theft, nutritional self-awareness, the complexities of a romantic relationship, and so much more, all there, but only if you choose to engage with it. It’s decades of work, with thousands of lives behind it, restrained from the temptation of showing itself off with thousands of icons, wave points, and other demands of deserved recognition. For other game companies, such restraint would be capitalistic malpractice. But maybe Rockstar’s games understand that travel, wether virtual or real, is about getting lost in mundanity, on your (perhaps, never achieved) way to the “big, tourist attractions”.

I certainly know that, when Grand Theft Auto 6 finally arrives later this year, I’m going to slowly walk every possible inch of Vice City and Leonida. Because, despite everything that we already know, I’m much more excited for everything that we don’t.

Apparently, Xbox died last week, through the self inflicted wounds of a $1,000 handheld, and a Game Pass increase of (without nostalgia) $360 a year. This is how we play now, says Microsoft… but it seems that enough people who had been playing on Game Pass chose to stop, crashing a website in the process. The Xbox consoles, without official sales numbers since the past decade, are also much more expensive than before, and their value is questionable since nearly all of its “first party” games are available on other platforms, including PC. Maybe, this is how Game Pass begins to end, but I feel it’s worse than that.

For all of its failures, Game Pass did (and might continue to) offer the opportunity to discover new titles; it recently helped with the breakout success of probable GOTY Expedition 33. But that doesn’t seem enough to quench the notion, peppered amongst comment sections of many a video game website, that this generation has no games. And while that’s objectively false, I think there’s a point to it. Five years in, the Xbox Series and PS5 consoles have been defined by titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Kingdom Come 2, Split Fiction, and Silksong (although that’s cross-gen) And next year, we can expect a fresh, interactive revival of James Bond, a brand-new Onimusha, and a little known thing called GTA 6. So, there are games. But most of them don’t come from big publishers (except GTA) and platform holders, certainly not like before.

Throughout this generation, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Xbox 360, and this Crowbcat video explains why: during most of its lifetime, that console had pretty much everyone creating something new, including completely original IP. Ubisoft gave us the first Assassin’s Creed: a game that they wouldn’t imagine making today, since you only had to pay for it once, and it didn’t cost 500 years of your life to finish it. What was once known as EA had Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Dead Space. Activision allowed Call of Duty to escape World War 2. Between GTA 4 and GTA 5, Rockstar crafted a western classic and a bullet time swan song. There was also this BioShock game, and a Dishonored one. And besides delivering the highly expected Halo 3, Microsoft produced a couple of Rare classics, a third person revolution in Gears of War, and further investment (however exaggerated by Peter Molyneux) in Fable.

Back then, new and interesting games were not miracles among the reality of an expensive, buggy, and constantly unemployed industry: they were the industry, led by big publishers and platform holders. And just in the past generation (not so much in this one) PlayStation produced a dinosaur hunting simulator, a bike ride through the apocalypse, and an immersive journey into feudal Japan, among other games that weren’t expected and couldn’t have been predicted, but rekindled the interest and joy of millions of players (and as a result, sold quite well)

So in 2022, when Xbox announced their massive purchase of Activision, I thought they would expand on the successful tradition of defining a console generation with creativity, investing in the potential of thousands of developers, and allowing them, for once, to not only make the same old Call of Duty. Could you imagine a revival of Spyro, after the popular acclaim of Crash Bandicoot 4? Maybe True Crime under a new name, so GTA isn’t the only game of that type, once every decade? But most importantly, all the games, of different size and taste, that would come out of creatively liberated developers?

No. Your princess is in another castle, and the Xbox-Activision marriage has reached yet another stage in its breakup, this time coming for Game Pass alimony. But it’s not just Game Pass, and seemingly not just consumers who will pay the massive bill of a worthless purchase, with not one new or interesting game to play. It was a bad deal, but also symptomatic of a larger problem: Xbox leadership doesn’t fundamentally understand that the video game industry lives and keeps on living through creative risk.

This became clear a few years ago, when Phil Spencer claimed that great games wouldn’t result in increased console sales, ignorning not only the entire history of success and failure of consoles, but the history of Xbox itself: Xbox, who wouldn’t have survived without a game called Halo, and wouldn’t have dominated the next generation without Gears of War, two unknown properties without any predictability of their success, two risks that successfully defined them. Not long after that baffling affirmation, they dissolved the developer of Hi-Fi Rush, easily their most original and inventive title in decades.

They also proceeded to kill off Arkane Austin, a powerhouse of acclaimed, genre-bending games that was forced, under the detached supervision of Microsoft, to make a title that they didn’t want nor knew how to make, resulting in one of the worst video games ever “created”. In this year alone, after a long period of unchecked development fumbling, they cast off the Perfect Dark IP to limbo. In a literal matter of days, they pulled funding from John Romero’s latest project, leaving his studio to (hopefully) find someone interested: he only co-created Doom. And it might not be over just yet. But for now, $360 a year for Game Pass, starring another rushed and, therefore, possibly uninspired Call of Duty. Expensive consoles with no appealing games from their own publisher. At least hundreds of unjustifiably unemployed developers. And easily dozens of games, from dozens of developers under the umbrella of a trillion-dollar corporation, never made. Risks not taken.

But risks should be taken, and even more so when you’re a Microsoft-sized company. If you can buy Activision for about $70 billion, you can (and should) invest in the creativity of their developers, allowing them to build something completely new. If you can buy Activision, you can ensure and support the games that Arkane truly crafted. You can competently develop a new entry in the Perfect Dark series, you can finance John Romero. Irrespective of Game Pass, or multiple platforms, or cloud gaming, you can make and sell unpredictable, inventive, amazing games. Much smaller and actually vulnerable developers and publishers have done so this generation, justifying most of its popular appeal. Even PlayStation has a Wolverine, Saros and Intergalatic down the pipeline. And while not all risks pay off (i.e. Concord), they don’t suddenly spell the end of its publishers, not when they’re so big. Games work because of creative risk, not in spite of it. And this was apparently well understood and embraced by everyone, just two console generations ago.

Will anything change now? Consumer backlash to the latest Game Pass pricing will certainly be interesting to see, and while many people (myself among them) have tweeted, youtubed, and otherwise yelled into the abyss for a change in Xbox leadership, that won’t necessarily guarantee a change in strategy. Smaller and/or indie games might hopefully continue to appear, alongside the collective hope of GTA 6 being good enough to justify its decade-long wait, and keep us entertained for the next decade. But this isn’t a good business model: it increases prices, leaves developers without a job, and pushes a general lack of creativity from those that can easily afford to be more creative, as they’ve successfully been before.

Because, when it comes to Xbox, it’s not just Game Pass. It’s the willing and needless lack of games, from one of the biggest game companies in the world.