Making this mostly because I saw this trailer which is the third game this year I'd actually WANT to play and this video from Arch on how because the games being made are all grey goo (sorry, 'quadruple A') they are losing not just to indies but DECADE old evergreen games like GTA V.
Between the constant woke stories and characters, the piss poor game mechanics and the insistence to be 'live service games' I can't tell if it's deliberate sabotage or they were so reliant on ESG that they forgot how to make a game FOR PROFIT.
And a lot of these games COULD be fixed with mods but thanks to the war on non-narrative modders, a lot of them remain a pile of shit. It's why Fallout 4 still has an active playerbase and Starfield is largely forgotten.
I think 2024, we will see at least ONE major studio fall and a ton of cope articles saying 'gaming isn't as popular' while these guys might make the next hit allowing us to drive a Toyota into medieval knights..
The industry is in a death spiral because software development is so in demand now. Why make soulless corporate “art” at a company that expects you to take like a cool-industry discount when you can just go to the soulless corporate sector for more money and less work. The studios have self filtered to the point that the only game devs left are people that don’t care enough about the hobby to know they’re killing it, people that don’t have the skills to get a better job in the real world, and true believers that think the sincere expression of their leftist ideals is enough to justify the microtransactions and live services. I don’t think any studios will fail any time soon though because the live service model does work for them unfortunately (look at Diablo) and it’s why they keep trying to recreate it. Maybe they’ll shrink but the “major” studios are major because they all have at least one moneymaker that isn’t going anywhere
MegaCorps themselves also suffer from the "gray goo" problem in that working for one is the same as working for another. So that being the case, why not just chase the money?
But if the games companies offered something interesting/different in exchange for working for them, then people might be willing to take the pay cut. Obvious one would be "we don't have an HR department; we just have Kelly who manages the benefits". Or barring that, put the head of HR extremely low on the org chart so the damage they can cause is minimized.