You're In Business, Jonathan

Jason Schreier has written an interesting little piece for Wired about auteurs in video games. Jonathan Blow provided some quotes, and while I would really like to spend some time discussing whether someone who "thinks almost all games are pretty bad" can qualify as an auteur, something else Blow said dovetails nicely with what I was talking about yesterday.

First of all, here's the relevant excerpt:

“For someone like me, who thinks almost all games are pretty bad, and who has very specific ideas about what he wants to make … I can very definitely say that the single-leader model is good,” he said in an e-mail to Wired.com, although he noted that he and THQ are not in the same business.

It's that last bit that interests me. Blow "noted" that he, as someone who makes video games and sells them for a profit, is not in the same business as THQ, who make video games and sell them for a profit. Of course "noted" is Schreier's word choice, but it's a strange one. That's a statement that cries out for justification, and Schreier takes it for granted.

Given Blow's past comments about not making games due to "crass profit motives," I think we can guess what he means. THQ is a business, and recently an increasingly nasty one, what with CEO Brian Farrell essentially saying he wants people to pay $100 for complete games. It's understandable that Blow would want to distance himself from that. It would be even if he didn't appear to buy into the notion that making money is antithetical to making art.

Blow can try to convince us that his desire to sell games (which I can only assume he has, since he sells games) is different from THQ's, but nobody should believe him. Both want you to buy their games so they can make money. That Blow's pricing model is more consumer friendly doesn't mean he's in a different business. He isn't, and he won't be until he starts giving his games away, or only selling enough copies to cover his development costs.

You're in the video game business, Jonathan, even if you hate it.