Itch.io isn’t like other platforms

I have this joke about how I prefer restaurants that have “bad service”, where the servers are a little rude. It's a bit like Freddie Wong’s video about how the best Chinese restaurants are rated 3.5 stars on Yelp. His best guess for why this happens is that white reviewers deduct stars for “poor service”. It’s not that bad service equates to good food, but more about how there’s this kind of artificial standard for “good service” created by restaurants and customers who value things other than the quality of food (and the job security of workers).

I say all that because I think itch.io is a 3.5 star restaurant. And by that, I mean that it exists within a context that warps our sense of what good service is.

Let’s talk about capitalism.

If you don’t know who Yanis Varoufakis is, think of him as the Brennan Lee Mulligan of economists. (I don’t know if that’s the worst sentence I’ve ever written, but it’s got to be close.) He’s not just an economist; he’s a politician. Varoufakis was briefly the finance minister of Greece and more recently founded a pan-European political party. He also worked at Valve studying the economies in games, but that’s not the relevant connection for this essay. Varoufakis is a political commentator. He writes books. His latest book is called Technofeudalism, and in it, he says capitalism is dead. But not in a good way.