Yeah, the irony is the article talks about Pay to Win games, which a good percentage of gamers don't bother with at all because you can have very good (arguably much better) experiences with a fixed price, several year old games that run on your ordinary computer, and yet harks back to an era when people did have a choice of pay per play or relatively expensive specialised hardware. No, really the decline of hardware as a proportion of gaming spend isn't bad news for people with a lot of time to play games and no money.

It's similarly lacking in awareness when it advocates one route to levelling playing fields being a model where everybody receives micropayments from any commercial entity that uses their data (interesting in theory) apparently without realising that data regarding people with money is usually a lot more valuable than data on people without it (before we even start to consider other issues like implications for deanonymisation). That's after moaning that Twitch separates people into "haves and have nots" because some people earn considerably more money from their streams than others based mainly on things other than their spending power.

And anyone that thinks "government employed Twitch stars tasked with building communities for the marginalised and estranged" is going to equal things out has never been through a process where government bodies evaluate who to fund...