I've read the whole article. Twice. Considering where I'm posting this, it shouldn't surprise me how detached from reality and biased Wikipedia can get, but here I am, absolutely stunned at the fact that a bunch of retards are trying to tell me that the sky is, in fact, green. I can understand obfuscating things related to DEI bullshit and all that jazz, since there's an ideological factor involved, but I'm completely lost about why the fuck they try to blame the consequences of two decades of absolute incompetence and a completely rotten business model for a market that basically prints money on
purely socioeconomic factors bad luck and global events outside of their control. Even if we take this absolutely deranged headcanon at face value, there isn't a single mention about how there's an overwhelming negative reception about the majority of products the industry churns out; the hows and whys are irrelevant, the only thing that matters here is that the consumers simply aren't buying the product, and that publishers are adamant about forcing their product and worse, their business model to an unwilling audience. If this was about refrigerators or pencils there would be no pussy-footing around this fact. For people so ideologically opposed to capitalism on average, they write like sweaty bean-counters making up excuses to shareholders for the next quarterly report.
I'm sure that COVID didn't help matters at all (even if this was one of the few industries where money went up instead of down), but if the industry was healthy and had a competent foundation a sudden but brief boost to numbers shouldn't result in such a record-breaking blow to their whole operation. For the life of me I can't understand how the Ukraine war plays a factor on this since by the article's own admission the layoffs are mainly an American/European thing and the Russian/Ukrainian industry is a drop in the ocean. The only examples given are literally who Russian/Ukrainian studios that are doing OK and had no layoffs, but I guess they couldn't help malding at Russian Man Bad. (For some unexplained reason, the Palestinian conflict seems to have no effect on the mystery of the missing gamer money.)
How the fuck is this related to a mostly American problem is beyond me, but I guess by Wikipedia's standards, this was more important to mention than the fact that regular people just think modern AAA games suck ass.
The reason that this article can't point to a truth that's obvious to anyone who is part of the hobby even in a casual manner is, funnily enough, the same reason why the industry is in such dire straits: not only is the emperor wearing no clothes, he's been wearing no clothes for so long that there's a whole cottage industry built upon his lack of pants. The local press makes sure to tell everyone how luxurious his clothes are and how people who seem to point at the emperor's exposed balls are deranged lunatics, local weavers offer their consultation services for a reasonable fee to recommend new clothes for the emperor to not wear, the clergy on their pulpits make sure to denounce rumours about the emperor's naked taint as a dogwhistle for devil worshippers to communicate with each other and the eunuchs at the monastery write excuses on their almanacs about why the emperor seems so suspiciously susceptible to pneumonia so it becomes written historic fact (and they do it for free!).
Until the big players make an honest introspection and start to focus on producing things that people actually want and cutting ties with the dead weight that tells them what they want to hear despite all the harsh evidence to the contrary, things will not get better. To make the point clear, this isn't limited to the woke encroachment on the industry; that's a symptom of the system's decadence but not the root of the issue.
Sadly, I don't see a market crash in the future since the money keeps coming and the market keeps growing and growing, until somebody like EA screws the pooch for sure, things will keep being retarded forever. At best we can hope for alternative markets to eat at their share of the pie, like we've seen this year with Wukong and that korean waifu game.
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