Dec 16

Dec 16 Alex Green Posits 2023 Is The Last Great Year For Games | Winter Spectacular 2023

We had it all this year. Players feasted on a gorgeous buffet of games. Like any great buffet, it had variety and quality across the board, a delectable range of puzzlers, platformers, tentpole AAA joints of beef mixed with gorgeous indie treats. Shame all the chefs got kicked to the curb after serving up.

Writing my regular Update Patch column this year felt tiring. Those who have read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 will be aware of the phrase “So it goes”, a term used in the book after any death is mentioned, whether it be the sudden death of a stranger, the loss of Billy Pilgrim’s wife or the murder of millions in war. The phrase is Vonnegut to a tee, the exhaustion of the world reflected eloquently, a familiar refrain that is weary of the familiar. Whilst 2023 was a great year for video games, the increasingly frustrating negative stories in the gaming industry make it feel like the last triumphant burst from an industry heading in a grim direction. With every story of layoffs and closures the same familiar refrain kept rearing its head. So it goes.

Oh did we mention all the Unity layoffs… yeah… that sucked too.

By October, over 6,000 people lost their jobs in the gaming industry. Whether it be smaller independent companies or larger AAA studios, no one was immune and job security in the industry sits at a minimum. Aftermath reported Amazon Games layed off 180 in a “refocusing effort” in the week I began writing this. While Epic Games layed off 830 people with CEO Tim Sweeney citing the need for “financial sustainability” and Sega’s cancellation of Hyenas, due to a need for “structural reform in (its) European bases”, led to job losses at studio Creative Assembly. So it goes.

Endlessly through the year, people across the world lost jobs in a famously difficult industry to find secure employment, with the job losses accompanied by little more than curt press releases and investor statements, saying “This is will be good for the company”. All this while the industry enjoys record revenues across all sectors with Statista reporting a projected worldwide revenue of over $400bn. None of this has been exemplified better than the Embracer Group which reported a reduction of “around 900 people” since the start of the company’s “restructuring program”. This included the closure of 30-year-old Volition Studios, while the conglomerate’s planned uses of numerous licences, including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and more, remains unclear. The long-dormant cult series Timesplitters certainly isn’t in a good place given studio Free Radical Design may not be long for this world according to VGC, after it was founded for the express reason to revive the series. Don’t worry though. As Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors explained to investors, these losses were “difficult decisions” and that “It’s never easy to part ways with talented individuals”. So it goes.

Of course, this is even more galling when independent companies have been bought en masse by the parent companies that are now shuttering them. Corporate consolidation has been at an all-time high in the industry over the last few years and all at the expense of workers. The aforementioned Embracer has sown the seeds of its own ghastly 2023 when it embarked on a buying spree so vast they have their own Wikipedia page.

Sony purchased Bungie for $3.6bn last year and both suffered when Bungie laid off 100 people in October 2023. However, no company is more synonymous with mergers than Microsoft, particularly with its never-ending saga with Activision Blizzard King this year. The story dominated the U.S. courts, with the U.K. able to get some concessions to force Microsoft to sell cloud gaming rights of ABK games to Ubisoft to get the deal through. Above all else though, the deal represented a low point for industry discourse in which people debated the merits of the deal in ridiculously simplistic terms. The “for” camp seems mainly excited for Activision to possibly make games other than Call of Duty. The “against'' camp decided to focus on just Call of Duty as though it's the arbiter of all things, as seen in the FTC’s arguments in court.

I feel like I am going to have stress nightmares where I wake up and ABK/Microsoft news stories are just starting again.

Everyone’s making moves, and aren’t expected to slow down going forward. Consolidated industries are often poor, despite some outliers. A 2018 study of U.S. industries found three quarters had consolidated over the two decades prior, with the paper in section 2 detailing how “lack of competition may allow remaining industry incumbents to enjoy wider profit margins by setting higher prices relative to production costs”. For comparison, in another entertainment industry, the blockbuster film industry is still suffering the consequences with continued mergers and acquisitions being the name of the game for companies like Disney and Warner Bros., all while producing some of their worst creative output in years with undercooked films like The Marvels and The Flash wasting promising newcomers and conjuring pointless bland nostalgia all in favour of elements that sell on a spreadsheet.

For the record I loved this game when it was bad.

All this as the biggest companies chase trends that look to benefit very few players or developers. Sony’s confused strategy to develop 12 live service games to crowd their own games out of an already oversaturated market is baffling, and whilst the company may be toning this down to six games by FY25 according to VGC, it can’t be a good sign.

Accessibility of games continued to be mixed with a lack of real industry standards resulting in a lack of reliability for players who need and want these options. All this without discussing Microsoft's partnership on AI. AI is a field exciting and useful for scientific development and a field intrinsic to great games such as Left 4 Dead and Alien: Isolation. but also a field hurting artistic achievement, as tech bros fawn over incohesive and derivative AI art the same way a parent praises a 4-year-old for drawing a rainbow with colours in the wrong order and the rainbow is a line.

To top off this cake, preservation concerns are at an all-time high. Whilst organisations like the Embracer Group’s Games Archive and others exist, concerns remain about the future-proofing of games and what we’ve already lost. A damning report in July this year found that 87% of games are “critically endangered” (referring to games not immediately available and only through piracy, archives and rare markets). In March, Nintendo closed the Wii U and 3DS stores, putting at risk an estimated 1000 digital games. VGC has also estimated that about 200 games will be lost when the Xbox 360 marketplace closes next year. This active erasure of culture and work not only devalues the medium as an art form, it devalues those who depend on credits in these games to add to their CVs, to get them the next job. Another obstacle in an industry full of them.

You may read this and think I am a miserable bastard who sits in the King's Arms at 6 am with a lager and complains about the good old days. First, you're wrong. I'm drinking an ale. Secondly, there are ways the industry has improved. The fact there is even discussion about accessibility nowadays is great. Games now have the range to reach more people than ever before. Indies still struggle but get increasing recognition as a pool of innovation and genre-bending ideas, even if some can't define an indie correctly. We are (mostly) beyond the days when gaming was viewed as a ridiculous waste of time and has respect as an art form. When it comes to the industry though, I fail to see how anyone can see the news cycle of 2023 and feel good about the future of games.

2023 feels like a last roar of quality from an industry discarding the artists, embracing profits over people and treating players purely as consumers, all leading to an industry built on disrespect that could ward off loyal players and in the long-term, lead to industry decline. So it goes.