Oh, but for that, you need to upgrade your free Xbox Live account to a paid account, and also register a uSemen account, which is maintained separately by the developer through an app on your console desktop. And you have to be connected to both at all times, even if you're only masturbating dragons in single-player. Better hope your internet connection never has an outage! $560, a paid yearly subscription, and two dozen hours of your life later, and you're finally ready to jerk off some wyverns! Except for the VR-exclusive content.

All of that complete lack of convenience represents the growing disconnect between what console creators think consumers want and what they actually seem to want. Do you want a PlayStation 4 Pro, plus a PlayStation VR headset and a new 4K TV to take advantage of all the Pro's features? Prepare to drop two grand. Do you just want to play a damn game, regardless of your K count? You're not in Sony and Microsoft's current target market. They're racing to advertise and sell the most powerful and expensive machines possible at a time when everyone's talking about how they're having trouble paying rent. And then they justify the cost by touting extra features of dubious value. How many people are navigating the baffling and hideous labyrinth that is the Xbox One's user interface so they can make a Skype call?

Hardcore gamers and tech geeks with money to burn love this stuff, and that's fine. Someone has to make the hardware breakthroughs. But people who know what Dolby Atmos audio is and get excited about buying the third incarnation of the same Xbox to take advantage of it are in the minority, if Nintendo's success with "Hey, plug this in and you can play Mario" is any indication. I'm not demanding a return to the simplicity of the Atari 2600, but at what point are we going to draw the line on paying big money to justify features that most people don't need? I guess we'll find out whenever the PlayStation 5 is announced.

Worst of all was Star Wars Battlefront II, which inspired a fan revolt rivaling the fervor of most communist revolutions. Initially, characters like Darth Vader (the guy that might as well be the logo for the franchise) remained locked behind either 40 hours of grinding or lucre, even if you had already dropped 80 bucks on the game's deluxe edition. The developers stripped out the worst of their "pay to win" features in the face of complaints, but reviewers pointed out that the game remained a tedious grind-fest that forced you to say goodbye to the rest of your schedule if you wanted to get anywhere with it. Naturally, it still sold millions of copies.

In fact, the top three best-selling games of 2017 all featured microtransaction scandals. Microtransactions aren't inherently evil -- blockbuster games are getting increasingly expensive to make, and letting hardcore fans pay to make their gun shoot rainbows is a better solution than adding 20 bucks to the base price. But microtransactions have evolved from a necessary annoyance into an open evil, and our response has been to shake our fists, grump on social media, then buy the games anyway. We can't keep having it both ways. If gamers truly want aggressive microtransactions to stop, they need to vote with their wallets. Otherwise, don't be surprised if 2019's Call Of Duty: WWIV makes you drop five bucks in the middle of a match so you'll be allowed to reload.

Sure, let's look at it. Most of the game was made by two brothers over seven years, and all they had to do to make it happen was, uh, quit their jobs, remortgage their homes, and work brutally long hours. How many aspiring game developers do you think are out there who remortgaged their homes and didn't sell two million copies of their passion project?

It's not like that's an isolated case. Seemingly every indie hit has a harrowing story behind it. One of the creators of Night In The Woods said that the workload almost killed him. He wasn't being figurative. Jason Roberts' Gorogoa began development in 2011, when Roberts quit his job. He ran out of money in 2013, got a boost from an indie development fund, then blew through that too. He finally released Gorogoa in late 2017. Seven years to make a game you can complete in under an hour. And those are the successes. An average indie game is lucky to make $20,000.

It's slightly beyond the scope of this article to determine how to completely redesign the economy to better support the arts, but let's not pretend that gaming's current business model rewards innovation. In Hollywood, creators who want decent budgets without involving superheroes found a home in prestige TV, and the streaming model has made that work. Gaming needs that -- a marketplace in which creators can get funding for riskier projects without having to sell both kidneys or pray their Kickstarter goes viral.

If you don't get the appeal, I'm sorry to inform you that you're old. I am too, but I do get the appeal, because I'm a cool old person. Twitch and YouTube have made gaming social again, and not in the sense where someone in the opposite hemisphere can call you a cocksucking cheater until you're deaf. It's about just ... hanging out. And if particularly engaging streamers can make a living wage doing it, great! That's the fantasy our parents yelled at us for having when we were 13.

But this is also a world in which working 12-16 hours a day, seven days a week for fear of losing viewers and subscribers can be the minimum. There are stories that sound like plot pitches for Black Mirror episodes. One streamer found herself in physical pain from streaming so much Just Dance. Another used Twitch to pay for his college tuition, but couldn't take a break when his grandfather's death was announced to him in the middle of a stream. Another streamer developed diabetes from their work habits. And, oh yeah, someone died in the middle of their 24-hour stream.

There's also the issue of streaming influencing the gaming economy in sketchy ways. Warner Bros. got in trouble with the FTC for paying influential gamers to promote Shadow Of War Profiteering without disclosing the campaign, and Microsoft failed to disclose that they were paying YouTubers to talk up the Xbox One in a campaign the FTC called "false and misleading." Twitch says their streams help boost game sales, but some games have the opposite problem. That Dragon, Cancer -- a fun, lighthearted romp through a family's naked grief at losing their five-year-old son -- was critically acclaimed but failed to turn a profit, as millions of people just watched someone play the game instead of buying it for themselves. There's a weird line between observing and stealing that hasn't been hammered out yet.

Lots of streamers have healthy and interesting careers, but it's still a medium that's too new to have a robust set of standards and ethics ... which means the rules are being written on the fly by inexperienced adults and actual children. It's in this murky world that PewDiePie, the multimillionaire with 59 million subscribers and 16 billion views, got in trouble for both failing to disclose sponsorship and for using racial slurs and anti-Semitic jokes mere months after he acknowledged that he was wrong for making gay jokes. That stuff made headlines even on sites old people read. At some point, they're going to decide these streamers are corrupting the minds of a generation. What happens then?