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"Costs are rising but the audience isn’t growing. That can only mean one thing"
Sure, it can only mean one thing, but it isn't the "one thing" that articles like this seem to think it is. The "one thing" isn't "going multiplatform," because "going multiplatform" is only a temporary fix at best. It's the game industry equivalent of sticking one's finger into a crack in a dam to try to prevent it from bursting. The "one thing" is inevitable and inexorable irrelevance and, then, nonexistence. Being washed away when the dam finally breaks.
Let's say it happens, for real. Now, you can play all the Xbox games on Playstation. Playstation games on Xbox. Both of those on PC. Let's say that maybe, shock of shocks, even Nintendo gets in on the act and puts their games on all these other platforms (and scaled down versions of the others' games on Nintendo consoles), too. Let's throw them all on smartphones and toasters and watches and graphing calculators and pregnancy tests and Amicos and whatever else, too, while we're at it.
And... then what?[1]
You think that AAAAA game devs/pubs are suddenly going to become sensible? That they're going to somehow stop throwing ever increasing amounts of money and people at making ever larger games? You think that clueless shareholders who only ever care about their own bank accounts will somehow cease to have unrealistic expectations that the line will continue to go up, always and forever? No, they won't. And then, once the sheen of "going multiplatform" has worn off, we'll be right back to where we are now, which is that modern AAAAAAAAAA game development/publishing is unsustainable and will crash entirely, sooner or later. And this time, they won't even have the "exclusivity" boogeyman to blame it on.
And as for Nintendo being golden through all of this... I'm not so sure. Nintendo has been relying on pure gimmicks for the past almost two decades now. The Wiimote, the Switch portability, the... ...whatever the fuck was up with the Wii U. Sooner or later, they're going to run out of gimmicks to exploit. And they've also been relying on the fact that they can just arbitrarily turn off support for "older" consoles after a decade or so and then repackage/remaster/remake all the older games that are no longer easily available and just resell all that shit (at full price, of course) on their new console, whatever that happens to be at the time. Support for which, of course, will be turned off arbitrarily after another decade or less, starting the cycle all over again. How long do you think that particular business model will remain sustainable? (It's at least part of the reason why I have next to no interest in ever buying a Switch or a Switch 2 or whatever may come after those.)
And all of this, of course, is also ignoring all the other modern video game industry horseshit that is self-strangling the industry, like all the draconian DRM schemes (e.g. Denuvo, Epic Online Services, etc.), the ever growing percentages of games being chopped out and chopped up to be sold piecemeal as DLC, the forced inclusion of online/multiplayer into what used to be traditionally offline/singleplayer games, the ever increasing prices in general (which won't suddenly and magically stop being a thing if they all "go multiplatform" either), the fact that too many game creators are going the shitty "live service" "forever game" route, and other such things I've ranted about over the past decades.
[1] - Ignoring the fact that, once all those games are available on all those platforms, gamers will begin to wonder why we even need all these different platforms in the first place. Assuming we aren't already doing that, of course, which many of us most definitely are.
Sure, it can only mean one thing, but it isn't the "one thing" that articles like this seem to think it is. The "one thing" isn't "going multiplatform," because "going multiplatform" is only a temporary fix at best. It's the game industry equivalent of sticking one's finger into a crack in a dam to try to prevent it from bursting. The "one thing" is inevitable and inexorable irrelevance and, then, nonexistence. Being washed away when the dam finally breaks.
Let's say it happens, for real. Now, you can play all the Xbox games on Playstation. Playstation games on Xbox. Both of those on PC. Let's say that maybe, shock of shocks, even Nintendo gets in on the act and puts their games on all these other platforms (and scaled down versions of the others' games on Nintendo consoles), too. Let's throw them all on smartphones and toasters and watches and graphing calculators and pregnancy tests and Amicos and whatever else, too, while we're at it.
And... then what?[1]
You think that AAAAA game devs/pubs are suddenly going to become sensible? That they're going to somehow stop throwing ever increasing amounts of money and people at making ever larger games? You think that clueless shareholders who only ever care about their own bank accounts will somehow cease to have unrealistic expectations that the line will continue to go up, always and forever? No, they won't. And then, once the sheen of "going multiplatform" has worn off, we'll be right back to where we are now, which is that modern AAAAAAAAAA game development/publishing is unsustainable and will crash entirely, sooner or later. And this time, they won't even have the "exclusivity" boogeyman to blame it on.
And as for Nintendo being golden through all of this... I'm not so sure. Nintendo has been relying on pure gimmicks for the past almost two decades now. The Wiimote, the Switch portability, the... ...whatever the fuck was up with the Wii U. Sooner or later, they're going to run out of gimmicks to exploit. And they've also been relying on the fact that they can just arbitrarily turn off support for "older" consoles after a decade or so and then repackage/remaster/remake all the older games that are no longer easily available and just resell all that shit (at full price, of course) on their new console, whatever that happens to be at the time. Support for which, of course, will be turned off arbitrarily after another decade or less, starting the cycle all over again. How long do you think that particular business model will remain sustainable? (It's at least part of the reason why I have next to no interest in ever buying a Switch or a Switch 2 or whatever may come after those.)
And all of this, of course, is also ignoring all the other modern video game industry horseshit that is self-strangling the industry, like all the draconian DRM schemes (e.g. Denuvo, Epic Online Services, etc.), the ever growing percentages of games being chopped out and chopped up to be sold piecemeal as DLC, the forced inclusion of online/multiplayer into what used to be traditionally offline/singleplayer games, the ever increasing prices in general (which won't suddenly and magically stop being a thing if they all "go multiplatform" either), the fact that too many game creators are going the shitty "live service" "forever game" route, and other such things I've ranted about over the past decades.
[1] - Ignoring the fact that, once all those games are available on all those platforms, gamers will begin to wonder why we even need all these different platforms in the first place. Assuming we aren't already doing that, of course, which many of us most definitely are.
