The Games Industry is in Serious Trouble

[A Black Falcon]

First, on the Microsoft front, a massive wave of studio closures or spinoffs is expected next week.  It may be the largest mass firing and closure in gaming history.  A bunch of the massive number of studios MS bought in the last decade will either be shut down or spun off, as costs keep going up out of control and game sales numbers consistently fail to meet the very high expectations necessary to make money given the high costs.  Additionally, MS announced yet another Xbox price increase for later this year.  The Xbox Series X I bought for $500 back when it released will now cost $800 thanks to the AI price bubble, a bubble MS is a major player in.

So, this is an opening for Sony, right?  Well... no.  First, they fired a lot of people at Bungie, a studio they bought recently, because of the same reasons as Microsoft.  Also, Sony just announced that they are ending all disc production for Playstation consoles in January 2028, and are shutting down the PS3 and PS Vita online stores in mid 2027.  Sony has also significantly increased the cost of the PS5 console, just like Microsoft, due to the same AI price problems.

What about PC gaming?  Well, that's suffering the worst from the RAM and mass storage price increases.  PC gaming was in good shape and getting even better last year, but now things are looking dire as people significantly delay upgrades and go with less RAM and storage than they would have a year ago or more.  I sure wish I'd built a new computer early last year, it was so dumb that I didn't...   I did upgrade my RAM to 64GB a year ago, but my computer is over 9 years old, it's definitely not DDR5 RAM.  Even so the cost of the RAM I got has gone up but not by as much as DDR5 has.

So yeah, very bad news from all of the other candidates.  But what about Nintendo?  Their RAM and storage costs have gone up significantly as well, but so far they haven't increased prices.  They definitely will have to do so eventually, though, no way will Nintendo eat the whole cost of their surely massive RAM and SSD price increase.

Meanwhile, console adoption numbers have been stalled for years, PC gaming is on the rocks due to AI, where does gaming go from here?  Some are making dire predictions of home computing dying in favor of streaming only, which isn't impossible but I sure hope we all do everything possible to keep that from happening...

[Dark Jaguar]

One note, Nintendo HAVE increased prices.

https://www.nintendo.com/us/whatsnew/pri...-2-system/

Keep in mind that they were stockpiling components in the first place for the initial launch of this relatively recent system, and the system launched at a price estimated to be higher than Nintendo wanted to release initially.  While that's not technically a price hike, the launch price was definitely set with the increase of component costs in mind.  Further, Nintendo have stated they have no intention of selling their consoles at a loss.  Expect more hikes down the line.

This also won't be the last hike, for any of them.

Related to this, the Steamdeck's price jumped up dramatically too, and their upcoming Steamcube thingy is far higher than Steam would have liked.  That one's from official statements.  That's all still in the PC sphere of things, but it's representative of the whole.  Both MS and Apple are jacking up their laptop and tablet prices as well.

Cell phone prices have also been affected.

Yes, there's other factors.  Trump's tariffs were a horrible mistake, and his elective wars (plural)  even worse ones, and they've had their effects.  There's also still lingering effects from the Covid lockdowns around the world.

Meanwhile, the Neo Geo AES+ hasn't been affected by component shortages at all.  The ridiculous obsession with using deep learning as an ineffective chatbot, writer, and "artist" didn't touch components THAT old, fortunately.  It's a little funny to think that this time around, the cheapest most economical gaming console is the Neo Geo of all things.  Heck the thing's selling shockingly well, and no signs that they're ceasing preorders so apparently they're ready to produce at scale?  Well, that remains to be seen I suppose, but if so, and with promises they're actually producing NEW games for the old hardware, it's a shockingly viable alternative to what the rest of the game industry is going through.

But, not THE most viable.  Aim low, get a low specced system using, as Gunpei would have put it, "withered hardware", and you got yourself a solid indie and retro gaming box.  I feel like a lot of people are just... NOT going to upgrade because they simply can't afford to.  I have no idea if Sony are going to delay the PS6 or not, but I wouldn't be shocked if they released it sooner and then went on to dramatically underwhelming sales.  We'd already seen such sharp diminishing returns the past few generations.  Couple that with the skyrocketing costs of not just consoles... but EVERYTHING... and you get people who may just be sick of the hardware upgrade cycle.  What's the point any more?  Smoke clouds that look a bit different but not objectively better than the last gen's smoke clouds?  People may do what they often do in times of need, opt for longer lasting purchases, while working with neighbors to help make ends meet.

I'm getting political, but I'm sorry, this thread kind of demands it.  Touching on that, the ESA went on record in front of a group of representatives to argue that ALL privately hosted game servers are "illegal", in reference to MINECRAFT, which I might add specifically promotes hosting your own servers and even provides a downloadable package to facilitate that... on the JAVA edition at least.  That's a horrible thing to put out there, the notion that self-hosting things is in and of itself an illegal use of software, even when the developer explicitly encourages this very thing.

Alright, WHY were they doing this?  Well, congress is set to pass one of the worst acts I've ever seen.  It is named something about protecting kids, so it's definitely going to pass without fail as an unavoidable canon event.  This is because in all the grand history of the world, there has never been a single politician who has ever voted AGAINST any act that claims to be "for the children".  It's an act that will effectively require every single online site, yes, including THIS forum we're talking on right now (I've brought this up before, but now web forums are explicitly mentioned in testimony), to verify the identity of every single user on it, because some of them might be kids, and those kids might be exposed to harmful content.  That's the excuse on paper.  But, the reality is they just want to track dissidents.  Why do I suspect this?  Because of a similar bill, one requiring all precharged cell phone purchases to require ID.  These are also called "burner phones".  What was the reasoning behind THAT one?  They COULD have argued it's to stop drug cartels, or communication of human traffickers, but instead the argument was to "stop terrorism".  It was the least likely of all scenarios, sounding like it was just snatched out of a grab bag of excuses.  In that case, of course, anyone using a burner phone to protect themselves while they find a way to escape an abusive partner (or for neighborhood watch groups trying to evade ICE), will no longer have this option.

Going back to the reveal all our identities to protect children thing... it won't.  Before, when it was JUST the porn sites, it didn't really affect me, but it still seemed ridiculous because predators can always just go where the kids are, Roblox.  Granted, the "are you old enough?" click through was always a bit of a "gate to a fenceless sandbox" scenario, but it was legally still a way for such sites to protect themselves.  More to the point, it was the job of parents and educators to prepare kids for the risks of that sort of content online, and to put passlist tools in place to control access to certain content if they deemed it necessary.  Hate speech seems the bigger risk to me.

But, now they've rolled up all my criticisms for an even stronger version of this, the nationwide ban.  Whether it's roblox or The Twitcher or wombo.com itself, the very beating heart of the internet, ALL of them will require ID.  It functionally makes the internet unusuable for all kids of all ages.  It's an overreach of ridiculous proportions, and of course, it's using unreliable "AI" tools to make it work.  I've recently been VERY sternly informed in a way that made me rather ashamed of myself that there are in fact adults of certain physical builds who routinely fail face checks of this sort, forcing them to ALWAYS use the photo ID method.  Taking this as a learning experience, I realized that this is going to affect far more people now that there's apparently a study showing that generation Zoomer kids are aging a lot faster than previous generations.  This is likely due to the obvious, stress, but it could also be unknown health factors now that so many government agencies tasked with checking for those environmental factors have been shuttered.  So, kids may PASS these face checkers, rendering the check pointless from both ends.

But it's still bad, because it doesn't even protect kids from predators.  Kids will still be exposed to hate speech, because they'll go where they're able to, and they will still run into predators online, because THEY will go where the kids go.  Further, and I can't believe I have to spell this out, but what this bill does is provide the identities, photos, and IP addresses of every single child online to complete strangers working in giant corporations.  The corporations if nothing else will absolutely be selling this data to data brokers, and there is a statistical certainty that there are predators working at these gigantic worldwide corporations who will use access to this information to abuse kids.  We know this because police, when given access to FLOCK networks, have used it to abuse kids.  Who watches the watchmen?  Nobody, in this case.  Police at least have SOME oversight, but these corporations effectively have NONE!  The best we get are "assurances", and that's before we get into one critical reality... some of these companies have ALREADY been hacked, and that personally identifiable data already been released.  Talk with Discord, who've been forced to comply with EU laws regarding this.

Back to Minecraft and Microsoft.  The ESA's lawyers threw the very concept of private servers out the window because they were being grilled about how one politician or another "discovered" that there are private Minecraft servers modded with racist and/or sexual content.  (How on earth do you make Minecraft sexy?  Well, apparently they found a way.)  So, they just went scorched earth and declared not only are those servers COMPLETELY outside of Microsoft or Mojhang's control (which was ENOUGH, that was all the argument they needed to make), but that really, they're breaking the law, and private servers are unauthorized (they are authorized, they provide the tools on their own site) and therefor illegal (we didn't need their permission in the first place, there are no clauses declaring private servers against their terms of service, again because they explicitly encourage it).

I know I went on a LOOONG journey to make my point there, but the gaming industry is in even more dire straits than you may have realized.