... Ball says that the blame for all of this can’t be pinned to a single thing, like capitalism, mismanagement, Covid-19, or even interest rates. It also involves development costs, how studios are staffed, consumers’ spending habits, and game pricing. “This storm is so brutal,” he says, “because it is all of these things at once, and none have really alleviated since the layoffs began.”...
It would seem the industry at large is just not acknowledging the realities of what they've created.
Developers have been making low quality, high volume AAA games for years. This drove down consumer trust. Then, they all decided to jack up the prices. The result is a demonstrable decrease in buy in. Gamers just aren't going to take a gamble on an AUD$125.00 game with mixed word of worth that's stuffed to the gills with micro-transactions that also looks the same as last year's game but somehow runs worse.
Publishers also decided to copy the movie industry model by re-structuring the entire industry around delivering billion dollar hits. Now, one high profile failure, or a string of missed sales projections, sees developers being fired in droves because every game costs hundreds of millions but needs to deliver billions in revenue to keep the pyramid scheme running.
The gaming press burned its bridges, killing the industry's ability to systematically swindle customers with fake hype cycles. They still try - see games like Concord and Veilguard - but that model is dead and buried. All that's left standing are soft-ball access media like IGN, which are little more than freelance advertisers for publishers, and are looked down on by most enthusiasts.
Then, publishers decided remasters and remakes were a good side hustle. Given the above low buy in for new AAA titles, gamers gladly buy improved versions of titles they know are already good, creating a negative feedback loop. Companies like Sony went all in, deciding its better to remaster TLOU three times rather than investing in new IPs, effectively cannibalising the future of the industry for short term gains.
This all creates a pressure cooker filled with petrol that's just waiting to be set off. And the diesel-soaked rag that serves as the fuse on this atom bomb is western developers deciding that the majority of their customers need to be systematically re-educated out of their "dangerous world-view". Their customers like the wrong games, like the wrong music, like the wrong movies, are attracted to the wrong things, have incorrect political understandings, have incorrectly calibrated morality, buy the wrong clothes, share the wrong memes, voice the wrong opinions, ask the wrong questions, and have incorrect dreams and aspirations. So, developers need to fix gamers by taking away their toys and showing them how to think correctly. And the more resistance encountered, the clearer the need for forcible re-education.
Now, you have an industry where every other game is either poorly made, a copy/paste ball of non-sense, deliberately crafted propaganda, or a heartless hack job that all still needs to sell 10 million copies or everyone is fired - and gamers are just about done buying any of it. That, my dear GAF, is the recipe for an industry crash. And once the dust settles, the industry will go back to doing what it seems to absolutely loathe doing more than anything in the world: making games that gamers want to buy.
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