‼️ ATTENTION TŌKON FIGHTERS ‼️
To celebrate the launch of MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, we’re giving away 3 Ultimate Edition bundles of the game!
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📅 Ends August 5th
Today I learned about Yuta Tabuse, the first Japanese born NBA player. He played 17 career minutes across 4 games for the Suns in 2004, was waived that December, and never appeared in another NBA game.
Inexplicably, over a year later he got tossed onto an alternate Japanese release cover for NBA Live 06, a cover which I now desperately need. This HAS to be the most obscure cover athlete for a video game ever.
Video games will never be taken seriously as an art form because neither the industry nor the audience treats them as art, and the audience is the larger part of the problem. Games are treated as products to be made fast, sold loud, consumed, discarded, and replaced. That is why Call of Duty and FIFA sell in the billions, not because they endure, but because they are disposable and familiar.
This has nothing to do with graphical fidelity, art style, music, voice acting, or budget, even though players insist otherwise. For most people, “artistic merit” means how flashy, pretty, and expensive a game looks. Spectacle is mistaken for depth, and production value is confused with meaning.
Games are not built to be evergreen because the audience does not want evergreen. The people who revisit old titles, engage deeply with systems, or approach games patiently are a minority. Most want the new release, the hype cycle, and the spectacle, then move on as soon as something shinier appears. This is the same reason Avatar makes a billion dollars per film yet leaves almost no cultural footprint. Audiences want stimulation for a few hours, then the exit.
Art requires patience and trust, and games demand both. They ask players to learn systems, accept friction, and think. The audience rejects this. Anything slow, strange, or uncomfortable is dismissed as boring or pretentious, so risk is punished not just by publishers, but by players themselves.
Because of this, metrics replace meaning. Engagement time, retention, and monetisation become the measure of success, because that is what the audience rewards. Art asks what something is saying. Products ask how long you stayed logged in. Games suffer most here because their greatest strength, player agency, is treated as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity.
Legacy is impossible without permission to fail, and the audience does not allow failure. A bad novel does not kill literature. A bad film does not kill cinema. A bad game can kill a studio, because players demand perfection, constant novelty, and infinite support while rejecting experimentation.
So the ceiling stays low by choice. Not because games cannot be art, but because an audience trained on disposability, spectacle, and instant gratification will not tolerate sincerity, patience, or risk. What survives is not what lasts, but what sells loudly and disappears quietly.
A trader thinks that the prices of eggs are going to increase, and so he contacts his broker and asks him to buy 1,000,000 egg futures at $1.70
Sure enough, a week later, the price of egg futures is $2.50, and the trader, happy to ride his winners, places an order for 3,000,000 more egg futures
Next month, at $4.30 a piece, he pats himself on the back and restructures his liquid investments to buy another 10,000,000 egg futures
At the end of the quarter, egg futures are trading at $7, and the trader finally calls up his broker and tells him to sell them all
The broker replies: “To who? You’re the egg man!”