I’m not saying that playing indie games is praxis, but I’m not NOT saying that.

At last year’s Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, I attended a panel that discussed the city’s long history as a hub for American underground comics. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as hard as it is to believe now, Seattle was an extraordinarily cheap place to live, which attracted starving artists from across the United States.

When the indie press Fantagraphics moved to town in 1989 and opened a bookstore, it galvanized Seattle’s comics community, which built a scene based on ashcans, alt-weeklies, and small press runs. That scene gave rise to cartoonists like Matt Groening, Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring, and Lynda Barry.

Much of that infrastructure still remains in Seattle today, but many of the artists don’t. Microsoft was headquartered right across the lake in Redmond, so Seattle was at ground zero of the dotcom bubble. All that sudden tech money couldn’t help but change the city.

Over the subsequent years, Seattle’s previous identity as a slacker’s paradise of grunge rock and strange art has been in open conflict with the same technocratic NIMBY hell-dwellers as every other city on the West Coast. Old Seattle isn’t winning, but it hasn’t lost. The weird city is still here for now if you look for it, along with much of the community that made Seattle what it used to be.

“We worry about Seattle’s soul and Seattle’s future, but we are hanging on,” said Megan Kelso, a local cartoonist and the co-runner of the local Short Run expo. “…We need to make more fans. If we want the survival of arts and culture, we have to show up for things.”

Hold that thought.

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At the end of 2024, the Seattle-based market analysis firm PitchBook released its 2025 outlook reports, which included a writeup on the investment scene for the games industry by Eric Bellomo.

It’s worth a look if you want an inside-baseball look at the financial end of the video game business, and helps to explain why the entire sector has been plagued with layoffs for the last two years. What sprung out at me, however, was an interesting point that I didn’t expect to see from market analytics.

“In the face of abundant content, consumers increasingly chose to play established ‘forever titles,’” Bellomo wrote, “leaving a shrinking pool of time for net-new releases.”

In context, Bellomo brought this up as one of a half-dozen reasons why investors abruptly fled the gaming sector in late 2023, once they came to understand how hard it is to break into the industry as an outsider. It’s a useful observation.

Other analysts like Circana’s Mat Piscatella have been sounding similar alarms. “Faced with poor discovery on the digital storefronts,” Piscatella wrote on Bluesky, “people will default even more to the games they know.”

If you’re a new developer or a smaller studio, that’s a serious problem. There’s only so much oxygen in this particular room, and a comparative handful of established series and games-as-a-service take up a disproportionate amount of it. People tend to play what they’re already playing. Everyone else has to fight it out for whatever chunk of the audience is left over.

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This isn’t a callout post. I am not here to say, explicitly or implicitly, that you are a terrible person because you enjoy games from a big franchise, play a GaaS, or have history with an MMO. I still read American comics; I put several years into World of Warcraft. I’m in no position to judge you.

That being said, this is the games industry’s version of what’s become an endemic issue in modern Western media: all the money is in the wrong places.

For video games, that’s manifested as what could be charitably described as brand stagnation. A minority of big companies drive the majority of the cultural conversation in games, and most of those companies have to keep their shareholders happy. Everything that you hate about the hobby is a knock-on effect from that gradual process of enshittification.

(No, seriously, it’s everything. Certain people, full of passionate intensity, will try to give you different targets. These people are culture-war con artists. Do not let yourself get distracted. There is no modern problem that does not eventually lead to an old man somewhere with a spreadsheet for a soul.)

That’s why I’m still thinking about what Megan Kelso said, over a year later. She was specifically talking about indie comics, but her advice holds true for every creative medium in 2025. Your job as a hobbyist is not to mindlessly consume whatever nostalgia-fueled zero-calorie slop that gets served to you. Discretion is called for. Broaden your horizons. Show up for the original work.

Talk to your friends, do some reading, and find something new to play (or watch, or read, or listen to). Every time you do, it helps reward the grassroots creativity that drives most of the actual innovation in this field. It helps build the scene we actually want to see.

This isn’t activism. It’s just a request to be more thoughtful about your entertainment dollar. If we keep showing up for the same stories with the same characters, year after year, then there is a theoretical endpoint where that’s all we’ll ever receive. That future cannot be allowed. Show up for something new, while new things still exist.