Whether it's on social media or serious websites, and whether it's backed by tanking financials or just bad vibes, we see a lot of talk these days about an impending video game crash, a day of reckoning for the industry that has been decades in the making.
With the great crash of 1983 as a reference point, industry veterans like Brenda Romero are starting to pinpoint an endgame for the trends that have been bugging folks for a while now. From spiralling costs to mass layoffs, having Wall Street weirdos as CEOs to the fruitless pursuit of "forever games", things haven't looked this bad for video games in decades. It's leading to a lot of talk, and a lot of concern, about the future of the "video game industry".
If you'd like to read a whole book about some of the stuff I'm writing about here, you should definitely check out Brendan Keogh's excellent The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist
Anyone who lived through the 1983 crash (which ran until 1985), or has at least read about it, will always be able to point to its dire effects on the US home console market as evidence that games can and have suffered near-total collapse, but something that is repeatedly lost with this comparison is that 1983 wasn't anywhere near as bad for video games as it's made out to be. Especially, it wasn't anywhere near as bad for those living outside the US as Americans would have you believe.
The 1983 crash was brought about mainly by an over-saturation of terrible video games in the United States home console market, mostly on the Atari 2600 system. The effects were momentous for Atari and the retailers selling their products, but in 1983 the United States was not the only place games were being made, nor was it the only place games were making money.
As with so much other video game history, particularly in the English-speaking world, the collective account of 1983-85 is incredibly Amerocentric, and often avoids (or barely touches on) the fact that in Europe and Japan all kinds of new and different markets continued to grow and thrive, like Britain's personal computer scene (on platforms like the C64) and Nintendo's own home console efforts. The NES didn't suddenly land in America in 1985; it had been released in Japan two whole years earlier, right when Atari had begun to tank.
It's worth remembering that video games themselves aren't an industry, and it's an unhealthy starting point for any resulting discussions if that's all you think they are. They're a medium, a vehicle for art, product and play all at once.
What happened between 1983-85 is that one of several concurrent video game industries collapsed. And that's exactly the same scenario we're looking at today. Just like the 1980s, there isn't a single video game market, there are loads of different ones. Some of their efforts and player bases overlap at points, while others are completely isolated from one another.
Many (though not all!) of the most alarming danger signs we're seeing are coming from the AAA industry. Big studios are run by people more interested in short-term financial gains than in creating quality products, and they've got stuck in creative ruts spending too much money on games that take too long to come out and which take too few risks. As a result, the AAA release schedule has dried up, those companies keep laying off skilled workers whether a game is successful or not, and this is having a negative effect on everything from the few AAA games we do get to play (now being riddled with in-game transactions) to the health of the home console market that's long been the spiritual home of these experiences, with Xbox's recent struggles the clearest and most prominent example.
That's not to say there aren't other issues affecting other games. AI looms as menacingly over video games as any other field. Fortnite's revenue is down, funding for mid-level games is drying up and VR is running out of puff because the biggest company behind its attempt at mass adoption has had its attention captured by a newer set of jangling keys. Political turmoil and capitalism's ever-accelerating decline are affecting people's disposable incomes just as international events and investors’ focus on AI has driven the price of pretty much every device we play games on through the roof.
As tempting as it might be to see some storm clouds and imagine the end of video games themselves, it's worth considering what games are, and how many markets for them are out there. Nintendo exists alongside but is also in many ways separate from PlayStation and Xbox's AAA studio woes. Steam is a beast so powerful that even if one or two kinds of games it sells were to disappear it'd still have 17 other kinds to make billions from, ranging from mid-sized European studios making weird strategy games to small teams of Australians drawing on government support to kids coding million-sellers from their bedroom. Roblox fucking sucks, but those are still video games, millions of people play and enjoy them, and it prints money.
Free-to-play gaming, particularly on phones, exists in another universe, making millions from audiences who might never touch any other game on any other device. The same goes for some of the planet's biggest PC games, from Hoyoverse titles to online shooters. Itch is home to anything anyone who has ever wanted to make a video game could ever think to make. Even arcades, surviving from before 1983 like crocodiles outliving the dinosaurs, are still around.
And those are just the industries we're mostly familiar with! China, Japan and Korea all have their own huge, unique markets. Do millions of people playing a Chinese online game you've never heard of care if Grand Theft Auto VI takes too long to come out? Are the companies selling gacha phone games in Japan even going to notice if Call of Duty sales slide, or you can no longer buy an Xbox?
It's also worth remembering that video games themselves aren't an industry, and it's an unhealthy starting point for any resulting discussions if that's all you think they are. They're a medium, a vehicle for art, product and play all at once. Every game ever developed has involved at least one of those three things, regardless of where in the world it was made or what platform you played it on. As a result, there is a universe of different industries selling games that offer wildly different products to often very unique audiences.
We may be looking at the death (or at least sharp decline) of one or two of the noisiest video game industries, ones that we as Westerners of a certain age might be most familiar with, and if that happens we'll see knock-on effects through other industries as well, creating challenges that will need to be overcome. But those surviving industries, and the medium that endures alongside them, will live on, and from the ashes of one dead industry we might even get something extremely cool to replace it.
