Well who could have seen THIS coming?

[A Black Falcon]

EA just announced over 600 layoffs as well.  The industry is clearly having major problems thanks to how long and expensive development of AAA games has gotten.  The total number of consoles sold has not increased much over the past few generations, but game budgets have increased dramatically.  Games take many years to complete and cost crazy amounts of money, and can developers make their money back?  And in a market so clogged with games, how many games are going to be unnoticed or forgotten because of how many releases there are?  I don't know what the solution is, but clearly things are not going well.  Microsoft is trying to get games to more screens as a way to deal with the stalled market size while prices balloon issue, but I don't know if it is going to work for them or not.  I guess we'll see.

Seriously though, considering that games cost multiple times more than they did in the past and take five or eight or ten years to develop, is it any surprise that things would start to break down on the development end?  Honestly, it isn't.