Just to lob a controversial thought in there: There may be some challenges the game industry faces that aren’t solely “capitalism bad”. The most compelling one I’ve heard is that, as games as a medium they have to increasingly compete with a growing back catalogue of classics.

Between that and the rise of indie games, it gets increasingly risky to invest in large projects.

(To try and preempt some comments: I am not saying that investors are “right” to pull out of the games industry. I just want people to consider whether the problem, and hence the solution, is more complicated than they first thought)

I agree, but my point was that cost isn’t a sufficient explanation.

I think I particularly agree with @megopie@beehaw.org: one reason we see photo-realism instead of more stylised graphics is that it is more generic, and thus less dependent on a specific team.

The more artistic/creative your work, the less interchangeable your workers are.

But you could also make the same argument about graphical fidelity, which has been pushed further and further for decades, greatly swelling the cost of production

Games.

Other than basic things like Tetris (Quadrapassel) and minesweeper, I’ve not yet found an open source game I’ve enjoyed nearly as much as the countless proprietary games I own and play.

This seems like a false dichotomy. Maxwell’s equations don’t say anything about where the charge comes from, only how the electromagnetic field behaves if charge (be it electric or magnetic) is present.

And if you’re talking about the standard model, well we’ve known that that’s incomplete since its inception, but I’m not aware of any argument that says anything beyond the standard model must have either monopole or a fundamentally different conception of magnetic dipoles.