I feel like we are on the brink of another video game crash. This can't be sustainable anymore. I have never in my life not cared about a console generation cycle. This has got to be the worst one so far. My wife and I each have a PS5 and we hardly touch it. I own less than a dozen games and most of them are now on PC. I usually only buy a game on PS5 now if I want that copy physically or has a special edition that I want that's not on PC or Switch. $900 for a PS5 Pro with a disc drive and stand is insane, but people are still going to buy it up. I hope it's a major loss for Sony. It kind of makes me scared for the Switch 2. I own almost 200 physical Switch games just for portability alone.
The Xbox Series X is the first Microsoft console I have passed on. It's just a mid-range PC. Every single game is now on PC so what's the point. It would sit collecting dust just like my Xbox One X has been. I only use it to play backwards compatible games that are in my backlog.
Video game companies are not giving people enough incentive to stay on consoles.
While I don't think a crash is impossible, I do think it's unlikely. I think more realistically, there will be a massive pivot over the next decade or so in terms of the types of games released, what ends up getting hyped, and how people play their games in general.
For one, I can definitely say the AAA game model is completely unsustainable, as is the idea that every AAA game has to strive to be the next GTA5. Like many blockbuster Hollywood movies, the budgets involved in many AAA games are in the hundreds of millions , which doesn't even include marketing, maintenance, and other factors that fall outside that initial development budget. Essentially, many of these games have to gross over $500,000,000 to turn a profit, which is just impractical for most AAA games. Because of this, I can see a lot of publishers shift their money towards smaller projects made by smaller studios. I don't think AAA games are going to die off, but I can see fewer and fewer of them get released as time goes by. Some of the better games will likely have budgets between 2 or 3 million, and 20 million at the most. I think we will also see a lot of indie games blow up in popularity due to those games being way easier and cheaper to make, and many indie developers willing to take more creative risks than big, publicly traded companies like Sony or EA.
I also think consoles are becoming more and more irrelevant given how accessible and relatively affordable powerful PC hardware is. I think there will always be a market for consoles to some extent since many people don't like having to fiddle around with PCs to get a game working well, but I think this reservation will become less and less of an issue as weaker consoles become roughly the same price as a PC that's nearly twice as powerful for around the same money. You can add the shift away from physical games as being a factor in this too.
So in a way, gaming and game development will likely become a lot more decentralized over the coming decade. I can see some very big companies going under, or at least becoming way less influential than they once were. We're already seeing this to a degree with studios like Bethesda and Ubisoft. This all sounds good to me for the most part, however, the fact that physical video game media will likely be done for in the next 10 to 15 years and the days of getting hyped for big name releases and consoles is likely in its twilight years makes me also feel pretty depressed about the future of gaming. As I've said in multiple other threads, I'll still game, but I'll primarily be playing older games and on rare occasions buying newer games when they've gone on sale significantly since I refuse to pay over $10 for the vast majority of digital titles.
