I heard on a podcast that there is some concern that the amount of gaming industry job losses in 2024 is making people question if this is the second crash.
My opinion is the crash has been slowly happening for a while, but I'll stick to the crash of 2024 theory for this post. I think this is more a result of over hiring post COVID, expecting the same growth they saw during lockdown, than a failure of wokeshit, business models, etc.
I remember being back in middle school when Acclaim went under, and that was 20 years ago, and 20 years after the big Atari crash. That's how long it's been, really.
There was
kind of a crash around the late 1990s/early 2000s when a bunch of the PC side of the industry companies went under/merged out of existence (connected to the dot-com bubble/rising costs of development)—stuff like Maxis, Brøderbund, Sierra, and others (and games ended up in weird places; TJMaxx and Sam's Club, among others)...but most parts of the industry continued unaffected.
It should be noted that the Atari crash is way overhyped to the point of legend. There's the whole "E.T. caused people not to want to play video games anymore until NINTENDO came in to save the day!" narrative that has been around since at least the early 2000s, but the reality was just a bubble that popped and was enough to start bouncing back anyway, especially once supply and demand issues had been resolved.
The investor panic at Warner Communications probably did more damage to the industry than anything else, really, and that was tied to Mattel and Coleco (both publicly traded).
The players now include Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and EA. Embracer Group is probably screwed just on sheer overexpansion, but EA's stock is twice as valuable as it was pre-2008 (unadjusted for inflation), Nintendo is very insulated and sitting on a lot of money, Microsoft is sitting on a lot of money, and there's a big enough indie market that even if all of these companies lost billions overnight you'd never notice.
