No longtime gamer has failed to notice how much easier video games are nowadays compared to their early days. The New York Times Magazine recently speculated that today’s easier video games may be a reaction to the increasing difficulty and chaos of modern life. More to the point, we can see similar reactions going on right now in Christianity in America. In a lot of ways, what’s happening with video games is also happening to religion. But these respective industries’ leaders are handling their declines in markedly different ways. Today, let’s check out this trend—and see what it reveals about religion as well.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 10/14/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: The Sims has officially gotten easier
On October 8th, 2025, The New York Times Magazine ran an article about how much easier the video game The Sims has gotten over the years. In it, writer Kim Hew-Low describes how she completely controls the life of one of her Sims, down to the exact meals the Sim will eat and what she’ll do to relieve stress. Hew-Low compares the routine ease of money-making and accomplishments in the game’s newest version against the sheer chaos that could quickly unfold in its first one.
She’s not wrong. Back in the game’s early days, hot tub parties could turn deadly at the drop of a hat. Sims could get electrocuted, starve to death, drown in pools lacking pool ladders, die in house fires, and get too depressed to go to work (thus dooming them to poverty in a vicious circle that all too many real people might recognize). If a Sims family had kids, neglecting them could lead to a social worker taking them away! Even into The Sims 3, Sims could die in a variety of hilarious, unexpected ways—including alchemical transmutation into a solid gold statue.
But nowadays, she tells us, it’s harder to get a Sim killed. It’s also much easier for them to earn money. She’s not wrong there, either. When The Sims 4 came out in 2014, nothing I saw about the game intrigued me. It felt like a mobile game—lifeless, soulless, and overly reliant on endlessly-cycling quick-fulfillment actions. Though it’s gotten better since then, it still lacks the sheer charm of the franchise’s earlier versions.
Hew-Low ends her article by pointing out how comforting it can be, in these uncertain times, to play a game that’s more cozy than challenging.
Her article got me thinking about trends in the video game industry. In turn, that inevitably led me to consider how those trends relate to religion in America. Today, let’s see how these gaming trends mirror those in religion—and why so many Americans are rethinking both their video game purchases and their religious affiliation.
The rise of the cozy MMO
By the term “cozy,” gamers describe games that are safe, predictable, nonviolent, community-oriented, cooperative rather than competitive, and most of all relaxing to play. Often, they feature pleasant building experiences, real-world crafting like cooking and weaving, and pleasing aesthetics. Technically, they’re MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), commonly called just MMOs. These include Runescape, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, Albion, and many others. But cozy MMOs are more like a fun day out with friends or doing your own thing. They’re a solid step up from purely social environments like VR Chat.
Even some competitive traditional MMOs, like World of Warcraft, contain a number of cozy elements these days: house decoration, nonviolent content like alchemy crafting, gardening, and more. Along the same lines, somehow Red Dead Online became a major hub for “horse girls,” who are teen girls and (usually young) women who love riding together and caring for their ingame horses—and they aren’t interested at all in the game’s better-known competitive content. (I sure didn’t have that on my 2020s bingo card!)
As this cozy content has risen in popularity, I’ve seen a decrease of interest in what gamers call “sweaty” content. Sweaty play is the opposite of coziness. It emphasizes scheduled gameplay with guilds, elite gear, and sharp combat skills in the game’s toughest content. A few years ago, we talked about how PvP, or player-vs-player, games are having trouble attracting new players. A lot of that trouble derives from PvP success hinging so much on sweaty play. In sweaty games, new players must endure a long period of defeat before they can build up the resources to become a real force on the battlefield.
For all too many people, sweaty play feels like a job. Worse, it’s a job that costs money to get—and even more money to keep! Cozy games appeal more to people who just want to relax and have fun.
And the rise of easier-than-easy settings in video games
This trend toward lower-stakes gaming isn’t limited at all to MMOs, of course. Even single-player games cater increasingly to those with little free time.
When video games first got popular back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they didn’t come with difficulty settings. Back then, console cartridge games lacked the memory space and coding room to do too much. So they came with one difficulty level. And that level tended to be really difficult indeed.
I don’t remember ever hearing any major complaints about that difficulty, either—except in games like Swordquest: Earthworld/Fireworld (1982/1983), which were over-the-top, ludicrously hard to win. As a kid, I beat every Atari game I ever got my little mitts on, except those two!
As video games came out for PCs, they still faced serious constraints. I don’t recall any of mine having difficulty settings. The predecessors of The Sims (2000), like SimEarth (1990) and SimCity (1989), didn’t hold back on difficulty either. I can’t even tell you how many cities I destroyed and early Earths I depopulated entirely by accident. Nor how many pioneer parties I accidentally killed through dysentery in the Mac version of Oregon Trail (1991). Back in the mid-1990s, I even made my then-boyfriend do all the puzzles in Myst (1993) so I could just walk around and look at the gorgeous scenery!
Things have certainly changed since the 1980s! Nowadays, some video games will literally do all the fighting and puzzle-solving for players so they can just enjoy the story and scenery.
Why video games might have gotten easier
Perhaps I heard no complaints about difficult video games because they were the domain of the young, who typically had a lot more time on their hands to spend on beating these games. That would change, however, as we aged. A friend who took up The Sims around 2001 dropped it after a while because, she said, it felt like a second job—but worse than that, it discouraged her to see her Sim navigating life and doing way better than she herself managed in real life.
Nobody who Simmed was surprised to see mods (modifications) popping up early on that made Sims’ lives considerably easier. (Hey, if you have that one TS1 shower stall that maxed all stats, hmu. Seriously.) Mods gave Simmers complete control over all aspects of a Sim’s life—including gaining skills, completing long-term tasks, making instant friends, and boosting job performance.
And a lot of the kids and teens who adopted early MMOs like World of Warcraft ended up juggling those rigid weekly guild play schedules around families and jobs. I knew a guy doing that in the mid-2000s. I had no idea how he managed it. His wife clearly wished he’d stop, too, and she definitely wasn’t the only spouse I knew who felt neglected. As gamers aged in place, we needed games that more easily fit into our adult lives—and budgets.
Of course, I couldn’t leave this part of the topic without mentioning the holdouts. Many gamers deliberately play games only on the highest difficulty settings. If that’s not enough to scratch their achievement itch, they install mods that make survival even more difficult and “realistic.” Skyrim is famous for these. (Since obviously, dragon-hunting and sorcery should be as realistic as possible!)
PVP arena-style video games are facing the worst time
Out of all the types of MMOs, PvP games are having the hardest time surviving. They are by far the sweatiest and most time-intensive of all the MMOs. If anything, they demonstrate the genre of video games that consumers want the least.
By now, the people who like sweaty MMOs and PvP games already have their favorite haunts. They already play Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, or what-have-you. That makes breaking into the PVP market especially tough.
Many newer PvP entries, like New World, aren’t very old—but they’re already fighting to survive. Others, like RIFT, are closing their PvP servers, but this move might be too late to stem player churn. The sheer technical issues facing still other games, like Throne and Liberty, hugely impact retention rates.
I’m not even going to get into PlayStation’s Concord. It was a hilarious flop for so many reasons that PvP and sweatiness barely even figure into its autopsy report.
PvP once reliably produced good profits. But in the past five years, it’s declined considerably in popularity. It requires too much time of players—and increasingly, more money spent on ingame purchases than they’re willing to spend.
Modern game developers, unfortunately, often need 5+ years to finish a game. A big trend at a game’s birth might not even ping the industry’s radar by the time it’s published.
But time isn’t all developers need. They also need loads of cash.
The increasing cost of publishing video games
In and out of the MMO genre, the biggest game publishers still fight to survive. Really big publishers, like Electronic Arts (EA) or Microsoft, are often called “AAA.” The term indicates that they spend gobs of money on developing their games; “AA” and “A” are accordingly smaller ventures, while “indies” spend the least.
As spending in AAA games rises, so does the cost of the games themselves. At its time of release in 2021, New World cost about $200M to develop. It retails for about $60 on most platforms. For a while, that was a standard AAA game price. But in May 2025, Microsoft announced that it’s increasing its games’ prices to $80. Many games publishers also seek to make more money through “special edition” pricing. For instance, New World has a “Deluxe Edition” selling for $80 on Amazon right now. It includes the game itself, a mount, and a “skin” (outfit) for one’s character. Seriously.
That site also reports that Grand Theft Auto 6, a much-anticipated release coming soon, might cost $100. I wouldn’t be surprised. For years now, rumors have floated around about the game costing $1-2Bn to develop. This rumor is likely untrue. But $400-600M wouldn’t be out of bounds. Recent AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) have certainly hit that range.
The costs only rise further from here. Video games require more and more time to develop—and more time always means more money spent.
The erosion of leisure time and collapse of the middle class: Two major troubles that AAA gaming studios have yet to recognize
These rising costs don’t only burden developers and investors. They also squeeze gamers hard, especially as leisure time and disposable incomes continue to shrink. Unfortunately for publishers, most gamers just don’t have as much money to spend on games as they did in the past. In America particularly, some economic signs point to a troubled future for many Americans.
An October 3rd Pew Research report reveals that about 3/4 of Americans feel concerned about inflation, the high cost of living, low wages, and the high cost of food and other necessities. On October 7th, the Daily Economy reported that the future might look even bleaker for struggling Americans.
So it makes sense that more and more people opt out of purchasing these increasingly-expensive video games. Life’s hard enough as it is without gamers spending precious resources on stuff that doesn’t delight them—like seeing their Sim become a wizard or strike up a romance with the Grim Reaper!
These concerns have serious consequences for the entire video games industry. For years, studios have been laying off developers. Unfortunately, it hasn’t helped much. More and more these days, studios are canceling titles in mid-development. But even that move might not save the industry’s biggest development studios and publishers.
Higher opportunity costs in video games mirror those in every other elective and hobby
What I’m seeing on the ground is a keen understanding of opportunity cost. That’s the term for what consumers must forego if they do something else. In other words, they can’t buy both games. They can’t afford that. So if they buy the one game, they lose out on getting the other one.
In times past, they’d buy both games. But that happy time is a faded memory now.
So gamers are getting more choosy about what they buy. They don’t want to shell out for games they’re not completely sure they’ll even enjoy. Their doubts have only risen as the gaming industry has shifted its focus away from gamers themselves. It’s no secret that the gaming industry isn’t paid for by gamers anymore, but by investors. Those investors set their own requirements for the games they finance. Developers have no choice but to obey—or else they lose that money. Often, these requirements run counter to what gamers themselves want to see in their games.
In a lot of ways, the video game market reflects where its money comes from. Consumers themselves only figure into the equation at the very end, and then only as a reflection of how wise the investment was. But investors keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars, only for it to result in stinky returns.
More and more often, gamers themselves opt out of purchasing anything new. They decide to play their older games instead. One popular choice continues to be Alpha Centauri (1999). I love that game. 26 years later, it still holds up great!
Why a religion blog is talking about video games
Religious groups aren’t so different from the video games industry. What’s happening in the one is mirrored almost completely in the other, and it’s mirroring for the same reasons:
- Consumers (church members) get put off by politics on either side of the aisle, but church leaders keep pushing it anyway.
- Small businesses (tiny churches of fewer than 50 members) are finding it harder and harder to get established and stay profitable.
- Franchise groups (church planting groups like Acts 29) can help small businesses survive—at the cost of rigid obedience to dogmatic rules that the consumers may or may not like.
- For many years, the managers of the larger businesses in particular have very clearly been hip-deep in politics, which undoubtedly sways their leadership decisions. (See also: The Red Scare, engineered in great part by Billy Graham, and the ongoing anti-abortion crusade, engineered by evangelical leaders like Francis Schaeffer [père] to get more sheep voting Republican.)
- The biggest businesses (megachurches) often have large-scale investment groups funding their enormous suite of programs and amenities for consumers.
- As opportunity costs rise and dealbreakers keep emerging, consumers can’t justify spending the same resources on their hobby. They begin pulling away to spend those resources elsewhere.
The only real difference between actual businesses and churches/denominations is that the former must eventually answer to consumers in some way.
Eventually, sales matter with video games. But in religion, they rarely do.
A shakeup that seems unlikely to happen
Religious leaders and followers alike tend to bristle hard when someone like me comes along to phrase their religion in secular terms. They don’t like thinking of faith affiliation as a reflection of consumer behavior. But the facts remain: that’s what is happening here. Religious consumers vote for what they want, in an economic sense, with their wallets and feet.
From that spending, we can tell that religious consumers clearly don’t want what religious leaders offer. And the same market forces that explain the declines in the video games industry apply equally to religion.
But religious leaders still refuse to meaningfully engage with why their product (church membership) is losing value. If they can’t do that, they sure can’t meaningfully address their declines in membership and donations.
Without some major changes to shake things up, neither the religion nor the video games industry is likely to emerge from this downturn unscathed.
NEXT UP: A review of Alpha Course video #8, which refuses to answer its own question about who the “Holy Spirit” might be. See you soon! <3
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