The decline in the quality, integrity, and sustainability of the gaming industry isn’t due to cultural decay or political division. It’s capitalism, plain and simple. Both conservatives and liberals often misdiagnose the issue because they operate within the same capitalist framework. What we’re seeing in gaming today—exploitative monetization schemes, diminished creative risks, developer burnout, and the hollowing out of beloved franchises—are not anomalies. They are the logical outcomes of an economic system designed to prioritize profit over art, community, or sustainability.

In its early days, the gaming industry was smaller, more experimental, and less optimized for capital extraction. But as corporations gained control, they refined methods to maximize revenue at the expense of quality. Loot boxes, microtransactions, live-service models, and pre-order culture aren’t glitches in the system; they are the system. These models devalue creative labor while extracting ongoing payment from players, often using psychological manipulation to increase engagement and spending.

Esports mirrors this degradation. Corporate-backed leagues, built for scalability and brand partnerships, often collapse under the weight of overinvestment and unrealistic profit expectations. Meanwhile, grassroots esports scenes—built by and for communities—persist not because they are profitable, but because they are sustainable and meaningful. Passion and collective organization can maintain what profit-driven logic destroys.

Attempts to blame diversity initiatives or cultural shifts for the industry’s problems are bad-faith distractions. The core issue is structural: capitalism transforms every art form into a revenue stream and every audience into a market. Companies aren’t “becoming evil”; they’re doing what they’ve always been designed to do—maximize profit for shareholders. And under capitalism, that imperative always comes at the cost of creative integrity and human well-being.

If we want gaming to flourish—if we want developers to be respected, players to be valued, and games to be treated as cultural works rather than products—we need to look beyond reform. The economic model itself must be challenged. Only then can gaming be reclaimed from the forces that are bleeding it dry.