A pithy summary of several sections of this article that I enjoy trying to bang like a drum: Vote with your wallet means that you agree that the rich deserve more votes.

(It underscores a lot of what currently is wrong with current politics, too. We’ve got two parties acting like they run on bake sales and instead controlled by billionaires, but they need you to be complicit in the fake bake sale so that they know you agree that billionaires’ votes count more.)

One tangent perspective though from the main argument that appreciate as a valid concern is the “archivist’s dilemma” in games right now. If you are a film collector, for the moment you can still rely on a physical disc copy of a movie from are least one company and a couple preservation firms exist including but certainly not limited to Criterion. With games, physical media is almost entirely dead, there’s maybe GOG as a Criterion wannabe (GOG Patrons might make things better?), and even single player games are no longer immune to multiplayer concerns like “what happens when the servers get turned off?” (That might be DRM servers. That might be “delisting” from stores like Steam, which leaves the game playable on most stores if you already bought it, usually but also not always. Also game engines like DICE’s Frostbite are architected to always be client/server even for single player games. Bioware’s Anthem being a key example where the single player parts of the game didn’t survive the multiplayer shutdown.)

Sales numbers are still a bad proxy for “how long do I get to rent this game in this economy?” and “is this really single player or is it ‘single player’?” type questions but as pointed out “active player counts” don’t really exist for single player games.

It must have been hard to be a film or TV fan in the era where film stock was often immediately destroyed or reused. I don’t entirely blame game players for being concerned with how much games feel like expiring rentals right now and that getting in the way of appreciating the art. I know the answer isn’t talking more about sales figures and is probably more about talking archival and digital estate planning and “renter’s rights”, but I don’t know how to teach game players to ask those harder questions more and worry about sales numbers less.