Horse armor was mocked, but it launched a billion-dollar cosmetic industry
The mall is dead, and we live in its ghost.
The behemoth of American commerce is a shadow of its former self, victim to its own rapid expansion and online competition. Many malls are reduced to half-occupied nostalgia vehicles or hollowed out for Amazon delivery hubs. Consumer disinterest and corporate mismanagement shutter the old and storied brands. New competitors arrive with speed and burn out almost as fast, and survival depends on matching or exceeding the ruthlessness of their practices.
Video Game Fashion Week is Polygon’s attempt at covering the fun, silly, and highly important world of character style.
Each digital marketplace is its own mall and its own carnival. Never before have there been more video games, and never before have there been more ways to spend money on them. As budgets increase alongside development costs, a title needs to do everything it can to hit corporate expectations. Nearly every game with an online component carries its own internal economy, and even single-player titles adopt opaque methods of cash extraction. When a developer announces that a game won’t have microtransactions, it’s greeted with an outpouring of tearful praise.
2006 brought a harbinger of this increasingly monetized future, a simple piece of downloadable content which symbolized all the good and the bad of the coming world: horse armor.
The early era of downloadable content on home consoles was marked by niche experiments like Satellaview, a Japan-only SNES add-on, and Sega Channel, a WebTV-like service that operated past the end of the Genesis lifespan. While satellite technology and memory restrictions kept the selection of available games limited, both were early variations on the all-you-can-play subscription
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