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?
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).