Over time, cultural institutions (i.e., not just individual stores or game companies, but the shared processes of running such companies) evolve to perpetuate themselves as efficiently as possible. This results in an accumulation of corner-cutting techniques over time that degrades the quality of everything they produce in the process of self-perpetuation.

But “enshittification” is something more specific: as originally defined by Cory Doctorow, it’s when a company convinces its investors to pay for something that attracts users without immediate profit, with the promise of future profit extraction once a large-enough user base is captured; then destroys its user experience to extract this profit; and in the process usually loses its user base before the investors have seen the promised returns.