I saw someone, somewhere, saying something like this recently: it’s always easier to play the role of doomsayer than the optimist, because far fewer people seem to care if you’re wrong when you’re predicting something will fail.
I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but in writing this one it is undoubtedly at the back of my mind. This is because I think the video games industry - that is, the established order of massive, western developer-publishers, each making multiple games that cost hundreds of millions and employing developers in the thousands - isn’t just in big trouble, now that GTA 6 has been unsurprisingly delayed to mid-2026. I think it’s finished. The games industry as we know it is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.
The past week has been another brutal reminder. EA has joined in the fun of major layoffs, in obliterating the positions of more than 300 people and cancelling yet another project in the brilliant, dreadfully cursed Titanfall franchise, as well as parking the beloved WRC series at Codemasters. At the same time, Fandom, the wiki farm owner of games media icon Giant Bomb, has seen major staff departures over feckless ownership meddling. And Polygon, which housed many of our friends and peers (including Eurogamer alumni Matt Reynolds and Oli Welsh), has just been sold by Vox and immediately gutted by Valnet, in a scandalous exchange. All of this senseless bloodletting continues, either implicitly or explicitly, in the name of yet more sacrifices upon the great altar of eternal growth.
It’s tempting to label these latest casualties as just another case of this industry’s continuing penchant for idiotic, MBA-fuelled foot-shooting, but there is also more going on here. As former games journalist Alanah Pierce pointed out in a recent, widely shared video, they are happening, yes, because video games have stopped rapidly expanding their audiences and instead become, in investor terms, a “mature” industry.
But also more astutely because of two other reasons: first, that those investors are taking their money to other, more speculative realms such as AI (which adds to the claims we reported that Muse is at least partially a shareholder play for more investment in Xbox). And second, that video games aren’t just capping out their audience because there are no more people in the world to play them, but because those people are now spending extraordinary amounts of time watching short, exceptionally addictive videos on social media.
“Gaming is dead” mfs when they discover indie and AA games from smaller studios that actually care about the games they make.
Gaming is not dead… But console gaming’s significance is going to be severely less this decade.
Sony knows it and Microsoft is sprinting towards it
smaller studios dont have money or interest to pay game news companies to write favourable articles about them. So clearly the industry must be dead if bigger ones are going down
Ethics? in my bing bing wahoo blogging?
I simply cannot bring myself to care that giant corporations won’t make as much money as they used to by doing a thing I already don’t really like. If this is what the industry’s death entails, why should anyone grieve?
Ohhh, they are trying to say that “AAA” (10s+ or 100+ million budget) gaming dev industry has finally dieded?
This saves the PC gaming industry, imho.
i will never know what “x is dead” means
Tempest Rising is actually good.
Another AAA game I want planning to play getting delayed doesn’t say anything about the games industry. Haven’t been excited about a AAA game in many years now. Everything is a bland cookie cutter sequel, remaster, or battle pass loot box multiplayer arena thingy.
did you read the article? do you understand the state that the industry is in atm?
Yeah, I do. A bunch of consolidations is AAA companies have left us steps away from a monopoly on publishers. Given the lack of competition, these big companies have gotten lazy and keep releasing the same shit over and over, some of it ripoffs, some of it remasters. People are getting fed up with it and their easy cash cows are now less profitable than they were.
Instead of changing their plans, they’re firing people. Because the only ones in charge are MBAs, not people who know what their products even are.
Removed by mod
If you’re someone to whom AAA games and nothing but AAA games encompass your entire view of the gaming industry, you’re a lost cause.
Indie gaming is the true heart and soul of gaming and forever will be. Let the exploitative giants collapse under their own weight. We’re better off without them.
did you read the article? do you understand the state that the industry is in atm? Yes there are indie games and yes they are great, but it has become incredibly difficult to break into the industry. Most of the indie games that we celebrate these days are coming from devs that entered the indie scene over a decade ago, devs like Supergiant or Davey Wreden. We still have breakout debut hits like Balatro, but it’s becoming harder and harder. The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery. Gaming publications are flatlining left and right, so you can’t look to them for discovery anymore. 1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago. Balatro broke big because of a lucky discovery by NorthernLion, but the reach of creators like NorthernLion is shrinking every day.
TikTok and its peers are the new normal, and as the article discusses, this eats up the exact recreation time that people have been putting into video games and other long-form media. The kids don’t care about indie games because Tiktok is more fun/addictive. If they play videogames at all, they only care about Fortnite and Roblox and maybe some gacha game on their phone. Some of them care about indie creations within Fortnite and Roblox, but obviously even those games are becoming long in the tooth.
So idk. Maybe Tiktok will become the new main discovery platform and this is how the industry will survive, but it remains to be seen if people will actually get off of Tiktok to go play the games in question, or if people will just stay glued to Tiktok itself.
The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery.
It’s brilliant actually. I mean it’s still arguably a shitshow, but Steam is very good at letting shovelware sink to the bottom of their algorithms.
1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago.
Not bad for a story-focussed adventure.
Sifu sold 3m, Baba is You about half a million. The game may be brilliant, the GOTY award may be perfectly deserved, still ain’t going to play it because it’s not my genre. “Story-focussed adventure” is like a quarter of a step above walking simulator when it comes to ludological complexity I’d rather read a book. That’s of course just me, for the general audience… well, it’s niche.
Also btw young people never drove sales. The reason is simple: They’re broke.
Also btw young people never drove sales. The reason is simple: They’re broke.
And are more broke now than in recent memory. I’m a bit surprised this point is flying under the radar
If you’re someone to whom AAA games and nothing but AAA games encompass your entire view of the gaming industry, you’re a lost cause.
This phrasing took me a couple reads
Now read it in a Canadian accent.
AAA, eh?
Just out for a rip, are ya bud?
Are there any grammatical errors? I feel like I wrote that correctly but you’ve got me second guessing.
I’d say
If AAA games encompass your entire view of the gaming industry, you’re a lost cause.
The rest is redundant
My favorite AAA games are the AAA games that aren’t like other AAA games, but more like the AAA games that don’t have AAA DLC first-day and instead, are like the AAA 6th and AAA 7th gen AAA games that released when I was 13; now those were AAAA, AAA games.
Upon rereading I don’t think so but the middle part just took me three times to read it correctly. Maybe just an uncommon sentence structure for me
ITT: a bunch of people that can’t be bothered to read the article
Clickbait title, GTA 6 delay has nothing to do with the game industry
Previous titles from rockstar like RDR2 and GTA 5 were also delayed
did you read the article? do you understand the state that the industry is in atm?
Aren’t delays to video games good though? Less crunch and hopefully fewer bugs.
Also it being an industry always seemed wrong to me. If big corpos are dying off then that’s good. Video games shouldn’t be about soulless money grabs and ever increasing profits, they should be about art and making enough to live on.
Aren’t delays to video games good though? Less crunch and hopefully fewer bugs.
Maybe. Maybe they just haven’t done enough crunch yet so they need some extra bonus crunch.
Oof.
Yeah.
(I know he apparently didn’t actually say that. Sssshhhhh.)
(I know he apparently didn’t actually say that. Sssshhhhh)
Just change Miyamoto’s face with Kojima’s. 🤷🏻♂️
a rushed game is forever bad
No Man’s Sky? Cyberpunk 2077?
They were marketed as 10/10, came out as 4/10 and improved to 6/10.
Cyberpunk now is a 10/10 for me. Released as a 6/10 but I didn’t experience many bugs personally.
Those are the rare exceptions that re-enforce the rule.
We had Balatro last year. Blue Prince released a month ago and is a bona fide GOTY contender from a tiny studio and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is possibly the best AA game of all time but sure, the games industry is dead. I’m convinced, back it up boys.
Oh no! Venture capital has moved to AI! (Anyways.) The article goes on to talk about humongous corporations making dubious decisions and toppling over themselves. Are we supposed to lament Ubisoft’s demise now?
Expedition 33 just came out of nowhere to great acclaim. Valve is hosting a thriving market & slowly but surely freeing PC gaming from Microsoft’s grip. SILK SONG IS DUE THIS YEAR MY FRIENDS. Everyone’s wishlist is as long as their backlog. The bar to entry for development has never been lower. Video gaming is an established medium at this point. A handful of corporative giants infected with a rotten management culture matters little. What essentially matters to me is for the creators out of a job to find new footing.
Even the Devs out of a job isn’t necessarily something you should concern yourself too much with.
Games development is a fairly privileged job to have and for the Devs working for big dubious companies…? Let’s not pretend like they didn’t know who they worked for, what they worked on and what the personal risks attached were.
I understand how you’d extend reproach to the employees of a bad business. I don’t feel it personally though. Solidarity for all workforce trumps it in my heart. Maybe it’s my family ties with active union members.
In gamedev particularly, a lot of creators get in there mainly because of their passion for the medium. Then they get chewed up by shit work conditions. Ultimately dream job type positions are especially vulnerable to abusive management.
We probably all have our own factors that go into determining whether or not someone deserves our sympathies.
And there’s definitely some circumstances where I’m more understanding. Like, Ubisoft as you mentioned. I have zero relation to their products nor the company it self. They’ve never really been on my radar. So I can’t speak to that.
But then we have something like Microsoft. A giant among giants in the corporate world. You don’t become a 3 trillion dollar company by playing by the book. And I understand why people would want MS on their resume, but I can’t understand wanting to work for them.
But that’s just a part of my little black book. I imagine you have your own, most people do.
Are you being sarcastic here… Or just a dick?
It’s a privilege to work for a shitty mega corporation making substandard pay for the skills you have?! And those mega corps routinely buy up the small studios, so it’s not like people have to even seek out employment with them to end up working for them.
Working in entertainment is privileged. It’s not a job you just happen to end up with by accident. Most people are there because they want to be there.
And yes, the shitty mega corporations will use that against you. And yes, again, your small indie company can get purchased and suddenly your boss is the shitty mega corp. But you have a choice even then. Try to get out on your own terms or stick around until it’s time to cut the fat and get fired.
You can think I’m a dick all you want. I have my principles and I live by them. I have taken jobs most people don’t even know exist, because they can’t even imagine themselves in a position that would ever warrant something like it. And I’ve quit jobs for less than how game developers get treated. I don’t care what I do, I care about who I work for and how they treat the people around them.
The bigger your backlog of games is right now, the better. No need to buy new games for a looooong time.
Fucking epic backlog here, maybe I can actually get to playing some of them now
I’m guessing AAA game publishers are like the major movie studios, and are risk averse, so they will just make sequels to existing IPs or make something unexciting with fancy graphics. What they don’t understand is that AA and indie devs have the tools to make games that look good or good enough, and are also very interesting and creative. So if a AAA publisher dies off, then good riddance. AAA gaming dying don’t mean the gaming industry is dying. 🤷♂️
Oh no, the video game industry is dead. Good thing we still have about thirty million video games to choose from.
Exactly. The article is clickbaity and out of touch. It’s not like there’s a decline in the number gamers. It’s just harder to make a AAA game that’s a hit, and that’s doesn’t mean the gaming industry is dead. AAA gaming/games are not representative of the whole gaming industry. AAA gaming is becoming the example of what NOT to do in the gaming industry. 🤦♂️
