The One Where I Crash Out Over Numbers

Light and Optional Homework: Patrick Miller on "Why Haven't Fighting Games Died Yet?" This is pretty good but long. Medium has it at around 40 minutes. (Sidebar: It’s weird how many reading apps give you an estimated time now.) If you need breezier reading, and about a different genre altogether, Mikhail Klimentov has two articles: Not Everything is Concord." and "Kill The CEO in Your Head". They’re at 15 minutes and 9 minutes, respectively. (It’s still weird, right? Why does an article have a runtime? We should start talking about movies by word count.)

Bonus reading: "Fighting Games Have a Product Design Problem" by idk. Whoever owns the blog. Miller is replying to this article. If you’ve read it and your takeaway was something to the effect of “wow, great points. I agree.” Then... maybe sit this article out. Or don’t. IDK. Maybe it will be good for you. I’m going to say mean shit about you, probably. If you’re a Steam chart poster, a review score gawker, or some other kind of weird pocket watcher, it’s the same warning. This is your “beware dog” sign. Cool? Sick.

NUMBERS ARE FUCKING FAKE.

Sony Studios' Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man 2 sold 10 million copies in the first four months after its release. That shit got a 90 on Metacritic. They still got hit with layoffs. Naughty Dog, who developed The Last of Us 1 & 2 like five different times in two mediums to rapturous applause, got hit with layoffs. Microsoft keeps boasting about record-breaking profits while laying off over a thousand people from its gaming divisions alone over the past couple of years. Those things, the profits and the layoffs, aren’t necessarily unrelated. You sack some guys before it’s time to count the money, suddenly a sum of wages is no longer on the books, and everything looks good. Does that sound weird? Yes, but you’re forgetting something.

NUMBERS ARE FUCKING FAKE.

How many people around the world play League of Legends or fucking Valorant? How many? Too many! A FAKE FUCKING NUMBER amount of people. How the fuck is Riot still laying off hundreds of people? Think about yourself at your job or your mum or your brother or your mate. Some CEO/CTO/COO/C-Suite fucker has a finance dude wyrmtongueing their ear off about how they can replace you and your department with an AI agent that can do your job a quarter as well in half the time. Somehow their wages go up and the stock prices soar. How does that make sense?

THE NUMBERS ARE FAKE

And to the extent they have power over you is that they are emblematic of existing oppressive hierarchical structures. I’m not saying you’re perpetuating those systems when you post a steam chart. It’s not that deep. Yeah, you know what I am kind of saying that. Like you’re not a class traitor, you’re just kind of annoying. In your spare time, you’re cosplaying the kind of fucks who do call and responses to Justin Timberlake’s line in The Social Network — “you know what’s cooler than a million dollars?”

Nerds love fake numbers. Every nerd hobby, from sports statistics to running DPS calculators, is interacting with fake numbers. Hell, even professional athletes, the polar opposite of nerds in the John-Hughsian sense, complain about their stats in each annual entry of any sports game franchise. Every man under 50 is either betting on sports or staring at prediction market charts trying to make a quick buck guessing at the next chapter in the dealer’s choice of global conflicts.

I am not above the fake numbers. This year, after some prodding, I joined a Fantasy Critic league. It’s like fantasy football but for video game reviews. Your group takes turns drafting games from the current calendar year, trying to establish the roster with the highest cumulative score based on averages calculated on the review aggregation site, Opencritic.

On one level I fuck with this. The numbers are fake, so let’s make a game out of it. Review score discourse/culture has been a thing for at least as long as I’ve been alive, and it’s been dogshit for that entire period. People crash out in the comments when a game they like, have already purchased, and might have already played gets a number they think is lower or higher than it should be. Alleged real people with alleged real friends harass human beings for giving a considered and contextual opinion on art they disagree with because the fake number is too fucking low. You have invested power in the number. It is receptive to your agenda. If you’re a fuckhead, you can do arithmetic gymnastics where you can put two games side by side, compare the review scores, and then go, well, the score went down because — spins the wheel — woke? woke.

Fantasy Critic has provided me with some insight into score gawking. I’m never playing this game again, by the way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but I’m built different (negative). I want to win, and that level of competitiveness makes me feel like I’m micro-dosing sports betting. To be clear, I’m not doing the equivalent of opening up a score app, checking Kevin Durant’s rebounds, and then diving into his DMs because he fucked my parlay (accumulator) for game reviews. However, I have read an IGN review and thought to myself, “Idk, I think you sound 1.3 pts higher on this than you’re letting on.” In both instances, the numbers are fake and beyond my control.

I like to talk to my dealer about online bullshit. This is free advice. I do this for a few reasons. Firstly, you get a bunch of hyper online fuckwits in a group chat, they’re going to say “yesssss bitch exaaaaaaaaaaaaactly” about some shit that does not matter. You know what I’m talking about. My dealer logs on to sell weed and then logs off. He stays very tethered to the real world. That’s my anchor; it’s very romantic. Secondly, I’m too embarrassed to talk to my therapist about feeling bad about review scores. That woman gets paid to listen to me, and she also gets paid to remember things about me. I don’t want me bitching about review scores on record. So I recommend you find someone like my dealer that you can explain your online nonsense to. If at any point you feel embarrassed when their eyes glaze over, then you need to shut up. My favourite thing he’s ever said to me was, “Bro, I think you’re too poor to have fake problems.” He’s right. The numbers in my bank account are fake as fuck and he would know, I’ve bought weed on a payment plan before.

I hear you say, “But Nic, I’m worried about the player base for a game I care about a lot and really enjoy playing.”

I want to cup your face in my hands and force you to make eye contact with me.

Listen: there is nothing that you can do to affect the sales or active player count of whatever it is you care about. I don’t think any game deserves a persistent, active player base, but I don’t think any game should die if it doesn’t get one. Games can move through your life, like seasons or people, even if they never get updated again. It’s bad that it’s difficult to spin up a server of Battleborn or whatever the fuck and get a game going with your homies. It might not be matchmaking, the pool of players is smaller, but a game shouldn’t be put out to pasture because it doesn’t find a way to graft itself onto its players lives within weeks of releasee. Every game can’t bum on my couch and eat my food for free. I don’t have the capacity.

It’s why I really hate that “fighting games as products” article. The author compares fighting games to league and dota, etc. The games that ate their competition. You can’t play the DC Universe Moba anymore. But you can go on fightcade and play some jank ass fuck shit like Rabbit. What the fuck is Rabbit? Idk but people are playing it and they’re cracked. Mobas or hero shooters or battle royales don’t have the broad range of options that fighting games do. It’s admittedly not the best comparison. Obviously, for a fighting game you really only need one other person, and there are fighting games lost to time or at the very least unplayable online. That said, if the measure of success is a gargantuan active player base, then we need to consolidate everyone into a handful of fighting games. It’d be a culling, and we would lose that weirdness that makes fighting games special.

I ran into a friend at the supermarket late last year and we made plans to play Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 over Parsec. We also really wanted to play Halo CE but only the original PC port. We have not gotten that going yet. How do you even Hamachi in 2026? Playing Marvel with a friend, a decade in between sessions, was a trip. That game hasn’t changed, and it will never change unless I opt to install mods. However, we’ve changed. We half-remember our combo routes. Muscle memory amnesia has set in. With distance neither of us are nearly as sweaty as we used to be. Oh, and I can do charge inputs noww.

All that said, I mostly think about the developers. When a game dies (or is killed), how must that feel? To spend 5, 8, 10 years of your life working on a thing. You’re missing birthdays. You’re putting parts of your life on hold. Maybe for some on the team it’s just a job and there’s fantastic work/life balance, but even then I have to imagine it hurts to not have something to show from that professional period of your life. I’ve thought this about filmmaking and writing; I’ve thought about how long it takes to make anything. How it’s a miracle anything even gets made. And then, doing basic math, how much can you make in one lifetime. That’s before accounting for someone, a person not even in the room with you when you and your team were making whatever it was, deciding it doesn’t get to exist anymore.

The focus on numbers and player counts positions this murder as natural. In not acknowledging the system itself as cruel, and the business frameworks of these games as unsustainable for anything outside of the biggest in the medium, all that is left are narratives. The numbers can be moulded to any agenda. It's the gamer’s fault. It’s the stinky men talking into tripods. It's the pickmes echoing their sentiment for clout. It’s the marketing. It’s the review scores. It's lazy devs. It's woke. It’s the incuriosity of the public. It’s your fault. It’s mine.