(This is a cut chapter from the essay “Lost in the Miasma” that I felt didn't fit with the overarching theme of the essay, but I still wanted to publish it, as it captures some of my thoughts on the modern gaming industry and works by itself as a short contained essay.)

---

The miasma—or the internet—has made gaming as a whole worse for the consumer on a physical, technical level; it has corrupted the games industry to such an extent that game development is now pretty much only about making as much money as possible as quickly as possible as easily as possible while ignoring all ethical values and disregarding the consumer almost entirely. The miasma has enabled a gross disregard for game preservation, player feedback, and, most importantly, the overall quality of the games themselves, all the while making it easier than ever to forever milk cash out of the player through endless low-effort downloadable content, microtransactions, and by pushing fake money purchased with real money that is then used to purchase dumb mystery boxes that contain dumb prizes chosen basically at random, which amounts to literal gambling.