Trickle Down Brainrot

07 Feb, 2025

This is a continuation of Gaming, Pricing, and CEO Hegemony, but this time I'm more focused on some specific ideas and less focused on structuring an argument

CEO-brain also extends to the players, by the way. There's this confidence that by being able to frame something as hard-nosed financial decisions, they are by default speaking some kind of truth rather than buying into corporate propaganda.

This answer on reddit feels like a really perfect example - not only are they framing their answer as some "uncomfortable truth", they've come to it pre-convinced that the base game is, in fact, a bargain.

"With inflation, and the larger amount of content than ever before, the base game is an incredible value."

This is simply not a conclusion one can draw before the release of a game. This assumption leads to the rest of the argument - if this is a great deal, they've got to make up the money elsewhere (do they???) so they really are forced to hook their whales up to the DLC machine.

"But how do you charge those people $130 for the "first year of Civ", but not price out the casual players, the new players, the players in emerging countries, and other price sensitive players?

You continue to offer the base Civ for $70, an incredible value. But for everything discretionary, you increase the price.

...

I believe in their hearts, they really want everyone to have that content."

It just completely buys into the premise of the corporation, down to the relentless reduction of experiences to "content."

I don't mean to single out this person. I don't wish them any ill, I was just looking to see if there's a consensus on this topic and whether we knew the game's total development budget (best I can tell, no?) and stumbled across it.

Modern corporate culture has society impressed and dazzled by the concept of the CEO, these business-brained geniuses helming behemoth companies through stormy financial seas. But they're mostly just MBAs with survivorship bias. They see a number with a dollar sign before it and tell someone to make it bigger, or make more of them.

EA's CEO Andrew Wilson recently said that he thinks Veilguard would have been more successful if it had been a live-service game. This is an argument entirely contingent on the listener knowing nothing about the development of Veilguard - it had an extremely troubled decade of development, caused by higher-ups (like Wilson) insisting they pivot to a live-service model*. After huge difficulty, and failure of Anthem and 90% of other live-service games, they pivoted back to Veilguard.**

To suggest a repeat is to execute a lie, and to manufacture consent for the inevitable - Mass Effect 4 (5?) is gonna be fucking horrible live-service slop, and Veilguard failing was all the justification they needed.

This is what CEOs do - it was worth more money to them to get Veilguard out the door in a bad state, see it make less than their fucking insane targets, and use that to justify the next few years of horrific decisions.

Civ 7 isn't as obviously bad as this, it's more of a subtle iteration of what 2K has been doing for years - increasing prices while offering less, but so much of the less that it looks like more. Because that's just what CEOs do.

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