Support NeoGAF

[RetroGamingUK]

As with the original gaming crash, this is a thing that only affects America. Coincidently Activision were a big part of the original 1983 crash too.

However another crash won't be like the last one. Japanese companies (Sony and Nintendo) now dominate both the American and global console market.

Japanese third parties like Capcom, Sega, FromSoftware are as great as they've ever been and Europe is still making great games too.

So no, this is an entirely American AAA issue that is caused by and will affect the likes of Microsoft and EA only.

 

[ShaiKhulud1989]

Oh my god. Even Xbox is doing fine, they are just paying for their own mistakes (thanks to braindead CEO) and technology debt is finally catching up with them in console space.

That being said, Microsoft Gaming will be absolutely fine with even without the needless burden of having a dedicated hardware.

Crash, my ass.

 

[PeteBull]

Lets even assume some darkest gaming timeline scenario, where fricken 50% of western devs fall/their games flop big time, that still leaves us with plenty AA and indie games, eastern europe dev studios, and japenese/korean/chinese devs that will hold the line perfectly fine.
TLDR: We will be just fine, bros, no worries

 

[mdkirby]

It's only a western AAA / publisher crash. Many indies are fine, and Asia is doing great. Big western AA and AAA publisher and dev houses have seen massive back to back failures for games with insane out of control budgets. This not only kills those games and studios, but has downstream impacts if it's a game from a studio owned by a larger publisher, as it results in cost cutting which may also result in the culling of unrelated AA studios (who whilst smaller also likely have inflated budgets).

These companies have forgotten first principles, make products your audience actually wants to buy. Very few of them are doing that.

It's not an industry wide crash tho, and indeed Sony is posting record revenue, as it's propped up by the success of studios and games not within this umbrella.

 

[RoboFu]

lol no, a crash would be when the consumers no longer wanting to buy video games. That will probably never happen again.

 

[yamaci17]

 

[Laptop1991]

No, the industry is making far too much money from online mmo's and mtx etc to be called a crash, when the 80's crash happened they wern't selling games and systems to play them on for a while and made nowt.

 

[EN250]

No? Things keep moving along as usual, Nintendo's new handheld is making bank, PCMR keeps growing and Sony keeps coasting till the next generation, so not even close

 

[Dr. Wilkinson]

Sorry, bro. This is not a market crash. You see, in order for there to be a market crash… the market actually has to crash, is the problem with your argument. And in fact gaming as a whole is doing well. Yes the layoffs suck, but layoffs are entirely different than a "market crash".

I would suggest doing your research on the crash of the 80s, because this is not that, in any way, shape or form.

 

[Ultralow35]

It's time to stop posting.

Why did I state any lies ???

 

[BlackTron]

The reason Sony has record revenue/profit in PS5 era, because

- subscription services -to play games
- peripherals (PS5 Portal) -for playing games
- releasing their games on PC
- licensing their games for TV shows
- market expansion in other countries, especially China -expansion of gaming business

but in term of their games, they are BANKRUPT creatively. They don't make more money because of their games, they make more money by getting creative with their business model and other revenue streams.

Sometimes we speculate whether industry trends we don't like, such as creative bankruptcy, will result in a crash, ie financial bankruptcy. But that hasn't happened yet, and we emotionally conflate the two very often.

 

[Dr. Wilkinson]

Why did I state any lies ???

You just fundamentally don't understand what a market crash is.

 

[BlackTron]

Same thing is happening here, Microsoft is the new Atari, but with nearly unlimited pockets. Rest of the world is pretty good, Sony is making more than ever and Nintendo is being Nintendo. Not to mention Valce and STEAM is killing it globally.

The funny thing about calling MS the new Atari is I'm pretty sure they never actually made money unlike Atari which did actually support its own business for some number of years? I think you could hand Xbox a clear win for 360 gen but I think RROD killed their books that gen.

I mean at least Atari does have that accomplishment of having supported its own brand without any kind of safety net or bailout package, which isn't even easy to do for 1-2 gens in this business.

 

[yurinka]

With recent news of massive Xbox layoffs and game cancellations, we can now officially call it, The SECOND video game crash of 2022-2025

The first video game crash occurred in 1983-1985. Now 40 years later, we have officially got a second crash (to be more specific, it's only Western industry crashing, just like the first crash)

Since 2022, we got

- Tens of thousands of layoffs in studios and gaming media
- Many studios and gaming media shut down
- Many projects cancelled
- Many AA and AAA games underperformed if not completely bombed

2022–2025 video game industry layoffs - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

NOTE:
This collapse affects predominantly Western industry.
- Japan games and studios seem to be doing just fine, if not better than 2010s. Even Konami is coming back. Nintendo is at their peak. From Soft is emerging to become one of the giant studio. Only Square Enix is struggling.
- Korea and China are actually on the rise with several successful games, and many more are coming

EDIT:
some of you think that I'm just referring the recent massive XBOX layoffs and game cancellations as the crash, NO, that's not what I'm saying. I'm referring to the on-going bad news in the industry in the last three years, including Sony's massive blunder in their GAAS ambition and culminating with the XBOX news, as the industry crash

A market crash is when the stocks of a market unexpectedly and super quickly go down a lot. That didn't happen in the 83-85, and didn't happen now. And the market didn't collapse either, keeps making now more money than ever and most of the top companies are in the stock market at all time record levels or pretty close.

In the 83 there wasn't a crash, only a handful big -mostly console focused- American companies collapsed at the end of that generation mostly because failed to transition to the next one, meanwhile the arcade and computer market was growing specially in Europe and Japan and other companies (like Sega and mostly Nintendo, basically the NES killed Atari) replaced them in the console market. And well, in that period many classic and super important gaming publishers, devs and platforms (like some 8 and 16 bit microcomputers) started to thrive.

And in recent years, the only thing that collapsed is the Xbox console (nothing new, many times before other home console players collapsed). Not any other big platform, not any big company, not the stock market and not the industry revenue. Even the MS gaming division is performing better than ever business wise thanks to having added on top ABK and their shift to multiplatform.

In the industry, games getting cancelled, some other ones tanking, people getting fired and studios shutting down it's something that always happened since the '70s, but now in a bigger scale. In the same way that also kept increasing since the '70s, and now are at all time highs in a bigger scale, regarding the amount of games greenlighted, released and being successful, or the amount of people hired and amount of studios created.

The gaming industry now also has the biggest value in the stock market it ever had, because most public gaming companies are now all time record -or almost- valuation because as companies kept improving their results and are in a promising pattern. And well, because the industry is better than ever regarding revenue and userbase size.

There isn't a gaming market crash: the opposite, the industry is better than ever and there are more jobs than ever (even if layoffs suck).

 

[Dr. Wilkinson]

We have… really bad thread control on this site. Lol

Cringe topic that makes no sense whatsoever.

 

[Fbh]

The reason Sony has record revenue/profit in PS5 era, because

- subscription services
- peripherals (PS5 Portal)
- releasing their games on PC
- licensing their games for TV shows
- market expansion in other countries, especially China

but in term of their games, they are BANKRUPT creatively. They don't make more money because of their games, they make more money by getting creative with their business model and other revenue streams.

Lol a company making more money than ever from games isn't a "Crash" just because most of the revenue isn't coming from first party titles. Do you even know what the original crash was all about?

Also no, Sony isn't showing record sales because of the portal, TV shows and late PC ports (most of which, outside of Helldivers, don't even seem to sell that well).
They are a publicly traded company, they share their data. You can compare the "Games and Network services" segment with previous years.
They are making more money because people are spending more money on their platform.

Every area other than physical games sales is up.
Yeah it's disappointing how DLC and microtransactions make more money than actual games, but that's just the reality of the current market. Videogames haven't "crashed" because you don't like the type of content people are spending their money on.

 

[Killer8]

If you listen to the news you'll get the impression that planes are just dropping out the sky. A Boeing 787 crashed in India last month killing 241 people.

Yet statistically your chances of actually dying in a plane crash is around 1 in 14 million. It's safer than any other form of travel and at any other time in history.

The point is that you can't take bad news in isolation and act like it's at all representative of the industry at large.

Gaming is rolling in more money than ever like a pig in slop. It isn't crashing any time soon.

 

[SScorpio]

I'm… scared. Don't know who that is so don't know what'll come from it. And I watched that whole video and still don't know what they're actually doing. Comes in part 3 I guess

Not sure what I need as a fan though, besides ways to revive breaking ancient hardware, sooner or later it won't be possible to buy working computers anymore.

Either way I think it's difficult to recreate the magic of old school gaming for a new audience. To make it good they need to bring back joysticks as standard, playing tight 8-way stick games with an analog stick is awful. And kids have no idea how to play that way. Plus the joystick for the TheC64 was trash, I snapped the stick when doing a Fist 2 playthrough. They need to bring back the sturdy Tac-2. Metal. No flimsy plastic. Or the Wico sticks, I still have my old ones, impossible to break.

Right now I'm interested to see how it goes for System 3, they're at the final stretch to release The Last Ninja on PC/Xbox/PS/Switch/Switch 2. Sounds like it's close now. It'll be interesting to see if it's possible to play a joystick game with highly advanced tight 8-way controls on analog sticks. They say it feels good, but we'll see.

We'll see what happens, but he's a massive Commodore fan and has former engineers that used to work at Commodore involved.

It's not a non-profit. So they will be releasing branded merch, but we'll also have to see what "support" they offer for existing fans which was said to be one of the goals.

But the brand shifting to these new hands might be one of the best possible outcomes. It looks like the other people involved are also huge Commodore fans. We'll see if it can be made to work as a business. But it's at least not in the hands of a copyright/IP troll. Maybe they'll copy what happened with the MSX with official modern hardware that looks original but runs off FPGA and supports modern and original peripheral.

 

[Fess]

We'll see what happens, but he's a massive Commodore fan and has former engineers that used to work at Commodore involved.

It's not a non-profit. So they will be releasing branded merch, but we'll also have to see what "support" they offer for existing fans which was said to be one of the goals.

But the brand shifting to these new hands might be one of the best possible outcomes. It looks like the other people involved are also huge Commodore fans. We'll see if it can be made to work as a business. But it's at least not in the hands of a copyright/IP troll. Maybe they'll copy what happened with the MSX with official modern hardware that looks original but runs off FPGA and supports modern and original peripheral.

It's cool that they're trying to keep the brand alive. But it seems unlikely that they'll make new computers. Going by the video the old timers mostly have advisor and support roles. And to make a new physical product they would need a whole team of young hungry engineers in electronics, computer design, physical design, software engineering, UI, marketing, economy etc. Commodore had several thousand employees. I mean it's not impossible but it's a mountain to climb.

 

[SScorpio]

It's cool that they're trying to keep the brand alive. But it seems unlikely that they'll make new computers. Going by the video the old timers mostly have advisor and support roles. And to make a new physical product they would need a whole team of young hungry engineers in electronics, computer design, physical design, software engineering, UI, marketing, economy etc. Commodore had several thousand employees. I mean it's not impossible but it's a mountain to climb.

I don't want to go through the video again, but isn't Jeri Ellsworth involved? She designed the C64 down to a single chip that was included in those plug in TV joysticks from the 2006-08ish. But unpopulated was a header that you could connect a physical original Commodore disk drive and it would work as a full computer.

Would they try be creating a new computer to complete with AMD/Intel/Apple? Heck no. But something for retro users? It could be possible.

Maybe this doesn't take off, but it's worth following and rooting them on and hoping they are successful.

 

[Ultralow35]

You just fundamentally don't understand what a market crash is.

Yes I know what one is where just not in one,,,,,Everybody knew this day was coming post covid the market needs to shrink

 

[Hawk The Slayer]

Won't be a crash when we got the best games of all times and realities coming the following years like Resident Evil 9, GTA 6, Elder Scrolls VI, Witcher 6, Fallout 6, Space Marine 3, Stellar Blade 3, FFVII Rebirth part 3, Tides of Annihilation, Darksiders 4, ILL, Atomic Heart 2, and a whole lot more!!!!!!!!!

 

[Fess]

I don't want to go through the video again, but isn't Jeri Ellsworth involved? She designed the C64 down to a single chip that was included in those plug in TV joysticks

Yes, as an advisor.
I definitely hope they succeed but I'm just sceptical, won't get my hopes up until I see something announced that looks real enough to be, well, real.

For now I'm rooting on System 3 and hope they don't stumble at the finish line on this:

 

[RetroGamingUK]

Quote from another thread

The American games industry (not market) is indeed going through a crash

S

Post in thread 'Sony not going to talk about PS6 for "years", more focused on games and software right now - Mark Cerny'

Thursday at 3:00 AM

Does that mean anything for PlayStation Studios management of Hermen Hulst, Scott Rohde and John Rostron (plus other people)? Not that I really have anything against their management, just a little curious here.

Sure - I wouldn't say that they were usurped, nor would I qualify it as a 'demotion', but there is absolutely more oversight of the portfolio and its direction that is coming down from the Japan side than there was before.

Its not that the GaaS initiative is dead - you're always gonna see Sony take swings at MP titles. They always have, to mixed results ofc, but its not...

• SneakersSO

• 
• 
• 

"There is just an undeniable phenomenon that the Western games industry, going beyond just Microsoft here, but the overall Western gaming industry is going through some form of a crash right now. You can just see how companies like Bamco, Sega, and Capcom are doing, not to mention loads of new dev groups shipping new IP to tremendous success (things like Black Myth: Wukong, Stellar Blade, and even Astro Bot to an extent), and compare it to the struggles that Western leadership has had in similar time frames.

From what i've heard, it sounds like Sony began correcting the ship awhile ago, but its the sort of like looking at a star given how long project dev times have gotten - its only going make sense in retrospect. My expectation is that starting in 2026, each subsequent year should be far stronger from Sony publishing, if the course correction does work out. There'll be more output, at the very least, and that is honestly just what the industry needs to get back to overall - shipping games.

Shipping games is a organizational muscle - if you don't do it long enough, your organization is going to get worse at it with time. Its interesting to compare all this with a Capcom, who is just in this habit of making sure they are shipping 2-3 AAA titles per year, and a variety of smaller releases in the same period. Shipping games is a skill. You can't have a studio like ND go 7 years without shipping something. Thats the sort of issue they (newly structured Sony publishing leadership) are seeking to fix."