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There’s a lie baked into gaming discourse (cowgod)
| SneakersSO | 12/13/25 |
| SneakersSO | 12/13/25 |
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Date: December 13th, 2025 9:22 PM Author: SneakersSO There’s a lie baked into gaming discourse, and it’s repeated so often it passes for wisdom. AAA versus indie. Big versus small. Corporate versus pure. It’s a false dichotomy, and it conveniently erases Japan. When people say “AAA,” they mean Western AAA. California. Canada. Northern Europe. Motion capture stages, writers’ rooms, HR doctrine, prestige cinematics, budgets the size of cities. When they say “indie,” they mean one to five people, pixel art, sincerity, and poverty. Japanese games fit neither category, so they get talked around instead of talked about. A FromSoftware title ships and breaks brains, and it’s treated like an exception. A Nintendo game lands polished, complete, strange, and mechanically confident, and it’s waved off as “safe.” Capcom rebuilds itself into one of the most competent studios on earth, and the discourse barely adjusts. These are large, disciplined, vision-led productions, but they don’t resemble Western bloat, so they don’t register as AAA in the Western mind. The conversation is dominated by Westerners, written in Western terms, for Western anxieties. Their crisis is not gaming’s crisis. It’s their production model collapsing under its own weight, and they universalize it. So the story becomes: Western AAA is dead. Indies will save us. Japan doesn’t enter the frame because Japan never played the same game. They didn’t inflate teams to a thousand people. They didn’t surrender authorship to committees. They didn’t pretend movies were the future of games. They kept making games. Systems. Feel. Discipline. Craft. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s worse. It’s provincialism with a megaphone. Western discourse centers itself, then mistakes its exhaustion for global decline. Far Eastern developers aren’t being “finished.” They’re being ignored because they didn’t fail loudly enough. And the irony is sharp enough to cut glass: The very cultures accused of stagnation are the ones still shipping complete, playable, confident works, while the West explains its own paralysis in podcasts and postmortems. The state of gaming isn’t AAA versus indie. It’s Western excess versus Eastern restraint, and the discourse can’t admit that restraint won. So it invents a binary that flatters its conscience and spares it from looking across the ocean and asking a harder question: What if the future never left? What if it just stopped speaking English? |
Date: December 13th, 2025 9:22 PM Author: SneakersSO Meanwhile, the Far Eastern makers, the Japanese and others, keep shipping real games. Systems, mechanics, worlds that feel lived in. No committees to stop them. No Team Cherry fanfare required. They make, while the West explains why it cannot. The West is drowning in plain sight, inventing applause to cover the rot, pointing at Stardew Valley and saying, “See? We’re fine.” They are not fine. They are pathetic. The absolute state? Incompetent idiots, balloon budgets, empty boxes, and delusions of grandeur. That is the West. That is gaming. That is everything. |