Over the years, a certain subset of video game enthusiasts have enjoyed, let’s say, a complicated relationship with Warhorse Studios, the developers of both Kingdom Come Deliverance and its sequel.
On the one hand, the games are both good! And Warhouse founder Daniel Vávra was vocal about Gamergate! “They only know how to bark at others from behind the fence,” he said in 2014, and “how to play victims when somebody barks back.” Of course, Vávra could only have been describing the cowardly purveyors of the cynical harassment campaign perpetrated against—oh. Wait. No.
No, Vávra was complaining about people writing “hysterical, aggressive, manipulative articles” and opining that “the biggest problem we have [in gaming] is that there is a group of people [who] think … they have a mission to make the world a better place and protect the oppressed by any means.”
This year, Vávra accepted an award from Gayming for the KCD2’s gay subplot—still finding time to rail against “forced ‘woke’ nonsense” in doing so, mind you—and then claimed he was “fed up” with a campaign against KCD2 “from a small and vocal minority” because of that plot and its other allegedly “woke” aspects. Life comes at you fast.
That said, Warhorse might be about to find that the gamersphere as a whole is somewhat less forgiving than the woke cabal set on destroying gaming. This seek, it was Vávra’s co-founder Martin Klima who picked up the “time to make some controversial comments” baton; in an interview published on PC Gamer this week, Klima expressed a hope that Grand Theft Auto VI “blaze[s] a trail” for higher game prices. He suggested that of all the industry, it’s Rockstar/Take Two alone “who can afford, or who can dare, to increase the price of games.”
Price increases, Klima argued, “[are] long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive.” The problem, he continued, is that “everybody’s scared to death about it.” However, he said, GTA’s higher price point “will [hopefully] allow us to increase the cost”—with “us” here being the rest of the game industry.
And in case he hadn’t pissed enough people off already, Klima also took the time to say that the game he’s hoping will save the industry is, in his opinion, a whole heap of shit: “I am not going to be playing GTA 6 unless I’m somehow forced to. And the reason why it is so popular—it beats me. It’s something which I just fail to understand.”
This has gone down as well as one might expect in the comment section. The thing is, Klima may well be correct. Games cost less now in absolute terms, let alone real terms, than they did when I was buying them in the ’90s (which is a small consolation for the fact that writing pays less than it did when I was aspiring to it in the ’90s). Whether a simple price increase will be enough to save an industry whose costs and ambitions headed skyward just as the world’s inclination to pay for anything inclined to the subterranean… that remains to be seen.
But the thing is, these are difficult discussions to have, for the same reason that any discussion on the internet is hard to have—because comment sections and social media reward and incentivize invective while flattening nuance, because those forums drive engagement by stoking rage, and because people will respond to “$99 for a game!!!???! Lol ill just pirate it” in exactly the same way as they will “lol actually its about ethics in game journalism.”
Which is to say, they’ll do it with a minimum of thought, and even less consideration for any of the actual people involved. Woke games bad/good (pick your absolutist position), big prices bad/good (pick your absolutist position), four legs bad/good (you get the idea). Boy, am I glad it’s Friday.
*No, it was not about ethics in game journalism. Piss off.
