Glibby McQuipster's Notable Quotables

Pictured: McQuipster, seen here
thinking up clever turns of phrase.

Somebody once said:

"If you're not paying for it, you're not a customer, you're the product."

-Somebody

Who said that? I don't know. In fact, nobody seems to be able to agree about who it was and it doesn't really matter. The important thing to keep in mind is that it-huh? Why do you care who said it? I mean, it's just a-you're not going to let it go are you? Ok fine, let's say it was noted 19th century wit Glibby McQuipster whose bon-mots are legendary. Satisfied?

Moving on. Whoever said it, it's often applied to Google's business model in which you don't pay for any of the company's products, but rather advertisers pay Google to put their algorithmically tailored ads 'Click Here' adds in front of our eyes when we're trying to do things online. Then we, like fools, buy stuff.

"Take it! Taaake iiiit!"

-Us, when presented

with ads for anything

Above: our grim future.

And that's how Google makes $100 billion dollars a year without producing anything and it's also one of the reasons we're on a trajectory towards a bloody revolution against the corporate aristocracy whose greed and excess are slowly suffocating us, but that's for another day...say, June? Anyway, they may soon have another way new way to get their advertisers' dumb products in our faces. In a tweet yesterday they demanded that we all watch some announcement next Tuesday which everyone seems to think will be about streaming games. 

Yup, Google is about to get into the gaming industry and shift some paradigms or disrupt it or you know, whatever it is corporations do.

Make San Francisco unliveable?

Assuming you have a decent connection.
Which you don't, no one does.

So what the hell even is a streaming game? Well, since you ask, it'd be either a dedicated video game console or maybe even some kind of browser-based platform (or both) over which Google would offer video games, probably as a subscription service. Which is cool, but the neat thing is that while you play these games on your console or phone or whatever, they're actually running on a server somewhere, so as the technology improves, you don't have to upgrade your device for the next big thing that comes along.

The question on everyone's mind
however, is can Google succeed
where Soulja Boy could not? 

So Google's never really been a games company and it seems like, super arrogant to simply announce that they're be jumping into the gaming industry the same way you or I might take up crochet, but they do have, as I mentioned a couple of times before, billions of dollars so who knows? They did have some luck recently getting Assassin's Creed Odyssey to run in a browser window which is genuinely impressive and suggests that if they are announcing something to compete with Xbox and Playstation it won't be some shitty Android box.

That was just an example.
Do not watch Bruce Almighty.

But I don't know, streaming video games as a concept doesn't sit well with me. Maybe I'm just old (definitely) and stuck in the days where you'd go buy a game tape from your local Babbage's, but I've just never been fully comfortable with the move away from discs and cartridges and towards digital downloads for games. Like, when you buy a game digitally, you're not really buying it so much as you're licensing it. So if the online storefront you bought it on ever disappears, that's it, you can't download it again. And streaming seems even more ephemeral. Google's whatever will probably be something like Netflix but for games and like a streaming service, things can be pulled at any time. If Netflix taught us anything it's that you'd better watch Bruce Almighty while you have the chance.