The current industry has survived tons of buggy and terrible games, but what will be the high profile bomb that does an ET and destroys the reputation of the entire industry?
Starfield is insanely hyped, if that bombs, it could have big repercussions.
Other than that, we could have the industry stagnate down to just first-party publishers, considering how Activision has become yet another part of Microsoft.
Maybe it's not possible to have another video game crash, maybe the industry is too established for that to happen again. It's an interesting discussion.
One of two possibilities that I see.
Either:
Diversity and HR policies will continue sucking what joy remains from game development, all the competent creative people will flee; and all you'll have left is the drama queens and the people who are just there to collect a paycheck and will do whatever tasks are assigned to them no matter how nonsensical they are.
Or:
Improvements to computer hardware will slow to a point where newer models of computer will no longer be able to make up for inefficient code, and there won't be enough programmers with low-level programming knowledge to be able to optimize the code to improve performance. Possibility #1 may exacerbate this effect, as programmers with that low-level knowledge may not want to put up with the diversity and HR nonsense.
Hard disagree with this analysis.
Your first hypothetical isn’t a hypothetical; you are describing the actual current state of most of AAA development.
Your second hypothetical is a complete non-issue in modern game development. The vast majority of today’s games are created using licensed game engines and prebaked assets. You don’t need chip-level knowledge to code a video game in 2022.
Yes, and eventually it passes the event horizon where it becomes difficult or impossible to make anything worth playing. Which happens all the time in other industries; why would gaming be immune?
Someone still has to make the game engines. How many people know how to do that? Is that number going up or down over time?
Somebody tell that to minecraft users.
To be fair that's most of what you need, the only real creative tasks needing to be done would be art and name related since the rest of game design can be done by playing into a genre and maybe adding a twist from another genre.
It is true that is most of what you need. However in my experience (which isn't games but software development for some pretty expensive and complex equipment) successful projects often have a handful of talented people who give a damn well beyond a simple desire to earn a paycheck..
Big companies do a pretty good job crushing those guys as it is, yet somehow they keep springing up like weeds. If they ever actually succeed in killing the goose that lays the golden eggs...then you just have software like they have in India. How many cool games do you see come out of India?