I hope the american game industry collapses again, for the good of the medium. Nothing good comes out of any american slop studio.
For the most part, it already has. It won't go the way of the last infamous crash, but its already mostly gone. EA's had to go private, Activision was acquired, Bethesda was acquired, Squeenix has had to reduce their US holdings more and more with the probable intent to ultimately shutter them. Amazon tried to play and ultimately gave up after realizing that money alone couldn't make a good game, there's not enough good devs and they just couldn't attract the ones that were out there. Netflix and Google both tried and failed with gaming associated ventures and gave up on them. Ubisoft is actively dying, Xbox is on fire, Sony is struggling to make profit with their first party work (They removed gaming profit beyond console sales from their indicators entirely) and are starting to refocus towards Japan like Squeenix, and most of the rest of the players have major asian stakeholders through Netease and Tencent, steering the ship with profit focused rigor and refusing to entertain much bullshit - American devs are just their jeets, willing to work for cheap out of desperation.
The AAA space is basically dead, mostly because so few of them are able to actually make a worthwhile product.
Its only marginally better in indie and AA spaces, investors are fleeing after realizing that a novel indie idea rarely sells well - and much of the space they could succeed in has been drowned in so much politically motivated failed slop that consumers instinctively avoid them on sight. Its hard enough to market an unknown, its nearly impossible to market against an instinctual negative perception. Of the devs that are at the intersection of talented, working in viable niches, and not making a retarded product, many of them have relationships with dedicated smaller publishers like devolver and hooded horse, and don't need or want random angel investors who expect unrealistic returns to compete with the potential gains of something like Nvidia right now. They'll say no and do without.
The American scene is already well into this investor collapse, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the current state of the industry is not capable of being financially successful. Too many conflicting elements lead to just way too much market uncertainty, with excessively politicized workers who can and will say or do shit that instantly kill a project. Safer to buy treasury bonds at this point. Without this investor money, its impossible to run the current approach of "most games fail but one or two succeed ridiculously" as that success isn't industry wide - so most of the industry becomes a net fiscal negative that dies without those investors. And the supermajority of those game devs can't survive waiting 8-10 years for fortnite to wrap up and Epic to start hiring for a new game project. They'll have to put the fries in the bag, and then there won't be dozens of hundred person projects like Highguard cooking quietly in the background that ask for a hundred million dollars from some investors. So now the industry is out both earning potential, and investment opportunity all together.
Its probable it'll rebound, but it'll likely take a decade or two at minimum, they'll need people to start putting out more large wins than large losses, repeatedly, to signal to investors "we've found a path to likely success" again.
