138A. The Force Wars Have Begun (Part 1)
In 2017 I predicted a future war between AAA developers, regulators, and players. That war has started, and threatens to become a global power war. Part 1: What the war is really about.
My 2017 prediction of a war between game developers, regulators, and gamers has come true. But what they are fighting over is much more than games, and as such this is going to turn into a global war that affects everyone, not just gamers.
In late 2017 I published The Future of F2P: The Force Wars. When I put a “P” in the title on my substack, that means it is a prediction paper. I do this so that you can go back in time and see if I nailed the prediction or not. If you check those papers, you will see I have a pretty good record. In this case, I would consider Force Wars to have nailed it. If you want a very detailed description of how the War was lining up and why, I highly recommend you give that a read. When I make a prediction it is because mathematically the chance of an event happening is approaching infinity or zero, making a binary outcome certain. Most “outcomes” are not binary so it is rare that I can make such a strong prediction, but in some cases (like this one) I can. This method only predicts that something will happen, it doesn’t provide a date because the rate of change will not be constant.
To save space, and because Force Wars nailed it 100%, I will abbreviate the history as much as possible here and expect anyone wanting more detail to also read Force Wars.
What is the Conflict and Who are the Participants?
While Force Wars explained this in detail back in 2017, I would like to add that the ultimate source of this conflict can be traced back to 2001. In that year I was writing for UnknownPlayer.com (which I mention in Force Wars) and did both MMO game reviews and acted as a consumer watchdog for online gamers. My readership skyrocketed to 400,000 daily readers that year after I identified a group of hackers attacking Dark Ages of Camelot (Mythic Entertainment) and Anarchy Online (Funcom). They were duping items and then selling them to consumers. I made a lot of money legitimately earning gear in other games like Everquest and EVEOnline. But to me duping was cheating and since you could just make a million of something that way the hacker/attacker could break the target economy. That would ruin the game for everyone.
I was handed the personal information on the hackers, Black Snow Interactive, by a colleague at UP. I then doxed the group. This made the lawyer for Mythic very happy with me. Mythic locked and seized all of BSI’s assets in their game. BSI responded by suing Mythic, and both sides claimed ownership over those assets. This ended up being an important legal case, though details are a bit hard to find as Google was still in its infancy. The case was ultimately settled/withdrawn and courts in the USA have still not defined who owns virtual goods. John S. Chao did a very good analysis of the legal implications back in 2010, but the situation is still unresolved outside of South Korea, where players do have some rights.
Game companies, data brokers, AI providers, and possibly even some aspects of crypto all operate in this legal grey zone where digital goods are a “service”, not a good. Providers of these “services” give themselves every conceivable authority in their EULAs and TOS. This power imbalance has caused some companies in that grey zone to gather immense power, enough to even challenge the governments of countries. Attempts to regulate them are often met with “too big to fail” arguments, which is a circular logic as the fact that they’ve gotten that powerful without regulation is exactly why they need regulation. The power in question is problematic because it comes at the expense of consumers, who are legally almost powerless.
I got my initial fame in the industry by defending the digital assets of developers from rogue gamers. Now that the power pendulum has swung so far in the other direction, I’m mostly assisting those attempting to restore power to gamers. The irony is not lost on me.
The future of humanity literally will be determined by the outcome of this War. As I’ve pointed out previously, Adam Smith founded the modern field of economics with his The Wealth of Nations tome in 1775. In that work he argued that we should end slavery because “freemen” could be worked even harder than slaves and if they died there would be no loss of capital to the employer/owner. In a world where all goods are increasingly not goods, but instead “services”, now the Freemen of the 21st century increasingly own nothing. Thanks to AI and “data centers”, the Freemen don’t even own their own identities anymore. Powerless. The ultimate slaves:
“The wear and tear of a slave, it has been said, is at the expense of his master; but that of a free servant is at his own expense. The wear and tear of the latter, however, is, in reality, as much at the expense of his master as that of the former. The wages paid to journeymen and servants of every kind must be such as may enable them, one with another, to continue the race of journeymen and servants, according as the increasing, diminishing, or stationary demand of the society may happen to require. But though the wear and tear of a free servant be equally at the expense of his master, it generally costs him much less than that of a slave. The fund destined for replacing or repairing, if I may say so, the wear and tear of the slave, is commonly managed by a negligent master or careless overseer. That destined for performing the same office with regard to the free man, is managed by the free man himself. The disorders which generally prevail in the economy of the rich, naturally introduce themselves into the management of the former: the strict frugality and parsimonious attention of the poor as naturally establish themselves in that of the latter. Under such different management, the same purpose must require very different degrees of expense to execute it. It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves. It is found to do so even at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where the wages of common labour are so very high.”
-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1775.
In Force Wars I identified the 3 groups involved that now are going to war:
The Empire: In Force Wars this was the providers of online games, primarily the AAA game development industry. Their increasing use of “Dark Patterns” to consolidate power and control over consumers was going to trigger a backlash eventually. But since this is ultimately a conflict over data ownership and rights, the Empire is actually much larger than it may seem at first glance. The “Big 5”: Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, are already involved but will become more active/obvious as resistance grows. If you include subsidiary and supplier companies, these companies control hundreds of millions of people directly and potentially billions indirectly. The Empire is expecting the Force War to start in 2026, and has been caught off guard.
The Alliance: This is fiat governments and their associated politicians and regulators. They only act when their consumers, economy, or even governments come under sufficient direct threat that they feel compelled to act. A lot of money via lobbyists, and “soft influence” via controlled media and other companies makes it hard for target countries to form and maintain any sort of “alliance”. The USA and China signalled their unwillingness to “ally” by not attending the 2013 ICPEN summit in Panama. The USA is obviously Empire-aligned as you can see from the leaders of the “Big 5” visiting the White House regularly. China desires to self-regulate without interference. This leaves only one group strong enough and united enough to organise against the Big 5: The European Union. The UK started this push in 2013 but was successfully split from the EU in 2016 in large part using cutting edge psychometric modelling technology deployed through Cambridge Analytica, funded by multiple USA billionaires and Steve Bannon. Thus for part 2 of this paper The Alliance will refer to the European Commission and their relevant regulatory groups. I would expect the soft power being used to subdue their activity is unprecedented. The Alliance expected to start the Force War in 2026, by deploying the Digital Fairness Act.
The Rebellion: In Force Wars I identified this as gamers, consumers of interactive media. Now that the Force War has expanded in scope, ultimately everyone could be in the Rebellion. That means people could be in both The Empire AND the Rebellion, and will have to make some hard decisions. A lot of soft power is being used to create political divisions across multiple countries, and then divide/demoralize people along those polarizations. But one group of consumers is well organised and becoming more organised every day: gamers. As an extremely unlikely political force, they were overlooked long enough to allow them to create that organization, with leadership that is sufficiently decentralized to make subversion challenging. But when you realize it, the fight over digital goods ownership started in 2001 with gamers and will ultimately be fought and decided by gamers. Everyone else will watch and not understand how important this struggle is. I will include “influencers” in this group, though I can already see that “sponsored” influencers are trying to split the group and are being rapidly “ratioed”. It turns out gamers are more perceptive than the average consumer. Who would have predicted that? The StopKillingGames movement in the EU is the Black Swan event that started the Force War a year earlier than either The Empire or The Alliance expected. This may trigger unusual/aggressive behavior by The Empire as they play their hand early, and accelerated action from The Alliance.
Part 2
In Part 2 (the next paper) I will explain how these groups are organised, what their objectives are, what action they have already taken and what action they likely will take next. I will attempt to predict the final outcome but this situation could explode out of control of all three of these groups. Plus, without a free press, it’s possible for all of these groups to lose while thinking they have won. Thus I would warn against expecting a binary win/loss outcome.