It’s ‘nerd-shit’ turning from what was usually an interplay between the hobbyist, who played and created for fun and community, and the professional, a hobbyist who had somehow parlayed creation into a living, to the interplay between the company, who is only interested in turning a profit and will actively harm a community by exclusively targeting the desires of it’s wealthy members, if it means generating more profit, and the consumer, who does not create but simply consumes and collects for their own individual satisfaction whatever that may entail.

Streamers and critics, are, btw, not hobbyists, they are professional consumers, those who are paid to consume product, the most toxic aspect of the dialectic, as they simultaneously have the loudest and most present voice in the industry, but represent the least amount and most privileged of people. Critics can be useful, but a critic should ideally also be actively engaged in the art of creation to some degree, or at least done so in the past. That doesn’t mean what they created has to be good or groundbreaking, it just means that they themselves understand what it means to create and not simply consume. An excellent critic can often elevate the criticism itself into a form of creation, but that is a rare talent indeed.