> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://aftermath.site/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Why Isn’t Anyone Funding Video Games Anymore? - URL: https://aftermath.site/podcasts/you-are-error-podcast-video-game-investment/ - Published: 2026-10-27T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-27T16:09:58.000Z - Description: 'If anyone tells you that it’s easy to get funding right now, I’m going to assume that they picked up the phone and called rich mom and dad' - Author: Nathan Grayson - Tags: Inside Baseball Week 2026, Podcasts, podcast, you are error, investment, money, inside baseball week These days it can be hard to remember, but the whirring machinery of the video game industry used to occasionally produce a successful hit without immediately collapsing and exploding. There are many factors to blame for this clear erosion of functionality: Mismanagement, unrealistic expectations, trend chasing, brain drain, and so on. But at the end of the day, many of our current woes can be traced back to a single source: money. Where, after the covid-born boom period of 2020 and 2021, did it all go? On the latest episode of [You Are Error](https://aftermath.site/tag/you-are-error/), Aftermath’s podcast about gaming’s greatest misconceptions, we find out. Given that it’s currently [Inside Baseball Week](https://aftermath.site/tag/inside-baseball-week-2026/), I figured that now is as good of a time as any to delve into a subject that, frankly, reads like headline poison: investment. It’s a snooze word with enormously impactful ramifications, especially in an industry where money keeps getting harder to come by. There’s a prevalent, seductively simple narrative at play here, too: Once upon a time, a pitch deck and a dream could land you cash from a deep-pocketed investor or a reliable publisher, and for a minute in 2020, it seemed like games were actually a pretty safe bet as far as pricy years-long gambles go. Thanks to the pandemic, people were stuck inside, so they had more time than ever to play games—just as other entertainment mediums were flailing. Investors saw gold in the hills. Money poured into the industry. Major acquisitions, like Take-Two buying Zynga and Embracer buying everyone, followed. But then 2020 gave way to more vaccinated years, and people un-paused their lives. Slowly but surely, investment money drained out of the video game industry and into other sectors, leading to the parched wasteland of layoffs, cancellations, and closures that now stretches before us. Is it really that simple, though? And where, exactly, did the money go? Will it ever come back? Further, how much do investors really pay attention to video games at all, and to what extent are they able to influence major productions? What happens when they want to see a quick return on investment? Are they responsible for unpopular, money-grubbing decisions like the modern preponderance of live service games? To answer all those questions and more, I reached out to [Mike Futter](https://bsky.app/profile/futterish.fsquared.biz?ref=aftermath.site), director of ops and publishing at Causeway Studio, producer at Strange Scaffold, and host of [the Virtual Economy podcast](https://virtualeconcast.com/?ref=aftermath.site). I found our conversation extremely enlightening, and I hope you will too. You can listen to the episode below or on [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you-are-error/id1782231480?ref=aftermath.site), [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/7w7V296dt8HCoDryWiofI4?ref=aftermath.site), and pretty much anywhere else podcasts are found. You can also [watch it on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWDP8sxhGfI&list=PLWplnbreNOJI&ref=aftermath.site). If you enjoy what you hear, please leave a review! Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity): **Mike:** You have this belief \[in 2020 and 2021\] that starts to permeate a lot of the industry that, OK, we have a lot of money coming in, a lot of new and lapsed gamers coming back because they’ve got nothing else to do—we’re gonna hang onto some of them. Some of them, they’re not gonna stick around. The world’s gonna open back up; they’re gonna go back to whatever hobbies they had before. We’re gonna lose them, or they’re gonna scale back significantly. But we’re gonna keep a lot of these new players and we’re definitely gonna keep a lot of these returning players because they already have experience and they’re seeing how far gaming has come since the last time they picked up a gamepad. What ended up happening was much more severe than that. We all anticipated a correction. We did not anticipate such a drastic correction. That was because you started seeing things like the war in Ukraine, which was hurting things. You start to see all of the ripple effects of shipping and manufacturing that was caused by covid; slower to catch up than we anticipated. And then, very slowly at first, you start moving into the current AI bubble, which is making things even more difficult. So if 2020 was an anomaly, 2026 is equally but for very different reasons. **Nathan:** Right. We have the 2020 boom, and conventional wisdom is that there was a lot of money flowing into the industry at the time—as you were saying for mergers and acquisitions, but also investment. People wanted a slice of that pie. So when did that start to level off? Because I feel like 2021 was also perceived as a good year. When did we hit that wall? **Mike:** The winds started to change in 2022\. I was in Toronto for Pocket Gamer Connects, and I flew up with my partner, Manda Farough, and she was on a panel. During that panel, she said something that she didn’t even believe was as prophetic as it turned out being, which was: “Get your deals in before the end of the year, because things are getting worse.” And they certainly were. Then 2023 rolled around, and things started to get worse and worse and worse. A lot of it comes back to that consolidation. There was a lot of hope—and I will be the first to admit that I was wrong about the hope that I placed in it—that \[Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard\] was gonna be really good for labor because they were getting away from Bobby Kotick and that board. There was some hope in there. Microsoft ran a big PR campaign—the whole labor neutrality thing, which I know you know well because you’re reporting on it is so good. Now you see Microsoft showing its true colors. **Nathan:** It occurs to me that there have been a number of video game-related investment bubbles or moments when people were like “Oh yeah, you’ve got to get in on video games.” There was the esports boom. That had obviously leveled off even sooner, though some would say the death knell occurred around 2020 or in that era. For example, you had the *Overwatch* League’s globe-trotting dreams getting crushed by covid. **Mike:** Right, and I think the thing you hit on—and that we all kind of lost sight of \[back then\]—is that all of these buzzwords that drive venture capital and private equity, those folks get bored. Fast. They’re always looking for the next big thing, and they want to be at the forefront—venture capital, especially. That’s the whole thing: They want to be there early, get in cheap, and make big money in five to ten years when they get out. So if you look at all the things that happened along the way—and thank god a lot of these fizzled out quickly; NFTs and Web3\. It’s kind of a joke now, all of those things. The thing I always use is going into GDC and looking at the fad that was there that year, and there was the NFT fad, and there was the Web3 fad. And now of course AI has hung on longer because of just how much money \[is being spent\] and which players are involved in it. That is part of the reason why funding has become so difficult. Gaming was always a risky investment. We are a hit-driven industry. But it has only gotten more true as game development has become more democratized. I think we start running into the collision of, OK, there was all this money coming in and this belief that indies are gonna save us yet again, except now there’s no money for it. We are already running lean, we are already running efficiently, and we are already being careful with scope in a way that triple-A never is, quite frankly. But we are having a harder time getting less money. That’s kind of the drumbeat you will hear from indies all over the industry. If anyone tells you that it’s easy to get funding right now, I’m going to assume that they picked up the phone and called rich mom and dad. **Nathan:** Yeah, one of the recurring themes that I came across \[in my own research\] is that we are amid uncertain times, obviously, and that on top of that, there are high interest rates. This was a quote from Hiro Partner Capital’s Spike Laurie: “We're still in a climate where people that are funding this stuff would rather put their money in the bank and sit and wait, than invest it in video games.” **Mike:** That’s absolutely true. Because most of the time, investors have no idea what they’re investing in. It’s numbers. They’re looking at their bottom line and what is the possible return. Because a lot of them—especially when you’re talking about VC and private equity—they’re responsible for making a return for somebody else. So if they start making bets on things that aren’t sure things, then they start running into trouble with whomever is holding the purse strings. [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-22-145651-2.png)](https://aftermath.site/tag/inside-baseball-week-2026/) ****Welcome to Inside Baseball Week**, our annual excuse to explore topics so niche and weeds-y that no other video game website would touch them: deep dives into the industry’s least-plumbed depths, interviews with people whose jobs you’ve never even considered the existence of, detailed breakdowns of minute decisions like when to delay a game or lay people off, transparent and sometimes unflattering examinations of games journalism, and this time around, poop (ask Riley). [READ MORE ](https://aftermath.site/tag/inside-baseball-week-2026/) ## Recommended [What Really Caused The Video Game Crash Of 1983?"It takes more than bad games, I think, to kill an industry"![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/icon/favicon4-5e299a84-b638-480b-bee4-3fe908faa93c.png)AftermathNathan Grayson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/thumbnail/et-9cf15f83-4421-4343-87e6-9aee5ce07e35.png)](https://aftermath.site/podcasts/you-are-error-podcast-video-game-crash-1983/)