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[cormack12]

With the uprising of digital games what does an actual video game crash 'look like' in this day and age?

Mid 80's was lots of games in stores, eventually getting landfilled to make room for goods that were selling. Bargain bins were common. We already have shovelware like those 1000gs/platinum harvest titles.

So I dunno, less AAA games? Less AA games? More indie studio's? Less investment for games to be created? The break up and acquisition of large players.

Cant we argue this is the new normal anyway?

 

[March Climber]

This is what will happen:

A small bubble of publishers will stop making games.

Die hard fans will think the world is ending. Everyone else will be sad about that company's library and game preservation, but quickly move on and forget them to play something else.

So basically what happened to Acclaim, 989 Studios, Midway, Agetec, and others like them years ago.

 

[intbal]

-All the human developers get fired.
-"Game Developers" consist of one accountant entering prompts into an AI all day long while a Blackrock consultant pokes him with a stick.
-Younger gamers go back to playing sports outside.

 

[Melfice7]

less quality, more slop, increased prices all around, constant layoffs, buyouts leading to consolidation

wait a minute..

 

[Pasta la Vista]

Prices increasing in digital storefronts as publishers scramble to recoup costs. Most people being priced out. Market shrinking because most people can't afford to spend on luxuries.

 

[joeygreco1985]

Out of control software and hardware prices leading to a massive drop in sales, which would then lead to some possible big players exiting the industry entirely. I'd say Xbox is most at risk if that were to happen

 

[Aesius]

Industry stagnation, over-reliance on AI resulting in the development talent pool completely drying up, massive-budget games flopping and sinking entire studios, and the core gaming demographic simply aging out of the hobby and not being replaced by younger gamers (or younger gamers being primarily hooked on a handful of F2P games).

 

[analog_future]

look around. it's happening right now.


The crash will largely be a blip for the average consumer. The real impact is all of this downsizing, people losing jobs, cancelled projects, closed studios, long development times, reduced budgets, elimination of risk taking, etc.. etc..

 

[Loomy]

A long slow death that turns into a transition. It's not going to all of a sudden crash. Who is selling the product, what they're selling, and how the product is consumed will change. It's already changing. But there's not going to be a crash where people wake up one day and all public publishers are all of a sudden filing for bankruptcy.

And it won't be video game industry specific. There's change happening in a lot of industries right now. Software development is going through a lot of it very fast. That will affect the games industry as well.

 

[Magic-DEI-Hire]

looks around. it's happening right now.


The crash will largely be a blip for the average consumer. The real impact is all of this downsizing, people losing jobs, cancelled projects, closed studios, long development times, reduced budgets, elimination of risk taking, etc.. etc..

This. All of the countless job layoffs and studio closures should hint at this being evident.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

It might look something like this: $900 current gen consoles, $80 games...

 

[Hari Seldon]

As long as a handful of developers can make serious money with Indy or AA games there will be games. TBH I don't know what kind of moron would invest money in the AAA gaming space, this is already crashing hard as the amount of dupes conned into investing into live service slop dry up.

 

[RoboFu]

you are watching it.

 

[Signalis]

It might look something like this: $900 current gen consoles, $80 games...

Nintendo right now

 

[Mr Moose]

 

[TintoConCasera]

AAA studios going to shit because games cost around 300 millions of dollars to make yet they don't sell because they fucking suck, while properly managed AA studios and indie devs keep releasing kino after kino at a much cheaper price.

 

[dragonyeuw]

The current paradigm will crash and something else were emerge from it. Weird to say but it feels like tech needs to devolve a bit, or at least level off, because the cost to produce hardware, software development costs, and the number of people you need to sell it to in order for those elements to make financial sense is reaching an inflection point.

It's gonna get real interesting when Gen Z and then Alpha become the dominant consumer demographic.

 

[Laptop1991]

No AAA Singleplayer games being made/sold and just GAAS games being sold at really high prices, whether there is anyone playing them or not would be a crash of a sorts for me,

Indies and AA as they are now won't save the top end until they really step up to what the AAA level was 15 to 20 years ago, but there is better games on the Horizon, well for my tastes anyway, a new Witcher, TES, GTA6, maybe a Fallout, Bioshock etc, they are now making the games we haven't had for 10 plus years thankfully, so i think the crash is over lol.

 

[March Climber]

TBH I don't know what kind of moron would invest money in the AAA gaming space

They are currently investing in Chinese and Korean AAA projects, because that's where the money has started to grow. There are tons of articles posted here about them.

 

[Cakeboxer]

Many studios and publishers would shut down, high budget AAA sp games would be dead. There would be a lot of low budget games and with heavy use of AI. Maybe it's also an opportunity to move away from all these cinematic elements, motion capture, endless boring dialogues, forced walking and cutscenes. Back to the roots: Gameplay first.

 

[diffusionx]

The market is becoming unsustainable. Consoles were designed to be cheap made for purpose devices. A $900 console is insane. It only looks more reasonable because the price of PC components have exploded and are not going down soon if ever. I saw a build guide this morning and mid range was like under $2000. Mid range used to be like $750 not that long ago. Consoles should not be following this trend but they are.

People will just play games on their phones or ancient games on potato machines or ps4. Note that this has been going on for a few years. We might be living the crash honestly. These companies are in danger of losing a generation of players because they will just never get a console or high end PC because it's too much money.

 

[Guilty_AI]

To be equivalento to 83, it'd require either Sony's or Nintendo's console business suffering massive losses.

Right now, whats more likely is a bunch of high profile publishers downsizing or going bankrupt. If GTA6 release isn't as good as it needs to be, and it causes visible consequences to Rockstar, i guarantee this will have a cascade effect with lots of investors pulling out and stocks crashing (in the gaming sector)

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

I can see a lot of gamers noping out of this gen and next.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

Nintendo right now

Yep, all Nintendo has to do now is simply keep the price of Switch 2 the same and sales will flock in.

 

[sodstall]

It's gonna get real interesting when Gen Z and then Alpha become the dominant consumer demographic.

Yeah everything is probably gonna be as simple as sentris or look like that silly game from that emote that crypto plays from apex legends. Just shapes and colors, no substance.

 

[HerjansEagleFeeder]

When the whole world is playing video games instead of just a couple developed countries, it's almost impossible for it all to "crash". You'd need something so dramatic people everywhere are more concerned about their survival than anything else.

 

[Sintoid]

Market will resize to reasonable dimensions, where all those who whant to make games (and not money by financing games) will fund their product and give trust with developers with a clear idea (not wannabe creator with some gun render or modern audicence target)
Maybe games will not have graphical fiedty we expect from this gen but at least industry will keep working well

 

[Signalis]

Yep, all Nintendo has to do now is simply keep the price of Switch 2 the same and sales will flock in.

Pretty much, I got my Switch 2 about 3 weeks ago and I absolutely fucking love it.

 

[Danjin44]

I don't know but I know it won't "reset" entire industry like video game.

 

[neocycle]

Big losses for big companies. That's all. As a gamer, I couldn't care less.

 

[Plague Doctor]

looks around. it's happening right now.


The crash will largely be a blip for the average consumer. The real impact is all of this downsizing, people losing jobs, cancelled projects, closed studios, long development times, reduced budgets, elimination of risk taking, etc.. etc..

This.

We are in the middle of it. You'd have to be naive or maliciously obtuse to believe a "crash" would mean all video game companies closed their doors all over the world.

The game industry isn't just one specific sector- that's the thing. For example, mobile seems mostly uneffected. We have break out hits every month in Indies/AAs.

Western AAA's? That's where the crash is. We got across the board downsizing, cancelled projects, record layoffs, wildly missing projections, highly qualified job seekers finding fewer opportunities, etc, etc, etc

It's from many factors but the ones that come to mind: bloat (much from the covid hiring sprees), trend chasing at the determent of long tern substainibility, sometimes a complete disconnect with the audience in cases.

Things will still happen, but it is in a really rough shape right now and a lot less from Western AAA. And they did it to themselves.

 

[xrnzaaas]

We are already experiencing major negative changes & events, but they may become even more intense. Maybe we'll witness a big publisher (EA or Ubisoft caliber) close up shop or maybe PS6 doesn't sell and Sony enters panic mode.

The future of being a gamer who plays new games isn't looking very bright. That's unless you're perfectly happy with finding indie gems and don't care about bigger budget games (including the AA segment) at all.

 

[Don Carlo]

We are witnessing it

 

[Durin]

I think we're witnessing something closer to the 2008 recession that contracted the entire industry, but not an actual crash. People forget back then that there was tons of doom and gloom from developers, largely around the AAA sector due to rising costs, and they're the main area right now experiencing layoffs.

DLC and other service-based models helped alleviate some strain, but those methods are think are hitting their own limits as more of these GAAS games fail. I personally think the race for higher fidelity is going to stagnate, as budgets come down to make producing those games sustainable, outside a select few franchises/devs that reliably produce hits.

That said, the industry is waaay more flexible now than it was before. You literally have Slay the Spire 2 making bank, and they switched to the open-source Godot game engine with this entry...so they ain't forking over a chunk of revenue to Unity anymore.

 

[SJRB]

Gargantuan, bloated budgets. Everything homogenous to appeal to as many people as possible to make as much money as possible, ending up appealing to no one and making no money. A seemingly endless series of games would get canceled and studios would get closed. Thousands and thousands would lose their jobs.

...wait