Depending on what you actually count as a “video game” the industry is now generating somewhere between 200 and 350 billion dollars a year in annual revenue, making it by far the largest entertainment sector in the world regardless of whatever your exact definitions may be.
More people are playing video games than ever before, they are playing them for longer, and (the not so secret reality is that) video game companies have gotten a lot better at getting money out of them while they are.
Over what should have been the best half decade in the history of the industry, the overall market is down by as much as 30% from its peak, in the same time that the broader market has more than doubled.
Sooo how is it possible that even with record sales, record new revenue streams, record numbers of new players, and record new opportunities to monetize that new audience… video game companies have still managed to screw this up so badly?
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14 yr game dev, worked on all platforms (mobile, web, console, Roblox/UGC)
This video undersells the scale of Roblox. I’m 37, and a lot of people my age don’t know that millions of people hop on Grow a Garden or whatever is hot there right now every weekend. Valve’s closest peak numbers are a scale less. That platform is going to define how a generation sees “video games.”
I would say the other point missing: China. China is doing exceedingly well at capturing market share over the last decade. While the west is struggling & self imploding, teams of hundreds of devs are working 996: 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. It’s tough to compete vs that.
Finally, and I know people don’t want to hear it, but AI is a great tool to speed up game development, especially in the prototyping phase. Even in production, there’s a real risk mitigation benefit in what video games are NOT: they aren’t legal apps, they aren’t medical apps, they aren’t financial apps, at least in the ways that those apps have serious compliance hurdles, other considerations for what you develop. If a video game is poorly designed, no one’s health is at risk.
I think the benefit is, yes, video games are about to be democratized in a way that’s hard to describe. If you know enough about game design, you can stand up applications that took full teams weeks in a matter of days as a solo. We’re about to drown in a Cambrian explosion of games (if society doesn’t implode separately).
What’s happening to American studios, the same guys have been working at Nintendo for the past 30 years. American culture doesnt care. The game shipped? Axe the developers, send the bonuses to the C Suite, and we’ll all pop some champagne. Surprisingly, this destroys the regional industry.
And people wonder why unionization is spreading so rapidly in the industry
Not quite just American studios. Ubi isn’t American and they’re closing studios in Europe and Canada. Pretty sure Tencent has pulled back a lot of their funding across the industry as well. Nintendo and Capcom are definitely on very firm ground right now thanks to their longer term outlook and solid bets paying off though, I agree.
I guess its really just the American Culture that has spread. What I mean by that is the burn and turn thats so prevalent. Nintendo seems to want to keep their Japanese developers, while the traditional west treats them like they treat literally every worker they have. Like the ideas are somehow completely disconnected from the people who made them. Then they wonder why their shit stinks when its produced by a bunch of junior devs sleeping on cots away from their families.
Japan has a standing culture on if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Added to a generally slow turn around for cultural shifts (for good and bad), they tend to be okay-ish on the not getting sucked into the next enshittification phase.
They also are ass backwards on some stuff for the same reason, so win some and lose some.
Plus we must be on the worst timeline when we are praising Nintendo…
I realize thats bad yeah, but average tenure in the US being like 5 years at most has me looking at places where people work for life and fit in feeling kinda left out. A lot of speculation there, I am 100% thinking like that because an axe is always over my head with private equity.
Ubisoft isn’t American and does the same shit.
They are honorary American, oof.
They’re just French 🤢
Your links are all broken because they appeared to be copied and pasted without actually pasting the full unabreviated hyperlink.
Here’s my take:
First, the Videogames made money based on number of plays, and the developers had to strike a balance between innovation, replayability, difficulty, and price then ship directly to arcades.
Then, the home console era took off, and competing consoles started signing exclusivity contracts with game developers in order to compete. Innovation was still a strong influence, but storylines and graphics became the major selling points. During this time, studios began consolidating as larger ones like EA, Activision, Tencent, etc all bought out smaller ones and dissolved them to move talent around to different flagship products.
Next, live service games proved incredibly profitable and hosting them became cheaper every year. Instead of monetizing a game once, developers could monetize them infinitely by simply adding microtransactions. During this time online distributors also became popular, giving rise to Steam and Epic Games stores to sell games purely digitally instead of via physical media. This has culminated in some distributors removing access to paid for games, as they were never truly purchased only leased.
Finally, major console companies started buying up or partnering with major studios, and then maximizing profitability which naturally means one thing: More Live Service Microtransactions, Less of Everything Else.
But Gamers aren’t idiots. There is a gap in the market for content that we own, in physical form, with good story, and decent graphics. But there are no longer any professional studios left to make them. This has led to the term “Indie Studio” becoming broader and more successful, and the constant decline in the trust of major studios. Now, “AAA Studios” as they’re referred to as, mostly sell towards children and people easily manipulated by social media feeds that they target to advertise on, but a new legislative landscape is slowly introducing obstacles for them to do that. It’s plain to see that the current way of things is unsustainable and set to collapse.
For a generalized channel from people who don’t know gaming like we do, it’s surprisingly spot on. Something that they might not know is a data point even worth quantifying is that in addition to hiring more developers, those developers are also, on average, spending more time making a single video game, whether it’s live service or not. And contributing to that problem of not having enough time is that even the non-live-service games are longer than the equivalent game used to be 20 years ago.
I would push back on this point that even Mat Piscatella makes where if you’re not Fortnite, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, or a handful of others, you’re somehow “fighting for scraps”; there’s the argument later in the game about what people want out of a multiplayer game or a social space; and then the question of “why wouldn’t you just make a mobile game?”. I don’t think these are often the same audience. The thing in common between most mobile games and most console games is that they’re made by people who have a very similar skill set, but their customers are often very different human beings. People on a Lemmy gaming community will probably play Grand Theft Auto, but they’ll also probably a dozen other new games in the same year. Those dozen other games aren’t fighting for GTA’s scraps; they’re just a subset of GTA’s audience who don’t intend to play it forever.
This is a video game essay on all things games this year. Youtube description has all the urls/research used in the video. I thought it was interesting.
