So… The Industry Might Actually Crash (Patreon)

Something I've been mocking for years and years are some people's obsession of guessing when the gaming industry is going to crash.

Channels relying on a narrative of doom and gloom will wax lyrical about the state of modern gaming and are all too eager to retell the story of 1983, a time when video-games were made in months not years, by individuals not teams, and in a market of millions, not billions of dollars.

TL;DR, it's an apples to iPhone comparison.

Not to mention, half the time, it's just based on bullshit.

I mean… 2023, of all the years is when you want to talk about gaming falling off a cliff?

Hi-Fi Rush, Baldur's Gate 3, RE4R, Dead Space, Street Fighter 6, Tears of the Kingdom, Jedi Survivor, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Phantom Liberty, Armored Core, Amnesia: The Bunker, Spiderman 2, Elpaso Elswhere, and the year's not even done yet.

Some talk about '23 being the year to go up against '07,' 04, and '98.

Crashing like 1983 is not on the table.

What is on the table, is AAA running into a wall.

Not long after I made a Tweet mocking this mythical panic, I happened to be in a call with a developer in the industry, one who, while not working for dozens and dozens of companies, had interviewed dozens and dozens of them.

Not 20-30+.

More 60-70+.

"Name them, I talked to them."

And apparently, every single one of them had said the exact same thing during these interviews…

"Our next game is a live-service."

Youtubers don't understand much about video-games.

Speaking from experience.

But something I very much understand is the concept of there being a limited amount of viewers, every minute of your video that's watched, are minutes of someone else's video being ignored.

If enough viewers are watching a particular genre, should that genre become saturated, the quality of many individual creators in it becomes irrelevant; there simply isn't enough time for all creators, no matter how good, to grab the limited pool of viewers that exist.

And yet, the gaming industry seems to think that 70+ live-service games, each demanding the player's monthly, weekly, daily, and sometimes, hourly attention, can all not just co-exist, but simultaneously succeed to the point where they'll be able to coast on that single game for the next 5-10 years…

Coincidentally, it's been theorized that all Triple AAA CEO's have a cocaine addiction.

It's baffling, not just because, you know…

WE ALREADY WENT THROUGH THIS TWENTY YEARS AGO.

It's super baffling because while companies are deciding to go on this live service bandwagon well after the train's left town, they're doing this at the exact same time we're witnessing every single social-media empire bleeding money out their assholes realizing that getting a big install-base to cover maintenance costs doesn't work, and that charging customers after the fact doesn't work either, because you've made it a part of their lives for free, and set that expectation.

I'm fully convinced at this point that had Visceral's Star Wars game led by Amy Hennig would've come out, had it started development in 2020.

That game and several others were killed by the industry's pursuit of live service business models.

"How is this going to make us money three years down the road?"

Now I'm hearing a developer tell me they're looking for single-player focused game studios to ensure they'll be employed three years down the road.