How to Enjoy Video Games in 2025

When I was a kid, I thought of old people as being resistant to change simply because they were stuck in their ways. That's sometimes true, but now that I have become an old person myself, I see myself forming a resistance to certain changes. It's a weird thing to reconcile against my personality because I actually love change. In fact, I start feeling a hint of depression if I get too caught up in a routine. I have to switch things up to get out of my funk.

At 42 though, I can see that some change, even if it looks good on the surface, isn't worth the cost. This is tough to see because the costs are often hidden and play out over months or years. If you haven't seen these patterns unfold in the past, it's hard to see why you wouldn't jump on that new trend.

Take Bluesky for instance. I made my Twitter exit back in 2022 when I stopped being active, logging in, or even visiting the site. I made my way over to Mastodon which offered an alternative, and I've enjoyed the community there ever since. In the most recent round of Twitter exits after the election, Bluesky had its moment, and I was tempted to go see what they have going on over there. I didn't though because Bluesky suffers from the same Achilles heel of Twitter: centralized control. I took inventory of the things that might make me move over or even just try it out: more people to interact with and better features. In evaluating these, I realized I don't care about being on the biggest platform. I don't live in the largest city. I don't try to collect the most friends. So, why would I care about which social network has a higher user count? Then I thought about the countless software products that wormed their way into our lives with "better features" only to then enshittify and make us pay for those one way or another later. The carrot is here now, but you can bet that the stick is coming later. No thanks!

Video games, like every commercial product, are on a similar trajectory. They've become more convenient and at the same time more exploitative. It's left me pining for the simple gaming transactions of my youth:

  1. Go to a store
  2. Find a game that looks cool
  3. Buy the game
  4. Play the game
  5. Move on

Now, games are cheaper and more accessible than ever. I can get hundreds of games for free and play them on my phone anywhere I want! If I had described this to a 12-year-old me, I would have been stoked to get to this utopian future… but I'm here now, and it's not at all what it's cracked up to be.

Fortunately though, the model of the past hasn't gone away. It's just been shunned by the major publishers that embraced it and used it to grow in the past in favor of more exploitative and opaque models. Since they're not the only game in town though, we can let them have it and move on to studios conducting business the way we want to. I've been wanting to write this post for a while to expose some of the pitfalls and help you stay on the path to gaming bliss!

Before we move on though, you should be aware that this post is very prescriptive, and the advice is based on my personal experience. All of the advice may not be right for you. Pick and choose what you like or ignore it all. It won't hurt my feelings a bit! I don't even follow all of my advice all of the time! (What a hypocrite, right?) If you approach this with an open mind though, you can find something in here that may be helpful to you.

If you want a fun way to be introduced to my philosophy, take a couple of minutes and play my Decker deck, created for the Deck-Month 2 jam on itch.io. More than anything, it's a test of how close your existing philosophy about games is to mine, but it's a fun way get the short version of how I approach gaming.

Now, let's move on to the long version.

Things to Avoid

Major Publishers

I guess it's been at least two decades now that major publishers have been complaining that they don't make enough money by making video games. They continue to inflate their budgets to produce more iterative, often derivative slop and then complain loudly when it doesn't sell three copies to every living human like their sales projections said it should. Game industry CEOs are literally starving in the streets because of this crisis.

Hang on a second. I'm just getting word from my correspondent in the field that the CEOs are not, in fact starving in the streets and are instead giving themselves raises as they lay off thousands of the workers who create the value their salaries are derived from. Weird!

While these CEOs are not creating any of the value that brings in the money, they are devising new strategies to get you to pay more for games while keeping the same price tag on the box. Many times, they can even reduce the price tag down to zero!

Free-to-Play

When they named this business model, they very nearly said the quiet part out loud. People want things that are free, but when you add a qualifier like the "-to-play" in this instance, the lines are right there to read between to let you know that something is not free. What is it? Well, you won't know until you try it!

That's the whole play: get the player invested and then get them to give up the cash. It's the same model email scams have used since the beginning of the internet: get people to invest something, and then they're more pliable to invest more so as not to lose their initial investment. Compare these scenarios:

This was the original exploitative free-to-play model, but in recent years, execs have, after looking around to make sure no regulators are watching, said, "why stop there when we could also add gambling?" Take the scenario above. Make the transaction to advance cheaper, but then also put the item into a blind box with a bunch of shit the player doesn't want and make the odds to get the thing they do want 1:25. God bless America™️, *that's a business model!

Reward these jokers for their great ideas by avoiding the business model altogether. If the game doesn't have a clear up-front price you pay, skip it. Some of these games may be OK, but the vast majority are not.

Live Service Games

This is an off-shoot of the free-to-play genre in which you also get charged up-front. Hurray, I guess?

Due to the fact that you are paying something up-front, it seems like you have a much better shot at getting a fair deal with live service games, although I still can't help feeling icky at the idea of buying a game and not actually knowing what my final cost for the game will be.

The biggest problem with these is that they are primarily competitive games. Being competitive games that want to keep selling you bits and bobs, they need to ensure the integrity of the competition. If the game is a joke because a bunch of cheaters are running amok, people stop buying the skins and pets and weapons and whatever else.

The industry has settled on a solution to this problem: all competitive games must install kernel-level spyware on your system that has unlimited access to do anything it wants. What could possibly go wrong?

Would you want Riot, Bungie, Activision, and the others to come into your house and watch you while you're playing? Would you want them there, able to poke around in the bank statements you have laying out on the table or grab the cash you have stuffed in a jar on top of the fridge? If not, then you don't want them in your kernel. It's kinda like they're in your house but they're invisible. That's not any better; it's just that you don't have to be constantly aware of it… which may in fact be worse.

Besides that, most of these games won't run on Linux, which we'll talk about later.

Perpetual Rentals (or Gaming Subscriptions)

All the major publishers are ready for you to stop owning games because once you own them, you don't need to pay for it anymore. This has led to the rise of subscription gaming services: Game Pass, and whatever the things EA and Ubisoft have are called.

These are a fantastic deal… and they will be, until they have converted enough people over and have a service sticky enough to ensure they don't bleed subscribers when they jack the price. Remember when Netflix streaming was $10/month? Enshittification is coming for gaming subscriptions; it's just not fully settled in yet. Game Pass has already nearly doubled their price. Imagine what they'll do once they have games you have to subscribe to them in order to play…

You don't want to be the sucker who invests all your gaming dollars in these subscriptions and has to walk away with nothing when the services are $50 a month and you have to subscribe to twelve of them to get the games you want to play.

Game Consoles

I was primarily a console gamer for many years, but consoles are expensive to make and expensive to publish for. That means the games published on these platforms are more likely to contain all the things to avoid I've previously mentioned: they're very likely to be published by major publishers, and all of those are chasing the free-to-play and live service player-hostile gravy train.

Besides that, a game is generally more expensive on console versus PC when comparing their best sale prices. Besides that, you miss out on many games that are only released on PC due to the cost, among other barriers, of publishing on console. Besides that, most console exclusives are now also released on PC. Nintendo games are the notable exception, but there are ways to play those on PC with even better performance. 😉 If you're buying Nintendo's games, you're funding their campaign of fan intimidation that enables them to sue their players for not handling their games the way Nintendo would like them to. So, don't do that.

Phone Games

Smartphones enjoyed a very short period after the launch of Apple's App Store in which cool games were created for them. Now it's a firehose of the same kinds of games we've talked about above — free-to-play gacha live-service gambling extravaganzas — with an occasional real game sent to die on those digital storefronts. Not worth your time to sift through, nevermind the fact that many of those "real" games are ports designed for a controller. This gaming platform is not worth your time.

Things to Embrace

Linux

The most common post I see on Linux gaming communities amounts to this: "Should I game on Linux given these constraints?" The answer most of the time is, "Yes, Linux just works for gaming now." I'm here to tell you this is 100% false. Linux may "just work" for some people, but for me and many others, it hasn't. The average of "just works" and "is kind of a pain in the ass" is definitely not "just works."

That said, it does work. It just takes a bit more effort than doing the same thing under Windows. To give an example, if I want to install a game I purchased from GOG on Windows, I download the installer, run it, and step through the wizard. Then I execute, and I'm generally good. On Linux, I'll still download the installer, but now I have to do something funky with it. I can add it to Steam as a non-Steam game and run it there. I can download Lutris and let it handle the installation. Once that's done, I'll need to… do something in Steam to have it run the game instead — maybe change the path of the non-Steam game I just added; I'm not sure since I generally don't use this method. On Lutris, I can just run it… unless the Lutris installer for some reason is trying to run the wrong executable, in which case I'll probably first need to discover that by looking at the logs and then change the path in the game's configuration to reflect the actual executable. Anyway, the point is that it just works sometimes and other times doesn't, which again averages out to "doesn't just work."

Steam generally just works. Occasionally I will need to change the compatibility layer in the game's properties, but that's about the most I've had to do. Other storefronts are more or less challenging. I've only ever had one game I could not get to run, and that was a little game jam game I downloaded from itch.io. I probably could have gotten it working if I had given it some more time, but I didn't care enough. This is something I probably wouldn't need to think about on Windows… although I'd be lying if I said I've never had trouble getting a game to run on Windows. I had to return Sekiro because it just wouldn't run on my system, and there was nothing I could do to make it run.

For console players, gaming on a computer is a little more complicated. Sometimes that barrier is too much. For Windows players, gaming on Linux is a little harder still. I look at each step as an investment. Going from a gaming console to a computer, you get out of the walled garden into a more open platform. You have real competition between stores when you buy games and no longer need to pay the console tax for every game you buy. You have a device that can do many things, and you have some knowledge that is useful outside the context of games.

All these same things are true for the next jump to Linux. You get further out of walled garden land. Windows is open, but you're still playing on Microsoft's playground. If you want to talk about knowledge that could be generally useful, in learning Linux, you're now learning the operating system that drives 97% of the internet. These are marketable skills, if that's what you want to make of them. On the other hand, if all you do is make it possible for you to continue gaming without exposing all your credit cards and banking info to some Microsoft AI or staying out of the clutches of their future subscription-based OS, that's well worth the initial pain of making the switch.

Indie Games

While major publishers are complaining that they're having trouble making enough money to fund their CEO's yacht budget with the release of Call of Duty 18, indie developers are quietly turning out games that are actually fun and innovative and offer a simple value proposition: give us a few dollars, and we'll give you a few hours of quality entertainment. Where major publishers are all doom and gloom as they rake in billions, the indie scene is turning out better games on much less. The trends the major publishers are chasing now are rip-offs of the indie games of 5-10 years ago, so go indie now and get ahead of the game.

From the gamer perspective, indie games are a breath of fresh air and a cornucopia of cool new ideas. They make games fun again. The picture is not always so rosy for indie developers though. Did you hear that Steam saw the release of 19,000 games last year? That's a big number, and it would be easy for a game to get buried. Some developers will devote years of effort to their game only to release it to zero fanfare and a handful of sales. This is inevitable, but we can start to counteract it by paying attention to the developers who are focused on making cool things rather than prying open our wallets with another glorified casino. Take the money you would have spent on that and redirect it to make the indie scene even stronger.

GOG, Itch, and (For Now) Steam

To stay off the subscription treadmill I talked about above, buy your games, but you should also consider where you buy them. GOG, Itch, and Steam have shown a commitment to being consumer-friendly. I particularly like GOG since they have committed to offering only games without DRM. That means I can take the installer I get from GOG and install the game from it any time. DRM means my ownership rights are always contingent upon the publisher, developer, and storefront. I effectively own nothing unless all those parties agree that I own it at the time I want to exercise my ownership rights.

In an age where the digital assets people pay for have been yanked back in many instances, this is the difference between buying and renting. Did you buy a DRM-free game, or are you renting a game that will be called back whenever the whim strikes? Itch is a very friendly storefront to creators, but part of that friendliness means that they don't seem to prohibit the use of DRM in your game sold on their platform, although they also don't facilitate it. In practice, I believe most if not all games on Itch are DRM-free. DRM runs rampant on Steam and, although the current leadership of Valve have been pretty good stewards, that's not always guaranteed to be the case.

Steam also has advantages, particularly for Linux users. Having the compatibility layer managed for you makes playing seamless. Deck compatibility tells you that a game works on Linux (although many games that don't hit their mark will still work). The two-hour return window was a revelation for gamers. If they could flip the off switch on DRM platform-wide, this would be the ultimate platform, but that will probably never happen since major publishers demand it. (Yet another reason to stay clear of them! 😁)

You'll be better off with any of these storefronts than with the alternatives, but to protect your investment for the long-term, buy DRM-free whenever possible.

The Upshot

If you ignore the mainstream, you can still have fun with video games even in our dystopian times. I'm still having a blast, and this corner of gaming culture doesn't seem to be fading anytime soon. Stay cool, and enjoy your gaming! 💪