What prompted you to send the gods away?

and hydaelyn said: thou shalt not hoard thy stack marker

freestyle comm for @tobyfoxmademeascaly

Coming into this generation, we were given lofty promises about the value to the consumer and what the new technology could afford developers. Now that we're nearing the end of this era for both PlayStation and Xbox, it's clear this generation will not be defined by the incredible games that released during the PS5 and Xbox Series X's lifecycles (of which there were many), nor by the powerful technology that has all but eliminated load times and allowed for unprecedented performance and graphical fidelity. Instead, the ninth console generation will be defined by corporate greed, mismanagement, and anti-consumer practices that could very well alter the course of the games industry itself. If you pay attention to the news within the games space, you couldn't possibly miss that we have been in the midst of persistent layoffs and closures for the last half decade. Beloved, successful studios with storied histories have been forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers in aggregate as the corporate pursuit of eternal profit has disenfranchised millennia of collective institutional knowledge. When you factor in how many of those long-tenured games industry workers may simply never return because they can't find steady or secure work, as well as how many younger would-be developers have simply decided to pursue other careers in the name of not having to look over their shoulders in fear of their jobs, the damage to this industry by the shareholder-appeasing corporations has been immense and, likely, irreversible. That, in and of itself, is enough to potentially kill the entire industry, but that's far from the only dramatic downturn gaming has faced this generation.