Every industry is broken, because the overarching economic system is broken. The game industry is one of the first to feel the full effects because it's so optional to the world.

Seems like there have been too many AAA flops, to the point where you can't really say that the launch week of a new title is going to be all that important.

It used to be that a big release was reliably interesting with everyone figuring out how to play, and a bit more emergent chaos. Few new titles have captured this. Either they are overly sterile, or buggy live service titles with no real reason to engage at day one.

Possible that the size of the teams is part of the problem, but if the industry needs to drop from 500 man to 100 man teams, I can't imagine how the industry will be healthy during that.

The problem with the game industry is, honestly, that everyone wants to break into it.

The game industry is genuinely terrible, starting with low pay and brutal working hours, but it's interesting and lets you do a lot of fun things.

Because everyone wants to do it, there are plenty of people willing to put up with somewhat lower pay.

It feels like whole business tries to become "the ultimate middle man".

Grabbing largest profits possible, but all risks on producers.

For clients there are two problems. Lack of people that steer industry in good direction long term, and everything works until it doesn't.

I recently started playing Expedition 33 and was impressed right away by the quality just in the first 10 minutes, hours later and the game just gets better.

I count 32 people on their team photo + the dog, and even this seems like a somewhat sizable number of people to manage. When I see news of these lay-offs it’s terrible for those people but at the end of the day I feel like those companies never should have reached those numbers. I fear for Larian

The US game industry has been broken for decade+, since all those gates. Now just free money ran out.

Start producing games players want, and you will do just fine! And do not tell your customers, how much you hate them! Even better: do not hate your customers!

One big problem is that good GPUs are not getting cheaper. They are both getting more expensive and becoming rarer at the consumer level, because everyone is on laptops of phones. As Sweeney points out, the game industry can't coast on improving hardware performance.

Epic is in the over-optimization business. With enough complexity, you can get performance up, at a high development cost. The results are truly impressive. See a GTA VI trailer.[1] The cost is high. Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion. That's 3x the cost of the most expensive movie ever made. It's more than the Super Bowl.

It will be interesting to see if AI generation can bring costs down. There's endless low-end AI crap, but here's a animation to watch - Kono Express.[1]. This was done by an animator Disney made the mistake of laying off. So he's in the process of replacing Disney Animation. He's turning out about half an hour of finished material per month, all by himself. It's up to Hollywood animation standards. He's combined Unreal Engine and AI to do this. Do we really need Disney's high-cost operation any more?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFwB6gZLRmc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdfJiKACxx4

Just saw this recent (from this or last month) Richard Garriott interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m60SbCPdfQI

Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.

The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games in a few weeks or months from their bedrooms after school..

Can we bring that back somehow?

It blows my mind that Sweeney thinks the solution is to make an ecosystem game. First of all, that's not easy to do. Second, the fact that all the AAA studios are trying to do that sort of thing is exactly why AAA games suck! Rather than trying to make cool games that are fun to play, they are trying to make slop that is addictive and keeps you spending money. Turns out that even people who are down for that sort of game don't need more than one (and they already have that one), whereas all kinds of people would be happy to buy something unique and fun.

I guess maybe it shouldn't surprise me that someone in his position advocates for "do the thing which is killing the industry, but do it even harder". But it really did catch me off guard.