We’re Really Just Going Through With All This, Aren’t We

You may have heard that there's a brand new video game console out this week, the first major hardware launch in almost five years. There's also a huge summer video games showcase, where all the latest and greatest new releases will be shown off, many for the first time. It should be the biggest week of the year for games. And yet.

Can you feel the excitement in the air? Or, I guess, can you not feel it? Can you feel the absence of where it should be? There are huge swathes of the video game industry going through the motions this week, staging major events the same way they always have, at the same time and even the same places they always have, even though things are most definitely not what they've always been. And the general vibe has been...subdued. The energy is more ennui than ecstatic. 

First, there's Nintendo and the impending release of the Switch 2. This is the company's first new hardware since 2017, launching with the first new Mario Kart since the death of Queen Victoria, and it's following in the footsteps of one of the most successful and beloved pieces of video game hardware of all time. The video game industry, and wider community of fans, should be bristling with electricity.

But a shallow launch lineup, a machine that's very similar to the last and a pricepoint that at first belied belief has sucked the life out of what has traditionally been a festive occasion. We're all going back to the well in terms of coverage--there will be Day One reviews, some midnight launches--but lotteries, shortages and uncertainty over supply and pricing has for many kept the lid on what used to be a mass celebratory moment.

Next up is Summer Games Fest Summer Game Fest trying, on behalf of the industry frontman Geoff Keighley so relentlessly champions, to fill the void left by E3, a show that for over a decade had become simultaneously pointless yet also clearly irreplaceable. The video game industry as it exists demands a focal point, a spotlight for everything coming down the pipeline, so for the next week we're going to get...an even more annoying E3. There will still be poorly-dressed men on stage making announcements, still endless trailers and commercials, yet somehow also less of it, everyone shovelling content into a pit they can never hope to fill.

The shovelling comes up short partly thanks to a lessening of this end of the industry itself. As the AAA market contracts towards a singular, exploitative point, and the wider market grows ever-reliant on a mass of vulnerable, independent developers starved of both funding and support, the servings of big games that used to fill these announcement shows grow ever thinner. But the shows are still there, and still yearn to be satisfied, so we try to replace the licensed EA games and 2K shooters of yesteryear with hundreds of indie games pitted against each other for the audience's attention and, in a trend far too on the nose for the occasion, what feels like an endless run of re-releases of yesterday's hits.

The vibes also feel a little off because of what's happened to the media. Or what's left of it. E3 used to be partly about the big stage events, yeah, but it was also about the days of subsequent coverage from outlets jostling to get their hands on the latest blockbusters and interview the big names from the big games, passing along these harried impressions and juicy quotes as free marketing. As empty-calorie as that coverage was, it still contributed to the overall structure of a week like this, as well as serving as a focal point for so much of the community’s excitement. In 2025, what little media there is left in this age of layoffs, closures, sales and an advertising market collapse will play a few things here and talk to a few people there. This coverage will take the same basic shape it always has, only now in a greatly reduced form. The same goes for the Switch 2, a console that wasn’t even sent to most press ahead of time, leading to a surprising dearth of day-one coverage, where once that coverage would have been inescapable.

This whole week, the Switch 2 launch and Summer Game Fest hitting over the same few days, is like the band playing as the Titanic sinks. I'm not saying VIDEO GAMES themselves are the Titanic, but the blockbuster side of the industry that we all once thought we knew, the home consoles and the AAA games and the big glitzy reveals that felt immovable and immune to recession, is now sinking beneath the waves while comforting, familiar tunes play over the lapping water.

Executives at major publishers increasingly view games and their developers as an impediment to their profits, rather than the source of them. There are layoffs everywhere, whether your game is good or not, whether it sells or not. Increasing amounts of consumer spending is focused on a dwindling list of forever games, while Roblox sucks the oxygen out of the industry for an entire generation. Meanwhile there is wider economic and political uncertainty, resulting in everything from tariffs to an inflationary crisis, which has many people struggling to pay for essentials, let alone $450 for a better Nintendo Switch.

I've seen a lot of talk on places like social media and Linkedin about how games have been going through it for the last two years, leading to short-sighted sentiments like how everyone needed to "survive until '25". As though every challenge huge parts of this industry are facing are unique to games, as though the video game industry exists in a total vacuum. But games are made by people who are part of wider societies, they're paid for out of bank accounts affected by things happening everywhere else. 

Games--or at least the kind of games this week used to be about--are trapped in the belly of the machine. We love to talk shit about Andrew Wilson, but he isn't to blame for every terrible decision at EA, because he's the executive of a publicly-traded company in 2025, and any other person in his line of work would and is doing the same thing. Almost every major industry in the world, whether it's games or cars or music or energy, is now at the mercy of Wall Street Weirdos, private equity in particular. We're not looking at a bad time for the video game industry, we're looking at just bad times.

Which is what makes it incredible to behold that this week we are just carrying on through it all, as though nothing has changed. We'll all be subjected to too many trailers to remember even a fraction of them. We'll all create and digest the same console launch coverage we always have, with midnight launches, photos of people rushing home with their Nintendo-branded shopping bags, first impressions, review scores of a machine breathing only its first breath. We're cosplaying as the 2000s, when these things meant something and were built for the occasion, even though literally everything around us--the economy, the industry, the platforms and ways we learn about and experience games--has changed radically.

It makes me wonder how many of these weeks we've got left. Before the medium has gone through such a revolution--hardware shifts, AAA's decline, the mass deprofessionalisation of the industry--that we all have to reckon with what video games actually look like now, not what the bloated end of the industry wishes they still did.