 What are you doing here? I literally told you not to watch this video. I wasn't kidding. This isn't going to be a fun video. This isn't the sort of video people want to watch. I mean, back here you're seeing like on loop some trip to E3 from a couple of years ago. Yeah, shaky footage and all. Try not to be too distracted because if you are new here, well, subscribe. They are giving away a hundred dollars in cash to a lucky new subscriber in the month of January. We also have another giveaway going on for some Pokemon Legends Arceus stuff. Head down to the description or pin comment for that. But there's a reason that I didn't want anybody watching this video, which I know is ironic, right? I'm a YouTuber. I obviously want you to watch. But the things that I'm going to be talking about in this video, there are things that I just don't want to talk about. Why don't I want to talk about them? Because I just don't want them to exist. In this video, we're going to be talking about, I don't even know how many do I have? Nate, what did you write down in here? I don't even know. A list of things that I don't want to happen in the future for the video game industry. As I said, don't watch because I don't want these things to happen. And if you're watching, I think that chances just increase that they will. Some of them are already happening. And yeah, I don't like this. So number one thing I don't want to happen in the future of the video game industry and all digital future. Now look, I'm not against all digital systems. I think that's fine. The Xbox Series S, the PlayStation 5, all digital. If there's ever a switch in the future that's all digital. I'm cool with there being versions of platforms that are all digital. What I am scared of is where the future of video games is like our phones or PC, where there's basically no physical games anymore. And the reason that I'm scared of this potential future of the all digital isn't really because I think all digital is horrible. I'm all digital on my computer have been for some time. I haven't had a disk drive, a working disk drive and probably a decade on a computer. Here's the thing. I always have access to my digital games. I do not trust the rest of the industry to always give us access to our digital library decades down the line. We already see with we use stuff getting shut down, you lose access to your digital library. So yeah, the reason I don't want an all digital future is because I don't trust them to keep my games available. So this is why we need to have physical games. Now, yes, I understand things are leaning more towards all digital. Nintendo is sweeping in with more digital only releases last year than ever. But at the same point, I want to keep physical viable not just so we have physical stores to go to and write to ownership and trading games and that's all fine and dandy even collecting like that's fine and dandy. And yes, I actually purchased digital games on switch all the time. Like it's not a new concept for me to purchase digital goods. It's just I fear a future where that's the only option because when I get 1520 years down the road, I know if I somehow lose access to my digital copy of Breath of the Wild, there is a physical one out there somewhere in the world I can buy and play. But what if the next Zelda game, Breath of the Wild 2 or the one after is digital only a decade later from that, maybe I can't play that game anymore. That's a scary future. See the reason I don't mind all digital on PC is because that doesn't happen on PC. You don't lose access to your games. I can still play games all the way from back in the 90s to today, whether it was physical or digital. But that's just not how it works on game consoles. They're closed platforms and because they're closed platforms, the moment the platform's online system is no longer supported, you lose access. So maybe what I really don't want to happen is the continuation of that. But honestly, I kind of miss buying physical games even on PC. I don't miss installing them, but I do miss buying them. So yeah, I just don't want physical to go away. Sorry. Now what's next on my list? I guess this is a pretty obvious one. NFTs. Now look, I'm not here to argue for or against NFTs. I've made my stance quite public that I am not a big fan of NFTs. I think that are too easy to scam, too easy to take advantage of people and too easy to screw people over. But that's neither here nor there. The reason that I'm scared of NFTs in the future of video games is because all of the major companies are talking about them to a level where if you actually go look for gaming programming jobs on the internet, go to monster.com, go to any of the big job hunt websites, you'll notice that there is a large growing hiring spree for people to develop NFT games, which tells you we're probably a year or two, maybe three away from NFT games being the dominant force in the video game industry. And that scares me. Now, why does it scare me? Because NFTs take focus away from why we play games. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe this is something Spawnway Broadway brought up on a recent video, you know, that maybe we're just out aging what gaming is today and we're holding too much onto what gaming used to be. But I still think at the fundamental core of playing video games is having fun, being entertained in some sort of way. And if the way you're being entertained is to turn it into a money making scheme, then are you actually entertained or are you just being a greedy bastard? See, I actually care about playing the games, not collecting things in the games to try to make money. So maybe I'm just not with the times, but I am scared to death of a future of NFT games. They're going to exist. I already know this, but for them to become the dominant force in the future. Imagine a Mario game where, oh, it's free to play, but everything in the game is ran through NFTs. That scares me because I feel like it's going to take focus away from making a fun and compelling experience and put the focus more on how do we foster a community that just wants to profit off each other. And that to me, that just doesn't sound right. So another thing that I want to go away. This is something that's been around for a while, going to continue to be around, but I wish it would just stop. Full games leaking weeks before launch. And I don't mean leaking and that there's a data dump. I mean the actual ROM files leaking weeks before the game comes out. Why do I hate this? I mean, why do you probably enjoy this, right? You have your hacked switches. You like that Pokemon Legends Arceus is probably going to leak in the next week or two, right? Because you get to play it early. People running emulators in their PCs, you get to play the games early. Hell yeah, babe. But also there are millions of consumers that don't hack their switches, don't have PCs and don't use emulators. And for them, the games leaking leads to the entire game being spoiled all across the internet. Now look, I'm not going to judge you harshly if you emulate your games on PC. I'm not going to judge you if you have a hacked switch, but I will say this. Keep it to yourself, damn it. Like we don't need the whole internet doesn't need to know everything about the game before it comes out. Because you're just ruining it for consumers that don't partake in that side of the gaming community. But to be honest, them leaking at all is really the root cause. Because we all know I can't trust any of you bastards out there. Someone out there is going to be spoiling people. Some people enjoy doing that. Heck, I look for spoilers. So I get it. But also, can we just not? Can we just like have a future where games stop leaking? And I don't know what that future looks like. I mean, is it a future that is all digital? The one benefit of going all digital is games can't leak for retailers if retailers don't have games. So I guess all digital fixes that. But then review copies leak. So then we just stop sending out review copies. I'm not really sure how to fix this in a way that actually is a positive without negatively impacting somewhere else. But you know what? I don't really care. This isn't a video about offering solutions. This is basically a video that you shouldn't even be watching bitching about things that I just don't want to exist in the gaming industry. So this one's a fun one. Um, because fanboys everywhere think they want this dystopian future. I am scared of a future where one video game platform dominates the entire market. Maybe it's switch moving 300 million units at some point. Maybe it's PlayStation 10 ended up with a half bill in sales and no other platform matters. Maybe it just ends up becoming gaming PCs. And that's the only market that really exists out there. Here's the thing. When one platform dominates an entire industry, you know what happens? A lack of innovation. Think about this for a moment. All of our complaints about how YouTube works, right? We complain about the algorithm. We complain about the AI. We complain about search results. We complain about data collection or the types of ads that get served. We complain about all these little nuances missing features, focusing on the wrong thing. No one to even talk to at Google if you get hacked, right? I've had my complaints, but you know why they get away with all of that? You know why nothing innovates? YouTube doesn't have any true competition, not for what it does anyway. In fact, YouTube's starting to view competition like TikTok and Twitch is like their main competitors when neither one of those actually replaced the fundamental core of YouTube. So the bottom line is, yeah, monopoly suck. Search engines. There's been very little innovation in search engines. Why? Because Google just owns it. There's alternatives out there, DuckDuckGo, as an example, obviously Bing. There's a lot of alternative search engines. How many people even use them? How many don't just use Google, the default search engine on basically everything, including iPhones. Yeah, guys, there's no innovation in that field right now. At least innovation that is making an impact. Same was true of web browsers too for a long time, right? They were owned by a certain thing and then Firefox and now Chrome and now Chrome is kind of the dominant thing. And now there's kind of a lack of innovation in the web browser space as well. This happens when one thing owns the market for a long time. We get a lack of innovation. This happens with hardware. We were getting a lack of innovation in how our CPUs were being made when Intel dominated the market for over a decade. And now there's legit competition and we're seeing real advances with AMD Ryzen and obviously 12th Gen out of Intel. We're seeing actual GPU competition at the moment as well, pushing Nvidia to do better, pushing AMD to make better products. And now Intel even getting into the market. Competition is good. Competition breeds excellence. And when there's a lack of competition, things like mad and NFL happen where the game's buggy as hell and doesn't really get any better every year. Something typically gets worse. And even the new features they add break other features. That happens not because the developers are lazy. They just don't have incentive to do better. There's nothing that competes with that. Monopolies are not good because of that. They control everything. And the consumer is usually the one that gets screwed. So yeah, I am scared about a future where we only have one viable platform. And that platform stops us from innovating, stops us from getting consoles like Switch or we stops us from getting Kinect, stops us from getting PlayStation VR, where we live in a future where that just doesn't happen because only one platform controls it all. It's not good. Another thing I'm scared of. I can't tell if it's a video back there. There's a reason we put this back there. E3 going away. Now, some of you might say E3 doesn't matter anymore. Digital events. E3 was a shit show last year when they did a digital event. Who needs E3? Who needs this? Who needs that? And maybe there's a broader conversation that not just E3 I'm worried about. I'm worried about packs. I'm worried about CES. I'm worried about Gamescom. I'm worried about in-person events featuring hardware and video games going away. And you might go, why are you worried about that? Because not only does that lend more towards a digital future, also folks, it gets rid of the community aspect of video games. One thing that goes untalked about with E3 and having that in-person event, we talk about the game demos. The game demos matter. Absolutely. But you know what also matters? The whole of the industry coming together. Because at E3 it's not just fans coming together. It's not just developers coming together. It's not just media coming together. It's everyone coming together in a single spot. You could literally be out on the show floor and bump into, I don't know, Aegeanoma from Nintendo. Maybe even Shigeru Miyamoto himself, you might bump into him on the show floor. Or you might bump into, I don't know, Pierce Snyder from IGN. You might bump into your favorite YouTuber, Nintendo Prime. You literally could bump into a billion things because everybody gathers in one spot. And it's the only gaming event that this happens at. Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show are similar, but not quite. The companies aren't going as all out. They're not freely walking the show floors like they do at E3. So yeah, I know we got to worry about the pandemic. I know we've got to be safe, you know, to carry yourselves, make the best decisions for you and your family. But also, I'm scared that we're not going to have that anymore. Not because the industry is changing and evolving. That always happens. But because without E3, I don't see anything able to bring us back. And if nothing brings us back together, we're going to grow further and further and further apart. And I think that's just damaging to video games on the whole. So another thing I don't want to see happen in the industry. It being dominated by free-to-play games. Now look, arguably already is. And I want to be clear here. I don't have anything against the Call of Duty War zones and the Fortnite's and the PUBG's and all the other free-to-play games. You know, I play free-to-play games like Scrabble Go. I play free-to-play games on my phone. So I have nothing against free-to-play games and I do think they should exist and they do and they exist in big ways. But I am scared of a future where that's all we get. Because what happens when that's all we get? We stop getting legendary experiences like Final Fantasy 7 Remake. We stop getting amazing experiences like Breath of the Wild 2 or Horizon Forbidden West or Halo Infinite. We stop getting the kinds of games that win Game of the Year. And we start getting games that lean more towards esports or more towards, I don't know, the fact that we should be nickel and dime'd at the end of spending more on our entertainment than we do now. See, nothing's wrong with free-to-play. Nothing's also wrong with microtransactions and even in some free-to-play games, gotcha mechanics. I'm cool with that. Gotcha mechanics even makes sense in like card deck kind of games and stuff. I'm not against that. But I am against that becoming the only option in the industry. And I'm afraid of a future where that's the case. And with the success of free-to-play games rapidly rising and the fact that they can be continually going and going and going with no end like Splatoon 2 ended. What does Splatoon 2 was free to play? Would it end? I don't know. But it ending leads to a sequel that could be even better. Fortnite Never Ending means it gotta constantly iterate on it, constantly iterate on it. Even games that don't do that, that do charge you, you know, a monthly subscription, but also charge you for X-Men, like World of Warcraft. Because they can't restart from the ground up, everything's kind of a half step. I'm cool with continuous Never Ending games, Roblox, Minecraft. No problem. But I do think there's a problem when that becomes the only thing we have to experience. And lastly, I want to end with something that I'm actually completely indifferent on. But I know some people are going to bring this up in their own, what they don't want to happen. I am indifferent on Nintendo's Next Gen platform being super powerful, whether it's a handheld or home console. I am indifferent. On one hand, I would love for a $500 thing that's more powerful than the Steam Deck to come out in two years and just dominate the market. I would gladly drop the money, no problem. On the flip side, I'm okay if it's not that. And it's just another $200 to $300 device that is weaker than everything on the market, but still offers the same gameplay experiences. Because to me, the games are what matter. And while more powerful hardware can unlock new things in games or give you better frame rates and resolution, and I do think that stuff matters, I'm a PC gamer. Game on a $2,500 monitor. We're not even talking about the PC, a monitor. Why? It's like the best gaming experience possible. I care about that stuff. But also, it's not the deciding factor on my enjoyment of a platform. I can have just as much fun gaming on my laptop down here or gaming on my phone as I do on my PC. And you might go, that's blaspheming it because it comes down to the individual experience. So yeah, Breath of the Wild is my favorite game of all time. I've only ever played it on Switch and Wii U. Never once played it on an emulator on PC. Never once experienced it in a better form. And yet, I absolutely love playing PC games. I absolutely love playing games on Xbox and PlayStation. So I don't really care if the platform is super powerful. I care about the games. The games to me are what make the platform not the hardware. However, I am indifferent. I obviously want it to be more powerful and I think that's just a given. But it doesn't need to be the bleeding edge. But also, if it is the bleeding edge, I'm cool with that too. That's why I said I'm completely indifferent on this. I wanted to bring it up because I know some people are going to complain about that. Otherwise, you guys can go down in the comments below and let me know what you're worried about for the future of gaming. What scares you and did you make it this far? Did you make it to the end of the video? Did you actually watch this video, even though I told you not to? Let me know. I'm Nathan and RoboJance from the Tenner Prime and I'll catch you in the next video.