Lots of little reasons, but I dont think any reason is as big as "more people than ever are a ballhair away from homelessness"

More and more people are saying the solution:

We need more better alternatives to what we currently have

More worker-owned unionized game studios that make spiritual successor games to what the big publishers make (To gradually replace them. AC is only thing keeping Ubisoft afloat. A spiritual successor that is better than it with mod support would make Ubisoft tumble fully)

More worker-owned companies that champion physical media, same for worker-owned companies that champion digital ownership for all industries, even videogames

A few more videogame hardware components, and hardware manufacturers to compete with each other. To fight for our money and actually have to innovate

Those are what will help game industry. Oh and supporting Indies, and AA games of course.

Everyone let's keeping building those new options up and supporting any good alternatives that already exist too.

"Different parts of industry head honchos need to be replaced by way better ones"

Pay to look good…

The same as every other industry?

No one else gets articles about how it's hard on them though, most journalists actively support the end of manufacturing and insult those who work it.

Leading roles were filled with PR idiots and marketing morons instead of people who actually care about games. Also, they are public

What's happening to American studios, the same guys have been working at Nintendo for the past 30 years. American culture doesnt care. The game shipped? Axe the developers, send the bonuses to the C Suite, and we'll all pop some champagne. Surprisingly, this destroys the regional industry.

14 yr game dev, worked on all platforms (mobile, web, console, Roblox/UGC)

This video undersells the scale of Roblox. I’m 37, and a lot of people my age don’t know that millions of people hop on Grow a Garden or whatever is hot there right now every weekend. Valve’s closest peak numbers are a scale less. That platform is going to define how a generation sees “video games.”

I would say the other point missing: China. China is doing exceedingly well at capturing market share over the last decade. While the west is struggling & self imploding, teams of hundreds of devs are working 996: 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. It’s tough to compete vs that.

Finally, and I know people don’t want to hear it, but AI is a great tool to speed up game development, especially in the prototyping phase. Even in production, there’s a real risk mitigation benefit in what video games are NOT: they aren’t legal apps, they aren’t medical apps, they aren’t financial apps, at least in the ways that those apps have serious compliance hurdles, other considerations for what you develop. If a video game is poorly designed, no one’s health is at risk.

I think the benefit is, yes, video games are about to be democratized in a way that’s hard to describe. If you know enough about game design, you can stand up applications that took full teams weeks in a matter of days as a solo. We’re about to drown in a Cambrian explosion of games (if society doesn’t implode separately).

Your links are all broken because they appeared to be copied and pasted without actually pasting the full unabreviated hyperlink.

Here's my take:

First, the Videogames made money based on number of plays, and the developers had to strike a balance between innovation, replayability, difficulty, and price then ship directly to arcades.

Then, the home console era took off, and competing consoles started signing exclusivity contracts with game developers in order to compete. Innovation was still a strong influence, but storylines and graphics became the major selling points. During this time, studios began consolidating as larger ones like EA, Activision, Tencent, etc all bought out smaller ones and dissolved them to move talent around to different flagship products.

Next, live service games proved incredibly profitable and hosting them became cheaper every year. Instead of monetizing a game once, developers could monetize them infinitely by simply adding microtransactions. During this time online distributors also became popular, giving rise to Steam and Epic Games stores to sell games purely digitally instead of via physical media. This has culminated in some distributors removing access to paid for games, as they were never truly purchased only leased.

Finally, major console companies started buying up or partnering with major studios, and then maximizing profitability which naturally means one thing: More Live Service Microtransactions, Less of Everything Else.

But Gamers aren't idiots. There is a gap in the market for content that we own, in physical form, with good story, and decent graphics. But there are no longer any professional studios left to make them. This has led to the term "Indie Studio" becoming broader and more successful, and the constant decline in the trust of major studios. Now, "AAA Studios" as they're referred to as, mostly sell towards children and people easily manipulated by social media feeds that they target to advertise on, but a new legislative landscape is slowly introducing obstacles for them to do that. It's plain to see that the current way of things is unsustainable and set to collapse.

they are laying of tons of gaming devs its going to get bad, and fresh out college will not be finding job(knew people that had to take jobs here just to be employed. its always cutting overheads/labor, record profits for the c-suites and ceo, rinse and repeat, until the company is a dead husk.

For a generalized channel from people who don't know gaming like we do, it's surprisingly spot on. Something that they might not know is a data point even worth quantifying is that in addition to hiring more developers, those developers are also, on average, spending more time making a single video game, whether it's live service or not. And contributing to that problem of not having enough time is that even the non-live-service games are longer than the equivalent game used to be 20 years ago.

I would push back on this point that even Mat Piscatella makes where if you're not Fortnite, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, or a handful of others, you're somehow "fighting for scraps"; there's the argument later in the video about what people want out of a multiplayer game or a social space; and then the question of "why wouldn't you just make a mobile game?". I don't think these are often the same audience. The thing in common between most mobile games and most console games is that they're made by people who have a very similar skill set, but their customers are often very different human beings. People on a Lemmy gaming community will probably play Grand Theft Auto, but they'll also probably a dozen other new games in the same year. Those dozen other games aren't fighting for GTA's scraps; they're just a subset of GTA's audience who don't intend to play it forever.

This is a video game essay on all things games this year. Youtube description has all the urls/research used in the video. I thought it was interesting.