Category: Season 2

I’m currently working on a video about the different video game subscriptions available in the market, and during my research, one subscription seemed quite interesting and also odd. The name of that subscription is GTA+, offered for $5 a month by Rockstar Games. I’ll speak a bit more about why this subscription is odd in the episode about subscriptions, but looking at it got me thinking about how Rockstar Games maintains a special status in the industry. As seen recently during the reveal of the GTA 6 trailer, if Rockstar announces something, the entire gaming world stops what it’s doing and pays attention. Rockstar releases games very rarely. They believe in bringing a game as close to perfection as possible before pushing it into the world. And very rarely do their games suffer from any of the issues that games by most other studios have at launch. The only exception was perhaps the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online in 2013, where there were a few bugs, but that was quickly forgiven because that was the first major online game released by Rockstar.

Buying video games is a luxury. There’s no other way to put it, because not buying a video game won’t have any negative impact in your life, apart from the fear of missing out. It is exactly this FOMO that publishers use to try and hype up the launch of their games, because all of them know that customers have way more choice today than they did in the old days, and even franchises like Call of Duty can see a dip in sales if they get a bad review at launch. That is why publishers use FOMO to try and get as many people as possible to pre-order the game or at least buy it at full price on day one. And to be honest, a lot of us have games that we would definitely buy on day one, no matter what the reviews say, because we are emotionally attached to them.

It’s a new year, and nothing much has happened in the world of video games yet, so let us spend some time looking back at what happened in 2023. It was a year full of amazing games, but sadly, also a year full of data leaks. These leaks were very unfortunate for the companies involved, and in some cases, downright dangerous, since the personal information of many employees was also leaked. The silver lining for the rest of us was that these leaks gave us an insight into how some of the biggest companies in the game industry work, and these are things that no one would normally know unless they actually worked in these companies, or personally know someone who does.

So let us take a look at what these leaks taught us about the video game industry. I have to warn you though, that there will be no video footage of any of the leaks shown here, so this is one of those videos where there’s not much to see, so you might want to treat it as a podcast or something.