It’s come up with a few gaming friends in other circles, but does anyone here think another big crash is coming up for the video game industry? The layoffs are a big sign, but also outside of a few games, overall quality in the triple “AAA” space is dwindling also.
Any idea if it’ll happen this year? Will it affect indie developers and customers if/when it happens?
I’ve been talking about this with some friends, and my answer has been “Yes”. However, its not exactly doomsaying or predicting, its more to me that AAA development is rolling downhill. The massive expansion of budgets, the overworking, the expectations of infinite profit. If nothing steps up to make that ball stop rolling downhill - such as massive unionization - then it’ll keep going down until it hits the wall.
I don’t think it’ll be as massive of a crash as last time because despite the major AAA studios being in danger, we are more in the era of digital stores than developers; Steam and GOG don’t seem to be in danger, and while Microsoft and Sony have been following that line, I don’t think Nintendo is quite on the same rocky spot.
yea it’s coming, i dunno if it’s this year
the cost of AAA stuff is too high, this console gen has been ass, every AAA game that comes out is some kind of disaster on launch. helldivers 2 blowing up the way it has is a good indicator of what people are actually looking for nowadays.
no one really cares about graphical prowess anymore. we’ve hit the apex there. unique game mechanics and technical stability are being searched for instead, and those can be found in indie games a lot more than the bloated garbage you see in a AAA release.
i don’t think it’ll affect indie devs much…well…unless you’re under the Adult Swim Games label i guess, RIP. customers will be affected, but like, positively - we won’t get battle pass bullshit shoved in our faces in every game, hopefully.
i don’t think it’ll be this year, but in the next few years: all these layoffs are going to lead to unbelievable brain drain in the next half-decade of game development given how long it takes to design games in this day and age
I feel like you’re not going to see the effects of a kind of crash or recession this year - you’ll see them in 2025 and onward as the string of 2023 layoffs that continues into this year starts to hit production studios more fully.
The big question is definitely like…what does a crash, recession, whatever you want to call it even look like. We don’t have millions of ET cartridges to put in a landfill or anything. Maybe you’ll get AAA studios taking hints from the genuinely big hits of the past few years that people want good craftsmanship/care taken and don’t want to be nickel and dimed to death. More than likely you’ll get a few AAA’s learning all the wrong things and succeeding anyway through inertia. At the very least, I have to wonder how those AAAA style budgets can maintain in this situation, and I suspect they can’t reasonably do that.
Look what they took from us.
It feels sorta doomsaying to say a crash is on the horizon, but the clues point to that conclusion… eventually.
I’m sure regardless of the business side that the hobby will still thrive, but It does seem like if that does happen, console only players will catch the brunt of the fallout.
I mean “doomsaying” kinda implies the wrong thing. The doom already happened, tons of people got laid off. What’s going to happen now is that a lot of the big companies who are betting on not needing those workers for whatever reason are going to start to crumble, and honestly that might be for the better. I’m of the opinion that most of the best things in video games (and any art or media really) happen in spite of the industry, not because of it.
I was trying to imagine something similar to Marvel crashing in the 90s and selling their properties to be distributed and adapted, but I don’t want to live in the headspace where Disney and Discovery fully step into the game development scene.
This is exactly where I’m at. The crash is the failure of the industry to support its own development, and the mass layoffs are how it manifests. It’s not something that will be felt so directly by an end user. I’d argue the market has become so focused on internet distribution that the idea of it coming with detritus to dispose of like unsellable A2600 games is impossible irrespective of how severe its failures become.
thinking further, i guess delistings like the Adult Swim fiasco are the closest we have to deserts full of crappy cartridges
Yeah, that’s a good comparison: games and IP that’ll just get mothballed because companies want to hold the rights but don’t want to spend the money to do anything with them.
agree, we’re gonna lose a bunch of shit to the sands of time. that reminds me i need to buy duck game everywhere i can before it disappears
i also think there’ll be a resurgence of AA games in the best timeline. we’ll go back to having multiple independent studios as opposed to a couple of gigantic ones owned by 4 companies
That is the best and somewhat likely outcome.
I figure even in the best case scenario that all the layoffs are just musical chairs, no one’s gonna give it their all for a company that’s gonna can then for the next quarterly earnings to go up a little. People will probably still work for AAA studios, but the reall emsauce will be with indie outfits that have the confidence of their workers. We may see more co ops spring from this.
I don’t know if we’ll see more AA games or mid-sized studios or whatever but I do know that as far as the availability of tools to MAKE games, the toothpaste can’t fully be put back in the tube re: indie development. Like that’s another big difference between this crash and the last, the cost of publishing a game is tiny by comparison, the struggle is visibility and not like, creating it.
I think a AA renaissance is really unlikely given the contraction of capital overall. These layoffs are true, unambiguous brain drain. People aren’t shuffling around or recongealing, they are leaving the industry entirely. There simply isn’t money to found studios or fund AA projects.
yeah that’s why i was hoping “best timeline” lmfao, the reality is that these people are talented and can make way more money in way less stressful environments and that’s where they’ll end up going.
that’s what i did instead of game dev lmao
Think we’ll see another resurgence in Japanese (or hell, just non-American) games? I know shit isn’t necessarily great over there either (Bamco cancelled a bunch of stuff recently), but you get articles like this one about FF7R-2 or this IGN interview about Elden Ring that mention how these studios keep staff around and accumulate institutional knowledge.
Wouldn’t surprise me! Given those examples I’d say we’re already kind of doing that. Nonzero chance those studios find some way to shoot themselves in the foot as well if they get a sense of overconfidence. (Squeenix is extremely good at this historically.)
yeah and fromsoft crunches the shit out of their team, like even for japanese studios it’s apparently pretty bad
Is the modern version of the landfill full of cartridges the “graveyard of shut down, no longer playable, live service games”?
The Japanese industry is really different from the US and if things carry on as they are I wouldn’t be shocked if they take back some of the global share they’ve lost over the past 2 decades. Even SqEnix, who are famously silly, are putting out 3-4 games of varying scale each year. When I think of studio “health” Capcom stands out as the clear best in the world, and I think there’s a narrow path to sustainability for AAA following their lead.
Inertia plays such a huge role at businesses of this scale, so I think the JP studios which are currently strong will remain so for awhile while Western studios struggle to pivot. I will say that where I work devs clearly want multiple projects of varying scale and steady releases (and the business seems to want that too) but no one is willing to spend any money to actually make it a reality. 2022-now has been nonstop cancellations and non-starters at my studio (US).