Last week for inexplicable reasons, Bethesda Games announced a paid subscription called Fallout 1st for their infamous MMO mess, Fallout 76. The base game was poorly received, even by the notoriously generous gaming press, seen as a buggy, unnecessary cash-in. There’s little other explanation other than base desperation to save a flailing title. Fallout 1st, a name that practically smirks at you, offers private servers, fancy skins, and what used to be mods for the tune of $100 a year. Imagine spending one hundred dollars on a game that was universally panned, for stuff you used to get in offline games for free. Even in a universally acclaimed game, this would be seen as excessively expensive.
Fallout 76 has became something of a cautionary tale about a sloppy, smug developer whose reach exceeded their grasp. Bethesda’s first party games have been coasting on a decade of unearned goodwill, putting out broken, shallow RPG’s of decreasing quality. A rare exception is Fallout: New Vegas, developed by Fallout originals Obsidian Entertainment. This might be the permanent black mark on Bethesda’s record they’ll spend the second act of their lifespan trying to live down.
The vanilla game costs anywhere from $60-80, depending on your version and platform. PC Gamer recently reported that “class warfare” had hit many public Fallout 76 servers, with regular players intentionally targeting Fallout 1st subscribers, who are posting cringe, easily identified by their fancy premium skins and emotes. Gamers rise up!
Besides being the most hilarious thing I’ve heard in a while, what Fallout 76 is accidentally doing is showing what happens to meaningful, interesting themes when a corporate machine devours it for profit, and the limit of gamers’ class language in describing their discontent with their media.
The Fairness Doctrine
Fallout has always, at least in early entries, been a satire of MAGA, before this was even a hack coded slogan for Trumpian white supremacy. In the Fallout universe, the United States was a pre-nuclear war cartoon of Leave It To Beaver, but hyperviolent and borderline fascist. The world of Fallout is stuck in the retrofuturism of 2287, but everyone still acts like it’s 1957. Giant tube TV, big finned nuclear-powered cars, and clunky wrist computers set the tone.
The grim gallows humor and Looney Tunes violence mocks the bullshit jingoism of anticommunist hyperpatriotism, suburbia, and mid-century American optimism (minus all the racism, of course). The term “nuclear family” is given a whole new meaning. What’s brilliant about the world is that the pre and post war America are both perfect representations of a broken economics of the present. The world before is a sheltered, pampered white middle class while the post-war world is the place most working class people around the world inhabit: everyone fighting for scraps. The nuclear war could be seen as a metaphor for an ideology bomb that blows apart our worldview.
That’s where Fallout 76 comes in. Gamers, the ones who think the Epic Games Store is literally Hitler, have this peculiar “half-in, half-out” relationship to capitalism. The vast majority of people who casually enjoy games don’t give a shit about DRM, lootboxes, or esports. The players that angrily care, however, tend to fall into a similar camp: capitalism is bad only when they identify it as “not fair”.
“Fairness” in an exchange for a product appears to be the operative motivation here. “I pay money for something, I get the thing in its entirety.” Asking for more money on top of that, for something that is *perceived* as being unfair, is practically a crime.
This perception of “fairness” is heavily skewed towards developers and publishers that have good PR and positive brand images. Steam, produced by Valve, is a sub-standard platform with a glut of low-effort content, terrible customer service, and didn’t even offer refunds until 2015. They do not sell games. They sell licenses for games in exchange for convenience, which they can revoke at any time. Its forums are rife with hate speech. They enjoy a virtual monopoly on PC gaming while still charging developers a 30% fee on *every single sale*, by offering space on their storefront and the chaotic features of their platform. Their bad behavior has been normalized because they were first to market and also take a light-hearted approach to their company’s image.
They’re literally gaming landlords. If so, Steam is a digital slum.
Steam has breathless defenders who bark and snarl whenever another publisher has the chutzpah to start their own launcher. Origin, uPlay, Rockstar Social Club, Battle.Net, and the final boss, the Epic Games Store. The recent hatred of the EGS is baffling to me, even as a near-decade long user of Steam. Yes, it doesn’t have as many features as other platforms and feels half-baked, but once again the real sin is perceived unfairness. This is a childish game of Good Vs Bad Guy. GOG Galaxy by CDProjecktRed is a rare more pro-consumer model, focusing on older DRM-free games and even developing a cross-platform launcher to centralize extensive game collections. GOG’s focus on games preservation of older, less-marketable titles and a rejection of walled gardens is seen as a breath of fresh air in an industry that seems to love fragmenting itself.
Epic Fail Store (Get it?!)
Epic Games has the unmitigated gall to, gasp, ask developers to be EGS exclusives, a criticism rarely wielded against Nintendo or Sony for their games on console. Epic Games is bad because they make Fortnite, a ridiculously popular game among kids and casuals, making them the ideal enemy of the One True Gamer. What you don’t hear a lot about is the fact Epic only takes a 12% cut, 40% of what Steam takes. For a small developer anxious about being part of a crowded, undisciplined platform like Steam, seeing the minor PR backlash from a bunch of extremely online gamers as acceptable to market viability. Gamers have regularly cited feeling “betrayed” when a game goes EGS exclusive by a company acting like, well, a company; yet I have to hear one percent the annoyance about Steam exclusives. This type of embarrassing brand stanning need to stop.
The gamers threaten boycotts, and much like the Overwatch Hong Kong cosplay, they tend to go absolutely nowhere. The lack of class language or willingness to challenge market forces makes it impossible for them to see anything outside of an individual consumer choice. Gamers angry about these things tend to be deeply atomized people to begin with, and the one thing they felt like they could control, a hobby that gave them an escape now squeezing them for more money feels like a violation of trust. It’s a false type of class consciousness, since “gamers” are merely individual consumers, not a class that can organize. Working people are a class, developers and the players alike.
It’s not that monetization exists, but a certain type of monetization beyond the selling price is somehow a bridge too far. The most entitled of them want the simplicity of a single storefront and one set of credentials. They also want games that have free DLC, no lootboxes, no microtransactions, no deluxe editions, yet triple-AAA polish and scope with top-notch voice acting and eternal multiplayer servers. It’s like complaining that your rent is too expensive, but you want a golden toilet. You don’t mind a landlord who takes 30% of your income, but you want them to be nicer about it and sell you a digital hat.
What they really want is something like a public library; a decommodified, universally accessible platform, dedicated to historical and cultural preservation, but for the rich breadth of PC games.
The real issue here is that capitalism is going to capitalism, this is the nature of the industry. The very same forces that brought them a PC gaming monopoly they love so much also pioneered FTP microtransactions and lootboxes on the platform: Steam with Team Fortress 2, a popular 2007 class-based shooter that went free to play in 2011.
Fallout 1917
Fallout 76 committed the perfect Gamer Crime spree: had its own publisher-based launcher, had obnoxious microtransactions in a premium-priced game, went on sale a week after it came out, lied about its deluxe edition bonuses, and then it launched a subscription service not worth $1 a century. Todd Howard might as well have flown out to their house and taken a shit in their Fallout 76 pre-order canvas bags.
The “class war” in Fallout 76 is an interesting expression of anger. Yes, it’s a type of juvenile trolling, but it comes from a semi-real desire to stop being exploited for wanting to relax and have fun. Odd that they want to have vicarious fun in a post-apocalyptic franchise that is a damning indictment of everything Fallout 76 seems to promote.
The most fascinating gamer outrage is against “pay-to-win” mechanics, purchased gear or bonuses that give you an objective advantage over others. The most prominent critics of these mechanics can’t bring themselves to point out that’s the definition of capitalism: superiority through wealth. They’re so close to a major breakthrough, but dash away from confronting or engaging in the most minor of class politics. Even deeper is the loot-shoot-repeat Skinner Box mechanics of such games as Fallout 76, Borderlands, Destiny, and others is a representation of the capitalist drive, the mindless acquisition of more for its own sake. But I mean, at least you get to shoot robots and shit, that’s more fun than grinding out a living fixing copiers and mining bitcoin.
Games development is going to be a testbed for how actual class politics play out in a data and software-based industry. White collar IT work, long the bastion of awful libertarian Silicon Valley ideology, is getting some classic labor agitation with orgs like Game Workers Unite. Stories of crunch, unpaid labor, and worker exploitation are getting traction. Too many gamers lack class language, so they have to target “greed” and individual bad actors, such as Epic Games or even Todd Howard himself. That may change in the near future, we’re already seeing it happening.
A more nuanced developer would make a two-tiered subscription based game a type of statement about how class politics work. The Fallout 1%, if you may. An even better idea would have been to have some player randomly given premium status simply based on luck, much like how wealth is determined by birth lottery. Yes, it would be unfair and probably not fun, but it would be compelling. (This was Krill’s idea.) Fallout 76 could have been a brave, sharp take on that, lambasting the American cult of self-made billionaires more aptly in line with its original themes. But no, it had to be a slapdash shovelware Early Access debacle so Bethesda could tie us over until Elder Scrolls VI.
That would require a better understanding of what makes Fallout special, and more importantly, a deeper realization about class politics as a whole that these gamers, comfortable with their “bad apple” analogies, may not be willing to entertain. Yet.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.