Is the Games industry stagnating?

 

As I pose this query I want to be clear that unlike as it is often raised, I do not present my own view on the world of gaming as reflection of the larger trends of the gaming world. This isn't a "My life has started becoming more busy and I have less time for games, that means gaming is bad now and it was better when I was a kid!" I'm a far too terminally dissociated with myself to form a view like that on the gaming world. Hell, I suspect I'll probably not even notice it when I die, my mind occupies myself so fleetingly. What I mean to address is the perception I've heard anecdotally quite often, albeit from everyone not in the industry itself- that the games industry is headed towards a dead spial. And the evidence is both in the direction of the industry and the nature of the medium itself. 

Now it's hardly any great philosophy to posit on the coming crash of the AAA market- that seems all but certain at this point. Giant studios are sinking insane amounts of time and money into projects that fans end up not wanting and not buying, leading to them firing developers and cranking up prices, that results in worse games with prohibitive prices that ends up driving people into the arms of the indie market. The AAA scene pretty much has it coming at this point and I- honestly think that when the bubble bursts and the wreckage clears this could end up being somewhat healthy for gaming. Once the focus shifts from the giant 'sink everything into this/too big to fail' meta- attention will settle back on the surrounding miasma of thoughtfully developed games by a plethora of varied and clever studios. We'll find it less easy to see the obvious trends of profitability influencing our games and genuine passion will rule the roost. It seems we're already trending that way in the age of surprise mega hits we currently reside within. 

But what about the supposed 'false growth' of the gaming market? We know that gaming is the most profitable entertainment medium in the world on good years, swapping back and forth with the other heavy hitters on less stuffed years, but it also cannot be overstated that the majority of that recent millionaire growth has come in the rise of the mobile gaming market. Yes, all those bite sized snippets of bank account draining trash which suckers in the busy offices and soccer moms who have neither the free time or the interest to look at what proper lovingly made modern gaming is. These are the products designed to psychological wire it's players in becoming perpetual spenders- draining the life out of themselves before they even know what's going on. This is the medium that suckers hundreds of millions out of the public. Is this the success that props up the games industry and makes us seem more mainstream than we actually are?

I read a theory that genuine gaming itself is a stagnant medium wherein the audience of console and games buyers hardly actually expands every year. The same sorts of people buy within their groups and slowly age out of the hobby or pass it on to their kids or stay hooked for life- wherever it leads them- but no new outside people are brought into the fold. The societal wall, the learning curve, whatever the barrier is- normies just don't become gamers. The article I was reading posited the problem was the complexity of game controls which has come to normalise the standard without remembering to keep friendly to newcomers- but I find that a little bit of cherry picked complaint. (Not least of all because the article then went on to reference the author's troubles getting to gripes with the modern complexities of Baldur's Gate 3- a game based on rules that are almost fifty years old at this point.)

When we take our eyes to the projected numbers, we can maybe draw some statistics to support this- namely that in the coming year there are expected to be less people engaging with the console market than there currently are this year, just as we predicted last year. This marks a point of contention for investors and interested support parties who buy in with the expectation of constant unlimited growth, without which the security of the medium becomes questionable. That is the trajectory which has lit a flame under Sony and their desperation to attract new customers and Microsoft's recent boneheaded and shortsighted sacrificing of the market for short term bursts of finance. This is the apparent doomsday hanging over the industry.

However when you actually ask some of the people worrying under this, they seem pretty confidant we're not looking at a permanent trend. I mean sure, if you work in the industry it's within your best interest to be optimistic about the future of your own job prospects, but it helps no one to be delusional in the face of destruction. You'd think if there really was no future in the games industry, or if no one truly saw any chance of the hobby growing, then we'd see more companies make the permanent switch to mobile- wouldn't we? Afterall these are businesses, run by people trying to score the most amount of profit possible, wouldn't it be the end-goal to fire every bust a skeleton team of 15 developers to run a mobile app with an established brand slapped on top? What stops them?

Well perhaps it's because the downturns we're seeing are, in fact, temporary as they insist. The most charitable way to look at the recent layoffs around all the tech space is that this is the consequences of the overhiring that came during the Pandemic times- but we haven't really explored the effect that would have had on the market as well. Video gaming would have no doubt exploded in a time when everyone had more off hours and were stuck in their homes all day, and in the years since as work-from-home is being weeded out- those same people are going to drop off as gamers. Fast forward a couple of years later would it be sensible to believe we're still seeing the drop-off from that reset to equilibrium? Is this the momentary ache from the ultimate snap back to market realities?

The only real stagnation of the games industry that is totally without contention would be the stagnation of opportunity as roles are slowly dropping off the face of the earth. Just like with every aspect of the Entertainment industry that is slowly beginning to cater more to the money men, there is lest fostering of the next generation of creatives and it's leaving a divide in talent. People are working their way up to leadership positions and that means less creativity entering the top fields of the profession. That is a stagnation worth analysing in a blog all of it's own. As to whether or not this hobby is slowly choking to death on it's own vomit? I would give us a few more years before jumping to those conclusions. Let's see how the 'number of active world wide gamers' looks like when GTA VI drops.