Gaming is booming, and it is breaking people. It has roughly doubled since 2016 and is making more money than ever. Yet 25% of gaming industry professionals were laid off at least once in the last two years. 33% if you look at the United States alone.
Those facts are all true. They are all correct. The reason they don’t make sense to the casual gamer or game developer is that most conversations about gaming tend to err toward the nostalgic, and do not consider reality, economics, and business.
Let’s clear that up.
On the one side, gaming is an industry of craftsmen in pursuit of entertainment and storytelling. It is a world where creative risk, human voice, and cultural presence mean something.
On the other side, gaming is a hundred-billion-dollar business being run by investors who only care about the quality of the product insofar as it sustains acquisition, retention, and monetization.
Both are very real. They are not friends.
Most “state of the industry” takes are partisan, ignoring one or the other inescapable reality. Without its craft, gaming becomes mindless entertainment slop where engagement minutes are the only thing that matters. Without business, gaming remains a cottage industry unable to appeal to the mass markets required to make it economically successful.
Let’s stop pretending the side we find inconvenient does not exist.
If this issue sounds familiar, it’s because this is the same exact tension that movies and music underwent.
When audio streaming became a commercially viable, professionally supported competitor, the music industry was forced into a decades-long restructuring that completely reshaped it. Streaming services are the norm, today. The roles of publishers and artists have evolved dramatically. What never disappeared were the musicians.
Now, the same forced evolution is happening to video games. To keep using “the gaming industry” to simplify a layered, complex microcosm of priorities and values is damaging to the career decisions of generations of hopeful game developers.
These are days of macro productions, content mills, artistic cottage industries, hopeful indies, and everything in between.
Technology has been a true double-edged sword. Modern game engines have lowered the floor required to make a professional product to nearly pure domain knowledge.
An artist with some learning bandwidth and Unreal Engine can rival an entire engineering department from ten years ago. A dedicated team of amateurs can ship a successful mobile title.
On the other hand, these technological advances have made it possible for large-scale publishers to do more work with fewer employees, that is without even touching on AI and its impact: marginal cost for commodity code and content iteration.
Gaming isn’t going anywhere, but those wishing to engage with the game development industry need to stop relying on outdated shorthand like “the gaming industry”
Developers working on large multi-year, billion dollar franchises, are part of a service industry. The tools, IP, and competence domains are still those of a game developer, but they have business colleagues that pull the strings. Where service logic dominates, layoffs are an unavoidable part of the environment.
AA, artistic, and premium indie studios offer a chance for true growth and maturity, but are subject to sudden, seismic shifts in funding that they often can’t control because that year the market chased a different fad cycle. The worst thing that can happen to them is true economic success, because that means they are one step away from becoming service industries.
Somewhere out there, laughing all the way from the mists of feudal Japan, is Nintendo with its walled garden of proprietary hardware driven by the absolute, world-breaking quality of their genre-defining titles. They are the rare, integrated entertainment business that sticks to its traditional values and gets paid like a studio without acting like an operator.
The gaming industry, the entire layered behemoth of it, is a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. And a little bit Nintendo. Before anyone opines on it, they should decide which operating model they mean. If they don’t, their conclusions will be garbage, and their career decisions worse.