The Video Games (and cinemas) of the Future

ALSO: I launch a hit podcast, and learn some lessons

I’ve been a bit distracted this week with the launch of a new podcast – Movers and Shakers – which has made a big splash, peaking at No.3 in the UK podcasts chart (not bad for a show about Parkinson’s!) and being covered in almost every outlet going. For the paying subscribers, I’m going to come up with a couple of lessons and learnings from that launch, which you’ll find below the paywall. But, first, a couple of short stories for everyone…

The biggest form of mass media to which I pay little (or no) attention in the august pages of this newsletter, is clearly video games. Globally, it’s an industry worth almost $250bn, which makes it competitive with basically any form of media in the world. Except, unlike most of the others, it’s growing.

After several months of refreshing electronics websites, I acquired my own PlayStation 5 (PS5) in January 2022. I’m not a big gamer or anything, but consoles are an interesting form of hardware. Unlikely my phone or laptop (both manufactured by Apple), new iterations, marketed as revolutions however minor the improvements, aren’t released every year. There isn’t a built-in redundancy that causes them to self-destruct after a couple of years (my iPhone, the newer edition of the SE model, has about a 10-hour battery life these days). Instead, they are built to last, and only released when technology and market pressures collide. (I note also that my PS4, which is a decade old, still functions perfectly – ghost of Steve Jobs, I hope you’re reading).

The original PlayStation came out in 1994, just a year after this author. The PS2 followed in 2000, PS3 in 2006, PS4 in 2013, PS5 in 2020. So even though I’m not a gamer, I was still inclined to snap it up immediately: a piece of technological hardware that’s built to last half a decade is a precious commodity these days.

This week saw the release of the new Fortnite, the juggernaut free-to-play battle royale shooter, creative mode. Why is this interesting? Well, here are a couple of thoughts.

Firstly, Fortnite has been a key part of a really interesting shift in the way that the video games industry makes its money. For every copy of Hogwarts Legacy that sells (I think I paid something disgusting like £70 for that game) there are thousands of games that are downloaded for free. Fortnite, CoD, PUBG, Apex Legends, whatever. The point is that these games are free but very, very addictive. And once they become a significant part of your life – your social life too, for many of the players – it’s hard to avoid spending money. Bundles and loot boxes, cosmetic changes and enhancements, all little things that cost, say, £5-10 rather than £70. But you keep buying and buying, and before you know it, you’ve spent hundreds of pounds on a new free-to-play game.

This is also, to me, a symptom of quite a new form of capitalism that we’ve seen in the video games industry. A capitalism that is both very aggressive but also hard-coded as voluntary. Look at the video games streamers who are making millions of dollars. They’re not carrying adverts for clothes sewn together in sweat shops, or even funky vitamin pills. They’re just sitting there, playing the games, and waiting for their subscribers to donate money. Money becomes a status symbol – which is capitalism at its most 101 – but nothing is being sold. It reminds me, to some extent, of a start-up that I pitched (to friends) just after I left university. We would invest in portable card readers, head to nightclubs in Chelsea and Mayfair, and egg-on men in suits to give us the biggest amount of money that they could. We could, I thought, benefit from the enormous, wasteful desire to seem rich.

But Fortnite is also owned by Epic Games, and I’ve written in the past about how they have been the protagonists (led by their CEO Tim Sweeney) of the battle against the Apple app store monopoly. Within the context of the overarching Epic Games brand, Fortnite is the golden goose, but this is a company valued in excess of $32bn, and one of the key reasons for that is the Unreal Engine.

Which brings us back to Fortnite creative 2.0 (if I haven’t lost you yet: hello!) which uses the Unreal Engine. Creative mode allows users to create their own maps and adventures, essentially mini-games that utilises the Fortnite game mechanics, but 2.0 also allows them to utilise the Unreal Engine 5 graphics and physics system. This basically means that, within Fortnite, users now have the ability to create entirely custom games, worlds and experiences. It is basically everything that Metaverse aspires to be, but without the dodgy headsets and with a captive, and massive, user base.

I watched a demo that turned the Fortnite game mechanics into something indistinguishable from Call of Duty. This might sound like a totally nerdish thing to do, and I may be losing yet more of my jock credibility (Beer! Football! Staffordshire Bull Terriers!) but it was fascinating. It is the first time I’ve seen a video games developer demonstrating a desire to be monopolistic (funny, given Epic’s recent lawsuit…). Fortnite creative mode 2.0 could, effectively, render other games obsolete. You could enter the mode and play something resembling CoD or something resembling Minecraft or something resembling Flappy Bird, all at the click of a button. It is like the innovation that was Steam (the hub for purchasing games created by publisher Valve in 2003, which has revolutionised the market) but totally free and in-game.

My suspicion is that we may look back on this as a story that changed the course of modern video games publishing, though there will be a time delay on that. When you harness the creativity of your user base, you not only have to give them the tools to create but the time to refine those creations. Let’s check back in a few months and see what’s been achieved.

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I was at a screening of the new season of Succession last night, at the British Museum. Weird venue, right? But I guess there was that scene in Scotland, from series 2, which involved a museum giving off a very similar energy.

Anyway, cinema attendance is obviously in huge decline, a decline that many think is impossible to arrest. But last night, during the hour-long screening, it didn’t feel like cinema was in decline. The room, compromised of journalists and influencers, and a smattering of cast and crew, laughed and whooped along with all the jokes, all the twists of the plot. And it got me thinking…

TV is returning to a degree of linearity. This is something that I’ve predicted for ages and something that I think anyone with even a vague awareness of human psychology could’ve predicted. The linear TV schedule was restrictive in lots of ways, but it was also the means by which we accessed TV as a community. And binge watching into the vacuum is a good way to kill time – but no-one wants to kill time indefinitely. We simply don’t have enough time. And so we have to strive to reintroduce that community aspect.

The decline in streaming services, which are addicted to the binge model (though less so, of late; just look at Netflix’s live event with Chris Rock), has been accompanied by the thriving HBO model. The Last of Us has been the hit of the year so far (and would’ve been the hit of last year, had it been released in 2022) and Succession is following hot on its heels.

TV has access to something that cinema doesn’t, which is familiarity. Viewers in that screening knew, and loved, the beats of the relationship between the Roy children. They were predisposed to like the content, and therefore less hesitant about engaging in group hysteria. And yes, this was a free screening with champagne and canapes, but you could put the first episode of Succession series four (which begins this Sunday) on at a dozen cinemas in England this weekend, and you’d sell them all out and there would be a similarly raucous atmosphere.

 I won’t say anything banal about the blurring of lines between TV and cinema. All I’ll say is that, as someone who infrequently watches TV on cinema screens at press screenings, most modern TV shows look GOOD when projected onto a big screen. So why don’t cinema chains start showing prestige dramas like The Last of Us, Succession, House of the Dragon, Rings of Power etc? It seems an obvious synergy. Americans have long held a culture of “watch parties” for TV shows, but what is cinema exhibition if not the ultimate watch party?

Free idea: Picturehouse or Everyman, speak to Sky Atlantic, and strike a deal to show the final episode of Succession at your cinemas. It airs in 10 weeks, so you have still have time if you act now…

Below the line: some pod launch thoughts from Movers and Shakers.