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?
I can’t speak for Piscatella or how much he thinks about it that way, but it seems to be the perspective of this video, and one I would very much disagree with. The video acknowledges what the video game audience used to be 20 years ago. I’d argue that audience stuck around, while the growth that the industry experienced disproportionately went to people who “aren’t gamers, but they just play this game”. I don’t remember exactly how the video put it, but we know who that person is, and it includes your kid. Your kid would still be playing games if there was no Fortnite, but how that demographic used to look (best we can scale it to yesteryear, as times have certainly changed) was just picking up this year’s model of an old franchise, like moving from Halo to Halo 2 to Halo 3, a dynamic that still exists in Call of Duty and sports games for that same large bucket of players that might only play one game.