Interesting presentation on the industry. The author is a bourgeois but the data he presents is comprehensive. Some takeaways:
>Capital investment in game development has grown massively since 2011 (i.e. the year /v/ often claimed that vidya went to shit)
>This culminated in a spike during COVID that's now receding
>Massive growth in the mobile games market is petering out
>Development costs, marketing, licensing, etc. have all made producing games more expensive
>Tremendous rise in the number of new games per year, including from China
>Also lots of competition from social/streaming media
>A plurality of the revenue from game sales goes to big established franchises, across all platforms
The end result looks like a classic crisis of overproduction in the video game industry. Too much capital investment, too many games produced that can be profitably sold to the consumer. All while fixed capital costs have risen dramatically. Thus explains the current round of flopping shit games and industry layoffs/studio closures. The author's suggested 'growth engines' for raising sales start on page 130.
A difficult thing for gaming industry is that not only they need to compete with newly released games, but also with old games. They can mitigate it by psychological manipulation to make players avoid old games, but fundamentally it will increase the cost + make the relationship between players and manufacturers become antagonistic. Or crack down on old softwares like how Nintendo is waging war against emulators, etc.
In gacha industry, and GaaS in general, it manifests as the phenomenon of power creeping, by devaluing the old characters, forcing the players to buy new characters. Needless to say, the relationship between players and gacha is becoming outright hostile day by day.
All of this points to the fact that capitalist mode of production is incompatible with the future of gaming industry, and also software industry in general. Returning to small scale production (aka feudalism, guilds), as many gamers are currently calling for, is a pipe dream, as 1. Old games, 2. Too many indie games devs already.
Therefore, the only solution is to nationalize big gaming companies. As capital is withdrawing from Big Gaming due to its unprofitness, it's upon the shoulder of nation to fund Vidyagaems, Make Vidya Great Again, aka. MVGA. Gaming industry, instead of being accountable before shareholders, now must be accountable before the whole nation!
>BUT… Anon… won't a crash like the Atari crash reset the profit rate of the industry…
No! The Atari crash is just like the Tulip mania, when people just switched from guild scale production to capitalist mode of production, no one knew shit, that why they invested on bullshit things. The current crisis is totally different, it's not only a crisis of overproduction, but also a crisis of overinvestment. Overinvestment = a level of investment such that it's impossible to extract profit from. And as I said, it's impossible to scale back production level to the past, you cannot persuade players to buy your games without a huge leap in quality. Propaganda, psychological manipulation also cost money, aren't cheap.
So, for AAA gaming, the conclusion is: Socialism or Death.
(For Indie gaming, it's not that grim. Feudalism is an sustainable mode of production, you can still your indie games, just don't forget to pay tithe to your Lord Gaben the Savior, heheh)