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).

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.

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 game 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.