Caveat - 18-30 white dudes. That part is important, LATAM types and Chinese bugmen getting into the hobby has not been fantastic.
I saw tons of minorities coming up - but I mainly played Fighting Games so your Mileage May Vary (TM).
I don't quite believe this. It's simple as all fuck to understand what the majority of a market wants these days based on what they buy, what they don't, what they talk about, etc. It isn't that they don't get it or can't find people to do it to a decent capacity but that they don't want to.
It's pretty simple.
Say you're a young and passionate developer who really wants to make a certain type of game. A game that was really important to you but you don't see much anymore. Using a real world example - let's say you want to make a game that was weird, quirky, and cool like Earthbound was. The problem is - no one wants to make that game (Nintendo, the studio that made it, doesn't even want to translate some of the titles). But you have passion and drive and want to see it happen - you have two options.
1) Try to join an existing studio (with no practical experience) working on whatever garbage they're working on and try and work up the ranks until you're some level of director and can try to make a suggestion about <YOUR GAME>. Possibly Studio wants to make <YOUR GAME> but even if they do - they're going to own the IP and all of the profits.
Chances are you'll never get hired and if you get hired, chances are you'll never get to make your game. Even if you do, you're just making a great game for some other studio to own and whore out as they see fit.
2) The game you want to make isn't that complicated - literally teach yourself to code, get some help on twitter/reddit/whatever when needed, put together a demo and see if it gets kickstarted. If it does - work on it for a year or two and self publish - it does really well and you become a wealthy celebrity near overnight.
You do all the work, you reap all the rewards.
The main issue is that AAA can't stop #2 from happening - it isn't about "let's make the games they want" it's about "what do we provide as a studio that would attract the people who want to make the games". It used to be that games were so massive, so complicated, so mysterious that you
had to work for a studio to have a chance at making them. You had to spend years working on Super Monkey Ball over at Sega before you could pitch them Yakuza. You had to spend years working on Armored Core before you could go "Hey I've got this Demon Souls idea" and so on. Now you can just go ahead and make your Undertale (the example above), Stardew Valley, and so on directly and don't need a studio at any point.
Even if you want to make a really big and ambitious game - there's nothing stopping you from starting your own studio (aka Larian) and having a bunch of employees and still making the game you want without "big studio interference".
It's a massive problem for studios because someone like "that" is required in most leadership roles at successful companies. It's where your Todd Howards, Jade Raymonds, Randy Pitchfords, Miyamotos, Miyazakis, Romeros, Carmacks, etc all came from - and now there's no one to replace them with. This is causing huge issues downstream where very bad decisions are being made at the highest levels (aka really terrible licensed games, poor choices in consultants, poor release decisions, etc) and causing real damage to studios.
Bioware is almost certainly going to die, Arkane is dying, Capcom nearly died, SquareEnix nearly died, Ubisoft is dying and so on and so forth. The whole landscape is a nightmare because talented devs are able to strike out on their own and AAA hasn't found an answer (and likely won't find one, but...) to the problem.
