"2022 was a warning shot for the big-budget games industry"

[kane_magus]

Oh, if only. If fucking only.

This right here is not the first time (and I'm sure it won't be the last time, either) that I have actively wished for the modern video game industry, especially the idiotic, too-expensive "AAA" video game industry, to experience a full-on 1983-like crash. If this "warning shot" is a precursor to that, it would be really great, in my opinion.

Comments

[owsf2000]

I doubt I'd care or notice if a 1983 era crash happened today with the modern industry, particularly the AAA industry. I'd actually love to see it happen but it won't so long as the average gamer continues to have zero respect for themselves as they continue to throw money at the publishers that are screwing them.

I have plenty of games bought, technically have the ability to make my own games if I really wanted to put the effort into it, and most of the games I play these days are indie titles that are fairly low budget - the type of dev that would most easily survive such a crash or be able to restart again after a crash began to wear off.

Large publishers like EA, Ubisoft, etc though would probably have a harder time of it as they slash/liquidate the devs they bought out to ensure there are some short term profits to be had even at the cost of their long term sustainability.

And that's just fine with me - I stopped buying their games years ago.

[kane_magus]

If video games magically went away altogether overnight, I guess I'd just go back to, like, reading more or watching more movies or something. Or, hell, maybe I'd even finally get around to finishing those novels I keep talking about. Something actually productive. ¬_¬ But yeah, barring actual magic doing away with everything, I have so much bargain-bin shit on Steam now that I'll probably never even start to play at all, let alone finish, that if new video games (AAA or indie) stopped being made, for whatever reason, I wouldn't miss them too awfully much. (But then, if there actually was an industry-wide crash, there's no guarantee that even Steam/Valve [or GOG or Epic Shit Store or any of the other "glorious digital future" things] would continue to exist, either, so... *shrug*)

And yeah, if/when the shit ever really hits the fan, it'll be less the likes of "EA" that gets hurt by it and more that the "BioWare"s of the world and such will be what end up dead. But then, it's not like EA ever needed anything as drastic as a full industry crash to kill off their bought devs, as history has shown dozens of times already. And it's not like BioWare isn't already a shambling zombie of its former self anyway, even now. *shrug*

In any case, like you say, there's no real chance that the modern video game industry will be going away any time soon, because too many lickspittles have been conditioned to suck down anything and everything the industry deigns to shit down the tubes connected directly to their gawping mouths and, moreover, what's even worse is that they've been conditioned to like and defend said shit as if it was good. An industry crash is just pie in the sky at this point.