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.

[Geno]

So, it seems Sony just announced that they're phasing out physical discs for new releases starting in 2028. More and more, it seems like media companies are trying to end the concept of "ownership" for consumers to make way for more subscription-based services. We'll see how the market reacts to this announcement and how it affects Sony's bottom line because that may be the only way to reverse this decision.

[Dark Jaguar]

While it's true that digital purchases have outsold physical purchases for many years now, it does come across as a bit of a death knell.  Read my above post for more details on just what I think of all this in general.

GOG seems to be about the only place we can reliably get DRM free installers to keep as backups any more.  Even 3DS/Switch/Switch 2 games are on a short clock before the storage fails completely.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I haven't tested my Switch games, I wonder if any are dead.  I did test a bunch of my 3DS games earlier this year, and one of the ones I tested won't boot.  I put homebrew on my N3DS finally to try to see if homebrew fixer tools could help, but sadly after leaving it running for quite a while all I managed was to get the OS icon to load again.  The game itself still won't run.  Bah... maybe I'll try again but it seems hopelessly stuck. :bummed:

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.

Oh yeah, that insanely awful and stupid bill... I really hope that it fails to pass because it's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard, and it definitely won't do anything to accomplish its supposed goal.  It's as you say, all it would do is allow more tracking, surveillance, and state-sponsored punishment of people engaging in wrongthink (as per what Big Brother wants!).

[A Black Falcon]

But yeah, I know I have said it before, but I hate AI, I really really do... what it's doing to destroy home computing is just the latest example of how bad it is, but the serious environmental consequences of the data center buildout are also a serious problem -- massive water pollution, natural gas pollution from the generators, and more.

[Geno]

AI ruins everything.



EDIT: The embedded video doesn't seem to be working, so here's the link:
https://youtube.com/shorts/1jE8glvLBls?s...yTez-w6TEU

[Dark Jaguar]

Yeah, I haven't tested my Switch games, I wonder if any are dead.  I did test a bunch of my 3DS games earlier this year, and one of the ones I tested won't boot.  I put homebrew on my N3DS finally to try to see if homebrew fixer tools could help, but sadly after leaving it running for quite a while all I managed was to get the OS icon to load again.  The game itself still won't run.  Bah... maybe I'll try again but it seems hopelessly stuck. :bummed:

Oh yeah, that insanely awful and stupid bill... I really hope that it fails to pass because it's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard, and it definitely won't do anything to accomplish its supposed goal.  It's as you say, all it would do is allow more tracking, surveillance, and state-sponsored punishment of people engaging in wrongthink (as per what Big Brother wants!).

For everyone else, I'd go ahead and hack your 3DS as soon as possible if you haven't already.  There's no reason at this point not to, now that online services are concluded.
https://3ds.hacks.guide/
In your case ABF, it looks like you've already done so.  Use the godmode file manager application to rip all your 3DS carts.  Be sure to do a full rip to catch your save files as well.  I've done this for my entire DS and 3DS game collection.  Both are stored on my devices as well as on my PC at this point.  At this point, it's the only way to really preserve our games.  Rip and copy and archive, until we realize it's never done.  I've also got a little tool for ripping Gameboy/Color/Advance games and their save files, but those devices use a mixture of MASK ROM chips and low capacity early flash chips that had much longer durability.

It's still maddening that this bill has led to the ESA declaring all personally hosted game servers "illegal".  Not that they have any power to make that law, but that being their position is total incompetence.

[Dark Jaguar]

vAI ruins everything.



EDIT: The embedded video doesn't seem to be working, so here's the link:
https://youtube.com/shorts/1jE8glvLBls?s...yTez-w6TEU

It's not just that LLM "AI" is ruining everything in a moral and environmental sense, it's fundamentally incompetent in a way we'd never accept from human employees, and that incompetence is baked into the technology on a fundamental level.  If none of you are familiar with Ars Technica, I'd recommend checking it out.  They're a very reliable science and technology news site.  I'd been following deep learning technology for a long while there, but now, numerous studies are showing where deep learning fails, and it all has to do with it being applied to areas outside what it's capable of.  It should never have been made into a chatbot.  Those chatbots are being sold as something they are not.  What they are is convincing statistical word pickers.  Deep learning itself is basically that, a system that can, through exposure to large data sets, find correlations within those data sets.  That's it.  That's the entirety of what it does.  I'm skimming over the details, the layering for example, roughly based on some aspects of our own neurology.  However, it's a far cry from the whole picture of human neurology, and our understanding of our own minds is a far cry from anything close to complete in the first place.  It's a shard and they're selling it as the whole thing.

This deep learning system is very capable at THAT specific task.  If you want to know statistical correlations, it's great.  It works fine at weather modelling and forecasting.  It's great at protein folding.  It can even be relied on to mutate and iterate engineering solutions within a 3D modeled world towards some preprogrammed tasks.  Exactly none of these use a chatbot at any point.  No one sits down and prompts it "what's the weather going to be like tomorrow in Santa Fe?".  No, it's very explicitly programmed, with outputs in a traditional form, numbers in specific boxes in a large typical UI.  No one is having a conversation with the deep learning model in any fashion in either input or output when it's used like this.

I stress that because that's where it fails.  It doesn't understand words.  I need everyone reading this to understand that, or nothing else of this tale will make sense.  Marley isn't even dead.  Knock all you like but no one's ever been there to answer.  It's statistical correlation.  When these models are fed massive amounts of written data, it's not discovering the definitions of words or anything remotely close to it.  It's discovering the statistical likelihood of words appearing next to other words.  It has no idea what the words mean, or the sentences, or the intentions, or anything else.  Now, that statistical word analysis was interesting when I first read about it, but I had no idea they were going to try and flip it around to GENERATE text.  The moment they did that, the disaster happened.  So, they tied in certain bespoke programmatic elements into the chatbots, so they could do things if certain chat values reached a threshold.  Keep in mind this isn't like older voice recognition tech recognizing a key word or phrase that's explicitly tied to a command, like turning on a light.  It's not even as reliable as old parser based adventure games where you "get flask".  At least there, once you know the right words, it'll reliably do the thing you told it to do every single time.  Here?  It's a statistical averaging and it's not looking for key words so much as key "weights", and since it's taking in the entire conversation up to that point, as well as a training set that's constantly in flux, this means unreliable output.  It also means, since it's only doing things statistically without any idea of what the words mean, it can't "verify" anything.  In fact, if you ask for a source, again, it's only spitting out a statistically likely response, and it may well give you a hyperlink but what's IN that linked page may well not match what it's saying by any description.  When you understand what it's doing, you understand why not only does the tech "hallucinate", but that the hallucinations are unavoidable.  It's hard to even call them hallucinations, because it never understood what the words meant in the first place.  This isn't Data from Star Trek.  This isn't even HAL, or the computer from Wargames.  This is something far more primitive than those 80's fiction AIs.

If you still believe there's ANY level of understanding in these chat bots at all, because they understood and explained back to you an analogy you made one time, keep in mind the sheer volume of the data set they've been fed.  They're being fed everything humanity has ever written down.  All of it.  Every combination of words we've ever thought to record.  Your original thought, your unique analogy, is very likely not nearly so unique as you believed.  Recently, I've gotten into the Japanese art of repair, kintsugi.  I could bore you with the philosophical details of how it embraces the damage and highlights it as part of the history, but you already know that.  EVERYONE "recently got into the Japanese art of repair".  It's the "stand alone complex", where we all come to the same idea independently but roughly at the same time, because the social structure around us was primed for that particular thought chain to arise.  (I suspect it has to do with everyone trying to save money and reuse what they already have, in an environment where we all feel a bit damaged.)  When you have a conversation with the chatbot, it's pulling from numerous forum and social media conversations, with programmed weighting towards stuff tagged as "agreeable" and away from comments tagged "argumentative".  That's the other key part.  The only reason it has a way to weight towards or away from different "tones" is because the process of adding in data involved, at first, "tone tagging" individual parts of the data sets.  Does anyone remember Google's deep dream, and how they got a lot of people to volunteer to tag a seemingly endless amount of images based on what's in it?  Things like "dog", "balloon", and so on?  We all found out just how many pictures of dogs people were taking around the world.  Without those tags, image recognition wouldn't have ever worked.  It needed a person, at some point, to say "this image contains a dog", and to be provided a sufficient number of dog tags (I will not apologize for art), that it could find the statistical connection between all those images and what part counted as "dog" and what part could be disregarded as "undog".  But, it never really understood what a dog was.  This is why image recognition can falter too.  These age checkers will fail and determine a kid is an adult or an adult is a kid because the initial data sets, among other things, are based on pictures of predominately white people, and of that, of a certain sub set of more marketable appearances.  Ads.  I'm saying the majority of images of people are from ads, and the majority of those are made with western sensibilities in mind, and western racism is baked into that.  

It's a classic case of misapplied technology.  So, why are they pushing THIS use of it, instead of any of the other legitimate use cases?  It's because frankly it's the only one even remotely marketable.  The other use cases are limited to highly specialized fields, where statistical analysis is helpful and there are particular programmers who know how to design an appropriate UI to very exactly design how the model should interpret input and provide output, without any sort of chatbot portion whatsoever.  While there IS a market for that, it's a market of a very few agencies and research groups.  They can't sell it to the public at large.  The chatbot changed all that.  It was JUST convincing enough they finally found a way to market it to the public.  They stand to make billions.  Rest assured, by "they" I mean the tech CEOs selling the tech in the first place, not the CEOs outside the field buying it.  They stand to lose, and currently seem to be experiencing buyer's remorse as they rehire the employees they were told they could fire by utilizing the tech.  Tech CEOs will NOT ever admit this, because you can't convince someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.  I think it's important to realize that the game industry was ALREADY in serious trouble BEFORE the advent of these LLM generators, but after?  It's no wonder we're seeing the collapse right now all around us.  You take a system where companies were already devouring each other en masse, where the biggest ones were so top-heavy that they had the thinnest possible profit margins and could only justify supporting "guaranteed hits" (an impossibility when it comes to art I'll add, nothing's a guarantee), and where investors are so thoroughly motivated by buying low and selling high, completely ignoring the dividends of steady basic profitability, and THEN you take away the stability of hardware prices, while simultaneously getting those same companies to deeply invest in that sunk cost of LLM?  It's the movie "Perfect Storm", that put the phrase "perfect storm" in our vocabulary, but wasn't a particularly memorable movie outside of that.  Oh you probably forgot about that didn't you?

Anyway, this is why they can't seem to crack the 90% "true statement" barrier, a failure rate high enough that no one would hire you if you reported THAT percentage, and why additional work "vetting" every single bit of output of these things needs to be done, to ensure both that no copyright violations occurred, nothing illegal was made, and that the statements of fact are truthful.  This vetting MUST be done by a human to mean anything.  We know this because now that so much of these generative tools is being posted online, the models are now eating themselves, incestuously enhancing all the flaws in their kit.  This also happens in long term conversation with one.  Even when weighted to be more disagreeable, eventually every single one of these chatbots begins an inward spiral reinforcing everything the user has said.  It should be noticed that further studies show that a chatbot's reported "reasoning" for why it made a decision is also unreliable.  It doesn't know, but it is feeding off of speculation written elsewhere online and posting THAT as it's own reasoning.

I've painted a dire picture, and of course, that's the other half of this.  Art outside of writing.  This suffers many of the same flaws, but no one's prescribing conscious understanding and intent on the artistic side of their output.  I suppose it's a bit easier to see that uncanny veneer over everything it outputs.  All the impossible angles, the irrational position of cameras, the nonexistent bugs and tools, that are the hallmark of deepfake videos we see online now.  We've found a number of common "sub genres" of deep fakes too.  The most popular without a doubt are animal videos.  The number of times people have had to tell grandma that no, that dancing cat isn't real... well it's worrying.  After that, there's the genre of "fat people falling over and breaking things".  Well, all kinds of other hateful stuff too, with whatever race you hate most certainly having a lot of deepfakes of fake representatives doing something shameful, but "fat people will destroy everything we've ever built with their sheer bulk" seems to be the most popular among them.  It's usually some fat person wobbling and falling over shattering something like an improbably glass bridge and sending everyone plummeting to their doom, where cameras are already set up in advance for some reason... and then a dog rescues a baby with unnatural motion.  Generic music cue.

Anyway, the rest are all valid, but I thought I'd point out that we shouldn't even grant that the tech works as advertised.  It doesn't.  Even at it's current trajectory, it's not poised to ever be more at base than what it is, an unreliable writer and only capable of making generic slop for the tic tacs videos.  Give me a break!  Oh wait that's kit kat.

[Geno]

Yeah, you pretty much nailed it. LLMs don't understand speech, images, or... anything (other than pattern recognition). I remember discussing this with some coworkers before, and one of my gripes is that AI has made some software less reliable. A calculator, for instance, will spit out accurate information pretty close to 100% of the time. Nothing fancy, just an ordinary calculator. But AI? It may get most basic math equations right (again, statistical probability will likely steer it in the right direction), but it's significantly more likely to get the answer wrong, especially if it's a more complex equation. And that's just math, which is the least abstract thing in our entire universe. For any task with the tiniest amount of subjectivity or requiring judgment, AI is ill-suited to the task (incompetent on a level unacceptable for human employees, as you stated). Humans can, in fact, create airtight programming code that works as it should 100% of the time (or very close). The more complex the code, the more likely there are to be bugs, and the more debugging and revising of the code may be necessary. AI cannot replicate that, though. It can do the task more quickly, perhaps, but with far less accuracy and without the discernment to determine where things have gone wrong when things do inevitably go wrong and how to fix those issues in a way that doesn't create more or bigger issues.

And yeah, the obsession with pushing chatbots (or "AI assistants") over the last four years has been... corrosive. People online already lack information literacy skills and tend to believe whatever nonsense they hear on the internet. For some reason, people are even less likely to verify misinformation when it comes from a robot than from a human. In extreme cases, there have been cases of AI psychosis. Richard Dawkins recently posted a series of tweets (or X posts, or whatever they're called now) in which he insists that Claude has developed sentience. Some people are referring to his recent psychosis as "The Claude Delusion."

The pollution sucks, too.

[A Black Falcon]

To briefly touch on what Microsoft's final decision was, it's to fire ~1600 people now and about as many more over the course of the year and spin off four or five studios, while not closing any.  "Not closing any" may sound good at first, but once you get to details like how a quarter of Obsidian's staff were fired or how id was gutted and lost at least half of their staff, you see serious cutbacks.  It's a very disappointing decision to say the least.

But don't worry!  For the studios not closed, the new, inexperienced, lower-paid staff they will hire in a year or two when teams expand again surely will do just as well as the experienced people they are firing now, right?  That's definitely how that works. :S


Meanwhile, Nintendo decided to join the party by announcing that the mobile game Mario Kart Tour is going to shut down in a few months.  Even though the game is mostly a single player game. there won't be a single player mode patch released; it's going to be made into lost media.  Now I think that MK Tour is a pretty awful "game", if you call it that with how limited control is, but that even Nintendo treats cellphone games like burnable trash really is disappointing.

[A Black Falcon]

id's whole engine team was fired and MS apparently wants them to switch to Unreal.  ... And yeah that's the last straw, that's heresy of the first order!  id and epic have been rivals since 1990, and id's specialty are their great game engines.  Getting rid of that for no reason is insanely stupid.

[Dark Jaguar]

Id's engine is highly optimized and and the newest IdTech can run on much weaker hardware than the newest Unreal.  To see them lose fully half of what makes their games so special... and of course they waited until the DAY that the new expansion for Doom Dark Ages released to announce that.  Because, hey, why actually give employees ample time to prepare for such a devastating change in their lives?

XBox is through.  If anyone ever trusts them again, it'll be too soon.  It's no wonder there's recurring rumors they intend to divest XBox off into it's own distinct subsidiary company.

Sony by comparison are killing off physical media (which was already the path the industry was going to, with a number of games and DLC having no physical version already) and are killing off a number of projects and companies, namely Bungie, as well as ending PC ports of their first party games.  While Sony isn't in as bad a place as MS, neither one are doing particularly well right now.  With rumors stating the upcoming PS6 is going to be priced north of a grand, and that the next XBox, whatever it's cost, is basically going to be a PC in every sense, I'm not sure either one is going to sell particularly well with the economy in the state it's in right now.

Nintendo, even with their own price hikes, and a rather disappointing Metroid Prime 4, still seem positioned far better than the alternative consoles.  Their in-house teams are still intact, and they've been focusing on standard one and done games all this time rather than live service games.  The closest they come to "live service" anything is Splatoon, but even then that's not due to micro-transactions but a steady drip of rotating weekly content, which eventually comes to an end while leaving the online functionality intact for a while.  Of course, they are not without sin.  They FOMO the existence of entire games, like Super Mario 35, and well... requiring you to hand over your personal phone number just to use their online service is a step too far.  I mean some people don't have personal phone numbers.  Yes, even today.  Some people don't have banking either, or internet access.

But, again, price hikes, and even the Steamdeck is now out of reach for a lot of people.  It's better for many to just buy the cheapest laptop they can find and play whatever they can actually run on the thing outside of some office suite for school and office work.

Anyway (what do you mean anyway?!), it's now looking like Konami was only the first to engage in such a dramatic purge.  Capcom, for their part, didn't want to go that route and have completely changed their business model to one that's sustainable, but only just barely.  Remember they RUSHED a glitchy mess of a Monster Hunter to PC in order to fulfill their "10 years of increased profits" promise to their investors.  And, well they can't do that forever.  At some point, we need to look at the underlying cause of all of this... investor expectations.  They're unsustainable for ANY corporation.  It's literally impossible for any company to report increased profits every single year forever.  That's not how money works.

[Geno]

Not just increased profits, but the rate of increase must also continue to increase! Totally sustainable!

[Dark Jaguar]

Not just increased profits, but the rate of increase must also continue to increase! Totally sustainable!

I've made this comparison before, but the only thing in nature that has unchecked endless growth year after year is cancer, and they both have the same effect on the body sustaining it.

[Geno]

Eventually, the cancer will stop growing because it kills its host. Same thing with unfettered capitalism, I suppose.

[Dark Jaguar]

Exactly, and it keeps killing the "host" that is the companies trying to please shareholders in the short term with no regard for the long term.  Shareholder culture itself needs to change rather dramatically as well.  They're all too bullish, seeking immediate "buy low sell high" returns, and they need to get more bearish, concerned with long term dividends, which only requires that a company stay profitable, and doesn't require eternal growth.