I love video games. It’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with them. From a young age, I was drawn to what they had to offer, their ability to push technology forward, their ability to amaze, their ability to entertain, their ability to excite me. When I was a kid I read maybe 10 video game magazines a month (I probably would have read more if I hadn’t been kicked out of the local WHSmiths). I enjoyed introducing my friends to video games and I knew I wanted to turn it into a career. I did it. Sure, there have been ups and downs, but 20 years later I’m still here, still obsessed.
However, things feel different. There was a mood in the air that was, for lack of a better word…bad.
The severe whiplash of it all is so difficult to parse.
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Layoffs and closures. I don’t know if anyone knows the exact number of job losses since the beginning of 2023 – see here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here and here (yes, there were a lot before then), but it’s somewhere around 20,000 . Some of that comes from restructuring to save costs, and some comes from closing studios entirely, such as Bethesda talent Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin’s recent closures.
Sadly, however, the past 16 months or so have probably been the best we’ve ever seen in terms of game quality. In terms of AAA games, we have “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”, “Baldur’s Gate 3”, “Cyberpunk: Phantom Freedom”, “Alan Killer 2”, “Spider-Man 2”, “Mario” “Miracle”, “Diablo 4”, “Final Fantasy 16”, “FF7 Reborn”, Dragon’s Fortune, Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, P’s Lies, Starfield, Octopath Traveler 2, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Star Wars Jedi: Survivors, and more.
The indie game scene is absolutely fantastic too, including Balatro, Animal Well, Sea of Stars, Hades 2, Ultros, Crow Country, Dredge, A Highland Song, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Viewfinder, Cocoon and El Paso, among others. I don’t need to use Google to recall it. A lot, isn’t it?
I’m not ignorant of how big business works, and even if I disagree with certain decisions, I can see their reasoning, but balancing the relentless growth of the video game industry with my own desires is extremely difficult. Just playing great games when a lot of the people making them are out of work and some studios no longer exist. I’ve built things and taken them away, so I have a level of empathy through shared experiences, but the scale here is a level that’s hard to fathom.
The emotions are complex and disturbing. I personally have a strong connection to Xbox. A review I wrote for the original Halo started my journey into games media, Xbox Live dominated my life in my early 20s, and the brand and its hardware/games played a role in my career in the games media business over the first three generations of Xbox important role. Microsoft has made an unpleasant business decision that completely goes against my deep-seated love for the platform.
Disdain me if you must, but I desperately want Xbox to succeed (along with PlayStation and Nintendo, that’s clear), but part of me also wants them to be held accountable for a series of dec isions that are unacceptable at best. To me, the joy in some quarters over the possible exit of Xbox from hardware is short-sighted and has no understanding of what Xbox actually does for the industry, but it shows just how dire a situation the sector has fallen into.
There’s been a lot of chatter online about the end of Xbox, at least in terms of hardware — and when you see reports that the PS5 (itself down slightly) outsold the Xbox family of consoles 5 to 1 in a quarter, well, it’s hard. Not wondering if this is actually all tinfoil hat bullshit.
And this is all happening at a time when Xbox should be thriving: Fallout has never been bigger thanks to Amazon TV shows, and if I’d been told as a kid that Game Pass was a service, I would have hardly believed it would exist in the future, owned by Microsoft Tons of the world’s biggest games. But somehow Xbox is stuck and seems to be struggling to find a clear direction toward success.
Of course, others have done totally pig-eared things. Embracer was the most high-profile disaster, with the company laying off more than 1,000 employees after previously cleaning out studio after studio. Take the recently shuttered Roll7 and Intercept Games, two companies that each developed some of the most beloved games of recent years.
Sony isn’t immune to this either. It’s also made a bunch of major layoffs, PS5 sales appear to be slowing down (although you’d have to be grounded in the business to see it struggling), and it’s made some unpopular decisions around its PC version, like big games Play Helldiver 2.
I’ve often wondered about Nintendo’s decision to abandon cutting-edge technology in favor of making hardware for the masses. Considering the difficulties the gaming industry as a whole has faced in its quest to reach seemingly unreachable graphical peaks, there’s no doubt that Nintendo’s choice was one of the smartest ever.
Yes, maybe Nintendo is best positioned to do it, but since the launch of the GameCube, the company has managed to deliver the best games of every generation at a fraction of the budget required by the graphics juggernauts of triple-A powerhouses. At some point, it will face these issues as well, as it works to deliver hardware with more processing power, but it has positioned itself to offer a strong mix of triple-A, double-A, and, uh, single-A games. And did a great job from them all.
I want to be hopeful, I really hope so. In June, we’re going to see a ton of new games from PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, and third parties that I’m sure will look amazing. Presumably, the PS5 Pro will still be released before the end of the year, the Switch 2 will be released early next year (fingers crossed), and Nvidia is sure to make consoles almost unimaginable with some incredible (and expensive) GPUs things. Every week we seem to get at least one indie game worth playing.
What do people want from video games? Based on recent earnings reports, it doesn’t look like a big-budget game like Final Fantasy VII Reborn and Final Fantasy XVI, although both are important weapons in the increasingly tiresome console wars. I had a lot of concerns about the upcoming Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, which looked incredible, and no one predicted that Sony’s Helldiver 2 would be a breakthrough. Funny, my son and his friends now only play Fortnite and Fortnite related games, so is this generation simply opting out of traditional gaming, leading to another game costing millions? A billion-dollar trend chasing that ended in disaster?
Time will tell, but I fully expect the gaming industry to change a lot in five years. Better or worse, I don’t know. However, I still get addicted to video games. no doubt.
