The Enshittification of Entertainment

There’s a popular meme template that shows the Grim Reaper moving down a hall with bloodied doorways behind him, with the idea being you label the casualties for your meme. You could imagine one version where capitalism itself is the Reaper, coming for every aspect of the entertainment industry.

Technology writer and author Cory Doctorow made waves a few years ago when he described platform decay with the catchy name enshittification. Doctorow laid out four steps to the process:

1. Companies are good to their users.
2. They abuse their users for the benefit of their business customers.
3. The companies abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Then the company dies.

Doctorow cited technology companies like Amazon and Facebook as examples of enshittification, but you can broadly apply them to almost any major company. We’ve seen it at all the major game companies – most recently EA, which was in the news for laying off 300 employees, including 100 at Respawn Entertainment and the cancellation of an in-development Titanfall game. A few months earlier, they laid off many employees at BioWare, which was blamed on low sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. This is a company that reported net revenue of more than $7.5 billion in FY24. Did they choose to invest in their employees? Of course not! Instead, they authorized $5 billion in stock repurchases over the next three years, which serves only to inflate the stock price (and by extension, executive compensation tied to that stock price).

We also see this process play out in the games journalism space, which this week saw the demise of both Polygon and Giant Bomb. In the case of the former, Vox Media sold Polygon to Valnet, a digital slop factory staffed by writers who are both overworked and underpaid. Not that it’ll matter to most of Polygon’s staff, who were laid off in the process (while negotiating a new contract through their union, no less). Giant Bomb, meanwhile, is seeing a staff exodus because owner Fandom wants to make big changes. Fandom, of course, is famous for its dedication to having the absolute worst UX if you dare to visit one of their wikis. Dishonest executives and commentators will tell you that there’s just no money in gaming journalism, but that’s a lie. We’ve heard for years that video games make more money than Hollywood movies, but if the latter can support an ecosystem for news and criticism, why not the former

Unfortunately, for these companies looking to maximize profit and minimize expenses (read: paying people), just doing well isn’t good enough. That’s why the AI hype bubble has companies lighting billions of dollars on fire with little to show for it because they’d rather develop some shitty LLM instead of just paying people fair wages. Generative AI is a dead end, but that won’t stop Silicon Valley tech bros from trying their damnedest to make it a thing.

Enshittification is also present in the anime industry. We’ve seen Funimation and Right Stuf slain by the Grim Reaper that is Crunchyroll, and what is there to show for it? Right Stuf was an important part of the North American anime industry as an independent retailer and licensor. Now their website is gone, and many of their releases, including their Gundam titles, are all out of print. It’s like the fall of Bandai Entertainment in 2012 all over again, except that at least back then we had more notice. You can’t even get Crunchyroll’s Blu-ray release of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, which was only released last September. Of course, you’re not without options as a consumer. Do you want to pay $700 for G Gundam? That’s a listing I saw online, along with many other similarly outrageous prices for other series.

What are the solutions? Nothing simple, sadly. There’s little we can do about large companies like Sony gobbling up other companies. If you value physical media, get it while you can. If you want to support journalism, there are independent writer-owned sites like Defector, 404 Media and Aftermath that have emerged from the ashes of websites shut down by incompetent greedy corporations. Even Game Informer has managed to resurrect itself after being shut down by GameStop, so there’s hope out there. If you value the work that these creators do, support them as best as you can, whether that’s monetarily or resharing on social media. None of this is going to get easier as corporations keep burning people, but supporting good work where you can is better than doing nothing.