There Will Be 3.2 Billion Gamers in 2022, But Revenue Set To Fall for First Time...

I have so many unplayed games in my account that it will take me years to go through them and try them. Anytime I'm bored I try something old that is new to me before buying something. Maybe only 1 in 20 is any fun, but that should at least inform my decision making. (buying too many things that are cheap and have good screen shots)

The trend I'm really noticing is that especially for the younger gaming crowd, it's a social event as much as anything else. A given game has to offer either competitive or cooperative game-play that works well with a group that's voice-chatting about what they're all doing in real-time.

That also means the cost of the game is a bigger issue than it used to be. (If the game costs $50 and someone's friends consist of several broke teens or 20-somethings, there's a good chance that title won't be chosen to pur

All of the old paradigms have fallen. Expectations are sky high, judgement is harsh, willingness to pay up front is bottoming out.

Eventually we'll get what we collectively truly want - and that's evidenced in our choices. We clearly want freemium gaming. We want games for devices over games for anything else. We want games to be swiftly consumed and forgotten in the next eager cycle of the consumer awareness wheel.

The Marvel Mentality is here to stay in most forms of media. We are a consume-and-discard culture, through and through, and the more quickly something can be relegated into the dust heap of yesterday, the better.

I'm not condemning this state of being. It is what it is, and wishing for a sepia-tinged version of the past where the consumer was somehow "better" is pointless.

It gives me hope, though, when I see something like BTS. They might have been a a very modern phenomenon, but the music writers were fully steeped in, and deeply respectful of, the pop genres and acts that came before. There was plenty of substance behind that flash.

But how many are real people rather than bots and dupes

Does playing Wordle make you a 'gamer'?

I guess the PHB with Solitaire on his Windows 95 box counts too?

3.2 billion...

On more fronts than one.

First, the price tag. How much does a AAA game cost? 60 bucks, right? Why? Well, because it's always been 60 bucks. And I'm not even kidding here, ever since the 1990s, the price tag for a AAA game was somewhere between 50 and 60 bucks. And so far, that model worked. Yes, games got more expensive to make. Way more expensive. Let's be honest here, if you dropped 100 grand on a game in the 90s, you were already making a very expensive game. Today's AAA titles swallow 10s of millions. Easily. But at the same time that the price tag jumped two magnitudes, so did the sales. While gaming was a geek's pastime in the 90s, and half a million copies sold meant that you were a celebrated like some sort of gaming messiah, today those AAA titles have to sell millions of copies to even be considered a success. But they sell that.

And as we know, games have insane fixed and very low per-unit cost, so more sales almost directly mean more revenue. Especially now that digital distribution is a thing and you don't even have to create boxed copies anymore. Selling a game for 60 bucks means like 59 bucks additional profit.

With this, the game industry was able to stick to that price tag for as long as it did. The problem now is that the market is saturated, sales don't jump by magnitudes anymore, but the cost of making games keeps creeping upwards. And people are used to paying 60 bucks for their games. Ask for 70 and they'll recoil in disgust and tell you to stuff your overpriced crap where the sun doesn't shine.

The industry's answer was a price hike through the back door, with mandatory 0-day DLC, loot boxes and other must-have addons that eventually moved that price tag for a AAA game closer to 100 bucks, which is probably also what you'd have to ask if you were honest about what you'd need to demand to make a profit reliably.

Because, and that leads to the next part of this problem, making a AAA game becomes more and more a gamble. You're risking your company, your career, your everything. If there's like 50 millions at stake, you can't really take any risks. That game has to sell. There is no room for fuckups. Or experiments. You can't just greenlight a game that sounds great on paper. How many concepts sound great on paper only to turn out like total rubbish? So what do the big studios do? Well, play it safe, of course. Call of Battlefield: $subtitle $sequential_number and EA Sports game $year are the result. Franchises that provide a reliable income due to a reliable customer base who will buy the next incarnation of the game because they have to if they want to continue playing, since we're gonna turn the servers off as soon as the new iteration hits the market.

Yes, this is circling the drain slowly because rehashing and regurgitating old content is maybe interesting to a player base that is used to something like that but it isn't exactly something that will attract new players. Such franchises tend to be exclusionary. Coming in as the new guy is not easy in such communities, especially if a certain level of competitiveness and "elitism" starts to spread among those "in the know". So every time people stop buying the next installation because they are no longer interested in the game, fewer people effectively buy and play the game, which in turn has its own effect because these games depend on a large player base. Nobody to play with, why buy the game?

Is that problem solvable? Yes. Well, no. Well, it depends. First, it will depend on whether people are going to accept that they are going to pay about 100 bucks for a AAA game one way or another, either by simply paying 100 bucks for it or by being bullshitted into doing it with 0-day DLCs and mandatory addons, "game passes", "season passes" and whatever else is used to somehow push the actual price tag to the point where the game is actually turning a profit. Personally, I'd feel insulted to be led on and fooled like this, but it seems to work, at least for now, in the game industry. It will probably continue to

There really haven't been a lot of new AAA game releases recently. It seems that the entire gaming industry got delayed by 18 months because of COVID, and the games that were supposed to release in late 2021/2022 are now all delayed until 2023.

...was a big deal in online gaming back in 1999, I remember when we all collectively freaked out when they hit 100,000 subscribers, it was absolutely unheard of at the time. I think it hit ~300k after its first year. Times change, 100,000 is probably an epic failure these days.