A lot of good games are made under the shadow of capitalism and it's weird to think about sometimes.
Like the whole concept of coin-operated arcade games. The extra life and continue mechanics seen in console games came from a cash incentive to make the player lose.
Or the fact that RPGs almost always charge the player for items. I'm not saying that it doesn't make sense as a mechanic, but I always wondered why people weren't given more healing potions.
The way IP laws work, I'm really curious how games would change once those are gone.
One way I see games changing with the destruction of capitalism:
I think online multiplayer games would be a lot more bearable. There wouldn't be the stratification between people who could afford putting more time or resources into a game and those who can't. Microtransactions and addictive gameplay mechanics wouldn't exist.
I think, at least for some genres and games, you'd see an explosion of modding and distributed development, but qualitatively changed to the point where it blurred the line between discrete titles modded into different forms and highly customizable engines with rich libraries.
Yeah I'd look to the STALKER modding community to this, as the devs did eventually just open source the engine and even helped modders with some problems. I know STALKER 2 is slated to come out, but that whole Franchise has been running on community support for 13 years now.
You get your conversion mods of the main game, i.e. some tweaks and changes, into full blown stand-alone games built on the framework of Call of Pripyat, sandboxes, storylines, dynamic storys and such.
Haha, Stalker was exactly what I was thinking about.