Ditto for professional writing, but add marketing and branding.

Something I grapple with is how games are designed for players to succeed. You verb in a game, you get an appropriate reward. Input-output is sensible. Cozy games map this to real-world analogs while keeping game sensibility. If we made our worth in life, we would probably find the same value in it.

Another issue with this is it's also competing with the alternative. It's so hard for 100,000 people to afford $10 a month, in place of one furiously rich asshole bankrolling something worse for $1,000,000 they won't miss, making the worse thing super available, and it's not the 100,000's fault.

I always find it fascinating how disconnected those things seem from even casual observation. Almost every game crit person I know posts regularly about looking for jobs, being worried about their job or outlet, posting about their second job. It is casually apparent everyone in this field is poor.

Sometimes I feel this way describing to other people what being an American is like. "No, we have a bunch of private companies that sell tax preparation to us. And when we try to make taxes easier so the companies don't need to exist, they pay politicians to keep it complicated."

Even when their philosophies crash, and their social and legislative efforts fail, it still sucks to know that there a non-negligible number of people out there who want other humans to suffer to death simply for being different than what they want.

And I hope, above all, we can find enough reasons to be kind even if this world seems like it's unwilling to give us anything but. To each other, most especially to ourselves, and that we'll do our best to help each other get through it.

Because there doesn't seem to be a lot of hope otherwise.

I hope people who have so many reasons to feel vulnerable don't have to, that they can find safety and equilibrium despite what the world is desperate to throw outward.

I hope that everyone can find a break from the relentlessness of it all, the news, the grind, the poverty, the misery.

One thing I find very telling is that a lot of publishers were forcing everything to have infinite hours mechanics with microtransactions, even for otherwise single-player experiences. Which makes me think no price number can be large enough if infinite money is an option they can crowbar in.

For me personally, I feel like "Both can be true." applies. Yes, in order for this to be sustainable, the cost of games will have to increase. Yes, also, that game development is too expensive, often for reasons that are not customer-driven, so it shouldn't be on the customer to shoulder that cost.

I personally want a Switch Micro, that's just the Switch on a smaller, lighter OLED unit. The same size factor as something like a PS Vita or non-XL 3DS.

However, the market is all moving away from this kind of tech, so this is the obvious correct move for Nintendo. Just not me personally.