Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, it has become a cliché to emphasize the economic power of the video games industry. The phrase ‘Video games are big business’, or some variation thereof, has been a staple of writing on the topic for decades, with early iterations lauding the commercial successes of arcades,1 later iterations citing it as motivation for the academic study of games2 and more recent versions citing the staggering billions in income they have generated, which has formed the basis of several transnational empires.3