Industrial Accidents

Before this week's blog, a taste of things to come:

Cthulhu is a courteous visitor. A horrific visitor, but courteous to a fault.

Now let's talk about the game industry's current crisis point, and my thoughts. Because you're paying not just of my games, but a piece of my mind as a nice bonus.

Anyone who's been following the industry lately knows things are kinda on the skids. The AAA side of things got bloated and overfed on COVID profits and the gold rush of massive dev acquisitions, and now is wobbling on its feet. Budgets are inflating, as the cost of making photorealistic AAA games goes up and up and up -- and the profits aren't rising to match due to long strings of mediocre trend chasing games like Suicide Squad, so the bloodthirsty corpos are making up for that by firing people. It's a vicious cycle, purging your institutional knowledge and creative talent resulting in worse games for the same amount of money, leading to more jobs shed as people are the first ones chucked out of the lifeboat to make more room for the gold.

But the indie side of things isn't sunshine and roses, either. The tremendous glut of indies is part of the reason I switched models, focusing on creating art rather than fighting tooth and nail for the limited pile of cash available to an increasing number of indie devs. Even a tiny, tiny budget compared to a single-A game can't make it past the post when things are this brutally competitive -- you either go unexpectedly viral or you vanish into the ether.

So, what's the solution? If I knew that, I wouldn't be throwing in the towel on capitalism and sidestepping the whole thing. But if I had to take a guess, and y'all are paying me to take a guess...

...I think the best spot is going to end up being in the middle. Something larger than indies, but not relying on the "too big to fail" mentality of AAA's. The classic AA game, something that uses style and creativity to make up for a lack of budget but has enough weight pushed up behind it to get it into the public sphere. As the fattest cows and leanest calfs die out, the ones which combine the strengths of major publisher marketing muscle with the clever and thrifty talents of the indies may overcome.

Or we get the 1983 crash again, I guess. Failure is always an option.