If gaming is in a good place then it should have a wide variety of genres doing well.
I disagree with this. Gaming as an industry is in a fine place, the 80s-90s model of software publishing is dying as millennials age out of the hobby and tastes change.
The only games that get hundred million to billion dollar budgets are open world shooters or adventure games with shooting elements generally. Those are the only mass market games that require that kind of money and a publisher, and increasingly they will be the only thing publishers bother with—it’s the only kind of thing they can do without downsizing and accepting a moneyball type approach to game production. Other types of games require no budgets or dev teams at all by comparison with the majors. Indies succeed and fill the part of the market investors’ deep pockets have really limited utility in. It is somewhat similar to the way restaurant chains and actual restaurants are capitalized differently and perform very differently financially except runaway success and superprofits are possible for games and not really for foodservice.
There are a lot of indie hits, there’s usually some FOTM thing that dominates steam charts or peoples attention for a bit and you hear insane things like the little nightmares franchise pushing 20 million units across like 2 or 3 games. Final Fantasy didn’t break 10 million unit sell in for a single title until 7. The market is much bigger with really wide ranges of genres succeeding spectacularly, just often without any involvement from the moneyed companies of the 90s and 2000s. Those publishers that brought you fun once are not structurally able to continue doing so. Budgets are too big, teams are in reality dispersed networks of subcontractors. Significant star talent has aged out of relevance at companies like square. All of their golden boys look like hacks right now. Capcom looks like a shambling corpse akin to 2018 Disney—waiting for a bubble of interest to pop and praying that they’ll somehow keep it from popping in spite of selling increasingly worse products. Monster Hunter 7 has a decent chance of flopping after Wilds soured casual and new fans with its horrible performance and word of mouth.
The industry is doomed if you’re a big publisher and the smart move is to sell off your IP to an American tech giant and exit. It’s a nasty and brutal rat race for indie devs but it is clearly winnable. The smart move isn’t to play, but game devs aren’t so clever and a lot of money is on the other side of the contest. But thanks to all this things look pretty great for first world consumers. Thirdies ought to get fucked and die already. People complain about “slop” but they’re just anhedonic young people who like using trendy words.
If things seem bleak for consumers, it probably isn’t so bleak in reality. Consumers are indifferent to non price and non quality factors. No one ever repaired their shit, it’s why no one cares about right to repair. It’s a bit unfortunate, but also clearly what has been decided in a very democratic way. At a practical level everybody, across decades, has picked thinner and harder to repair! The hobby is more expensive in some ways and cheaper in others Graphics cards are now pricing thirdies and their first world fellow brokies into game streaming, which is as technology pretty miraculous. Genuine ownership of adult toys is clearly not meaningful for most peoples enjoyment and doesn’t impact market interest and affects an extremely small minority who don’t let go of things. Mobile gaming shows that the average human simply doesn’t have a soul or mind and the idea of giving those people rights or showing any concern for them does offend me. I side with their oppressors.
The industry will survive without low performer publishers with no vision like Square, EA, Capcom, and Ubisoft. Nothing will replace them. I believe it will be good to say goodbye to this past. Those companies churned out shit games in between the hits and earned their failure and their success equally.