Everyone within videogames knows the term “Games as a Service”, but we mostly use it when we talk about the business model of games that are aimed to provide a continuous experience to its players. However, you cannot run a Game as a Service, when you don’t also design it as such. I compare this type of approach to something similar to a Restaurant, where customers are sold an illusion of comfort that actually requires a lot of effort to keep up. We all know the stories of angry restaurant customers, who love to yell at service workers and in a way, the most vocal elements of videogames are very similar both in their expectations as well as their tone when they are not met.

We have a big problem with videogames in that most voices who get to talk about game design as a craft are people who are very good at one very particular kind of game, those that are commercially successful. This also applies to games criticism, where even those pieces that do try and look at games from an angle that goes beyond treating games as consumer products, mostly look at games that come out of that very specific, industrialized part of videogames culture.

Over time, and subjectively I feel this has gotten much worse over the past 10 years, this has lead to a very stagnant idea of what a videogame actually is. In the landscape of 2026, a videogame can only be a Restaurant. Everything orbits around the player, even elements that sound like they might go against the player’s interests are framed such that they are actually good for them.