The Soulless Machine
You can feel it when a game is made with love. And you can feel it even better when it isn’t.
There’s this heaviness that settles when you boot up something that was clearly built on deadlines and shareholder meetings instead of passion. It’s like walking into a store that used to be a family bakery and finding vending machines filling the space instead.
Lately, so many games feel like that. Half-finished, rushed, or just… hollow. The kind of releases that make you wonder if the people behind them even played what they made.
And don’t get me started on gaming events. You pay +20€ (in Portugal, at least) to get in and most of what you see are brand booths. The majority of them completely unrelated to games. You walk through aisles of ads, people trying to harvest your email in exchange for a keychain with a logo. A few years ago, they at least pretended to care about your experience. Now it’s just glorified data collection. It’s capitalism at its most efficient and least human: strip the soul, monetize the remains.
Games That Still Feel Human
But then, every once in a while, you find a game that reminds you why you fell in love with gaming in the first place.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of them for me. You pay once, and get updates that actually listen to the community. You can feel that care in every patch. Oh, and the game is yours. Isn’t that amazing? No subscriptions?
Or the early access indies, some of them not in early access any longer, like Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, REPO, or Devour. You buy them cheap, and the devs keep improving them because they’re proud of what they’re building. You can tell some still have other jobs. They’re living off passion, which ironically isn’t that sustainable these days, considering the work it takes do make a game.
Still, Those games aren’t perfect, but they’re alive and grow with you. You feel like part of something instead of a walking transaction.
The Power of the Player
I know some people don’t want to mix games with politics, but come on! Everything’s political when you put money behind it. As players, we have a voice, and it’s stronger than we think.
Your wallet, your time, your data matter more than you thinmk.
If you complain about game quality but buy them anyway, you’re telling yourself, and the brands, you deserve the bare minimum.
Look around: people are boycotting brands every day because they want to align their money with their values, like half the world boycotting Disney Plus when Jimmy Kimmel’s show was canceled. Why not do the same with games? If a publisher keeps feeding us broken products at full price, maybe you should stop preordering. Maybe stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Because every time you refuse to settle, the industry has no other option but to hear it.
Why We Play Anyway
I took a break from reviewing games because I didn’t like what it turned me into. Turning experiences into numbers felt too much like grading students in a system that has always been unfair, and modeled after the industrial revolution. How do you rate joy? Or grief? Or awe?
Games are supposed to help us feel. To escape. To connect.
Remember lockdown 2020? When visiting someone’s Animal Crossing island was the closest thing we had to hugging a friend?
That’s not a great example, since it was a game that completely stalled updates, ignoring players’ requests to improve quality of life features, leaving them hanging for years. But still, that feeling is in the collective consciousness. There was even a podcast created in-game.
I’m not saying esports or big-budget productions don’t matter. But what happened to stopping, breathing, and playing something that helps you recenter instead of overstimulating and exposing you to poverty?
What Do You Play When the World’s a Dumpster Fire?
Because honestly, that’s the question I keep circling back to. When the world feels like too much, when headlines burn, what do you play that makes you feel in control again?
I think that’s what I’m chasing when I rant about the industry. I’m mad because I care and I remember. Because somewhere between the loot boxes and the expansions and the preorders, I’m still looking for that spark that made me fall in love with gaming as a kid.
Maybe we can’t fix the system overnight. But we can choose what we support. We can keep finding and celebrating the games that make us feel something real. Like when we shared a laugh with cousins growing up playing Bomberman. Or spent hours hanging out with a friend while this old game took hours to install. Or the first time you saved the princess.
So tell me: when the world’s on fire, what do you play?
In partnership with MoshBit Gaming.
