The end of "The Industry"
Our ancestors might caution against railing too fiercely against the nature of our age, for every age has its vanities. Maybe they would advise discerning what is within one's control and what is not. After returning from The Game Awards, I had to write this. The show was great. The capital 𝐼 industry is through.
I graduated college in 2010 and attended university during the main part of the Great Recession. The world I entered into after graduation was one that had shifted out from under me without my knowing.
There were no jobs, so while I lived at home, I invented it together with a friend of mine.
5 years later and while the industry healed, the world has shifted again. People finally started to take our industry seriously around 2015. We were not ready.
In 2025, we are even more adrift. The structures that we relied on - certain platforms, publishers, etc have all fallen or been gobbled up by bigger fish.
As our heroes age out and the businessmen circle us, how will we survive?
Today I would like to offer my perspective and I hope some positive guidance.
The Age of Heroes draws to a close
The Age of Heroes has come firmly to a close. Maybe it ended around in 2010. Maybe later. Pray we make it out alive. We now live in some very dark times.
Over the years, there have been close calls. Some leave us too soon.
In a sobering closing ceremony to the 2021 Final Fantasy XIV Digital Fan Festival, where he had also performed with his band, Masayoshi Soken opened up that he was diagnosed in March 2020, adding that the cancer was in remission. Soken kept the treatment hidden from most of the development team, doing some of his work for Final Fantasy XIV from hospital.
Soken was undergoing chemotherapy during these months, which he found “mentally as well as physically tough”, but also wrote music to conclude Final Fantasy XIV‘s Shadowbringers story, including the climactic song ‘To the Edge’.
"Yes, time circles endlessly. The hands of fate trained ahead. All things change, drawn to the flame. To rise from the ashes. To begin. We first must see the end." -- "To the Edge" lyrics
Time is against us. What we choose today will affect the outcomes of tomorrow.
Tomonobu Itagaki, the founder of Team Ninja and a legendary Japanese game developer behind titles like Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, has passed away this year. He left us a note upon his passing.
Itagaki was outspoken, and often shared his honest opinions. For those that know me well, I appreciated the hell out of this as a developer. We truly lost someone honest.
This news affected me. I told my best friend she called her childhood friend (the daughter of another legend) to share the news. They grew up playing Itagaki's Dead or Alive games together. I was told they wept.
Many of the people, all developers themselves, who worked with him expressed their feelings of loss such as Laura Fryer and Katsuhiro Harada.
A short few weeks later, Harada (Itagaki's university junior and rival) announced he's leaving Bandai Namco as the TEKKEN series reaches its 30th anniversary. I highly recommend reading his retirement post. He implicitly cites the loss of Itagaki as a reason for leaving with guidance from his longtime friend Ken Kutaragi.
For the last 40 years, our industry has built itself up and expanded in ways that we could haven never foreseen. Now, our creators are leaving us. The people who hold the purse strings sit around and do other things while the fabric of what everyone has woven together falls apart.
The powers-that-be should care, as they in many ways hold the fate of creative people in their hands. Sadly, they live separated lives from the rest of us.
To those hoarding resources I say; you can't take it with you.
Read the latest news on the legacy of individuals throughout the history of game development, including looks back at personal achievements
There was a phrase in 2024 that studio heads were saying to each-other. I remember the wonderful DICE Summit of 2024. The rivalries had been put on pause, and some of the more petty elements that come up in any industry like this had faded.
"Survive 'til '25." became the mantra of the show that year and throughout.
At the DICE Summit 2024, there are round table discussions hosted by wonderful people. There was a lot of very hurt studio heads. People who ran companies all the way from 20-500 people were feeling it. Many of them felt like they had either failed their people or had somehow gotten lucky. I was very privileged to participate in the roundtables hosted by Adam Boyes and Oleksandra (Sasha) Volkohon.
Sadly, as time went on and 2025 brought no succor, others around the industry started making grim jokes. I said to someone “Survive til ‘25, huh?” and they said “Suck dicks til ‘26!” – a grim omen, but I laughed a lot.
Finally, the entire phrase revealed itself this year from all of the studio heads I spoke to, it was;
"Survive 'til '25. Suck dicks 'til '26! Go to Heaven in '27~!"
If nothing else, at least we can still be playful in these dark days. I appreciate that about us.
Swen knew who would win. 5 out of 6 of the games nominated are independently owned and operated with (in some cases significant) funding comes from outside sources. Nintendo is still operated in large part by developers. It turns out developers know how to make great games.
The Game Awards - Game of the Year 2025 Nominations
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
The message is clear. We can overcome this hardship.
"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world." --Satoru Iwata
Layoffs have consequences.
No one can create fun an energy like Nintendo's own teams. That said, Nintendo a relativity "small" company with around 5,000 global employees, covering all aspects of their business. Nintendo competes with PlayStation, Google, Apple, Xbox on the platform end. They compete with thousands of development studios on the software end. They compete with every other form of entertainment during leisure time.
I've been told they don't quite see themselves as a videogame company in the same way that the others do. They have singular focus.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder was directed by Shiro Mouri, a veteran who has been with Nintendo for over 25 years. He previously served as Director for New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe.
5 people made the original Super Mario Bros. All 5 of them were still at Nintendo to ship Super Mario Bros. Wonder 38 years later.
Shigeru Miyamoto (Original Director) returned as Supervisor.
Takashi Tezuka (Original Assistant Director) returned as Producer.
Koji Kondo (Original Composer) returned as Sound Director and Composer.
Toshihiko Nakago (Original Programmer) returned as a Special Level Design Advisor.
Kazuaki Morita (Original Programmer) is in the Special Thanks section.
This is likely the most incredible piece of developer continuity in gaming history. The results are obvious.
"On final approach! Mark V is prepping for PS4! I can't believe that shirt has survived 18 years" --Carter Lipscomb
Video games are often called "difficult" to work on and to make. I think that is partially true, but doesn't tell the whole story. Over the last 15 years, the entire pipeline that created highly skilled game developers has collapsed. Before 2010, there was barely even a concept of the "indie game". Now, many students are required to release their final projects on Steam as part of graduation.
School → University → Job → Ship a game every 5 years → Rotate studios. This was the lifecycle of a career in Triple-A game development.
The recent mass layoffs (according to 2025 GDC report estimated at over 45,000~ jobs lost between 2022 and 2025) have devastated this model, leaving experienced and emerging developers in crisis. We are in a "reset phase" driven by unsustainable M&A activity and the pressure for high profit margins. When you look at this against the overall tech saga from 2020-2025, you see a bigger picture.
Art Comes Last Yet Wins Again
In a bad economy, companies will prioritize retaining the roles deemed most essential to the core engine of production, often measured by cost and replaceability.
Informa's own 2025 GDC report found that developer sentiment toward Generative AI to show that the "reset phase" is financial and existential. A cause for internal conflict. This adds an undertone of fear throughout modern development at large companies now.
Programmers, especially those at senior levels, typically command higher salaries than game artists and animators. Programmers have had a much easier time saving up a runway.
Artists often have a much shorter runway, forcing them to take the first stable job they can find, rather than investing time into launching a new organization.
Those are precious 6 to 12 months of "runway" are required to self-fund a prototype, build a business plan, and court buyers. The creation of original, high-quality assets (characters, environments, etc) have by far become the most time-consuming part of game development. This requires a long period of unpaid or self-funded work before a pitch can be made.
With technology being more and more accessible now, creative people need to be as respected as their wizardly counterparts are.
While accepting their Game of the year award, Sandfall Interactive thanked "YouTube Tutorials" because they "had never made a game before". Expedition 33 won so many awards due to taste, not technology.
Sold Out. Billions made!...?
There is not a polite way to state this fact, but liars have taken control of what was a fairly healthy ecosystem around the 2015 era. I was invited to dinner with a colleague immediately after this years Game Awards. Sitting in Sol Agave, he told me about his plans for the future.
We talked endlessly about doing bushiness, especially in the game services space (i.e. doing work for other companies). After a while, he went on to describe how difficult things have become, and that non-endemics have been stringing him and his people along for months or in some cases years. Telling him nice things about their past dealings, how much they would love to work with him and his company again. Increasingly, he's found throughout these years since COVID that all of that has changed. As people have cycled in or out of our industry, outsiders have come in. Liars.
This is a very seasoned and well respected studio head with 130~ people and have been operating for now over 15 years. This is almost an exact alignment with my time at Poppy Works. It was difficult to deny the topic.
With that, the conversation steered towards some of the roots of our problem. Again it came up that people who make or have experience working directly in development are not at all involved in the business element of games. What have been the immediate results? Selling out.
Companies such as Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts (EA) and Ubisoft are or have been effectively purchased by white-label governments. These were major drivers of business that interacted often with businesses like his, and occasionally mine. There were opportunities there when the culture of business was different.
Without these players participating in the ecosystem in a good faith way, the ecology of creation is collapsing. It is up to us to save it in parallel during this time. I wish us luck.
The devil cares enough to torture you. He takes pride in it. Sadly, on our current path, you're just another meal to be shat out. At least David Zaslav will get a pretty penny from of plunging the stock and his entire industry into the grave.
We're witnessing the slow exodus of Warner Bros. Discovery from the games space while being eaten by another giant in Netflix. The film industry people are screaming in agony, the future of their art is in ... flux.
"[We don't] attribute any value to [Warner Bros. gaming]" --Gregory Peters (Netflix co-CEO)
"In all these conversations, the effect on entertainment will be monumental. All these companies have significant stakes in the television and film industries, but they also vary in their involvement in video games. Warner Bros., oddly, is the most established of the three, owning a handful of major studios and notably publishing the best-selling video game of 2023, Hogwarts Legacy." via Gamepressure
Business Gibberish & Squander
Thanks to aggressive M&A activity since 2020, the industry has lost on dozens of business opportunities. Healthy st
For example, Volition's demise were commercial underperformance followed by an executive financial mandate to cut costs following the collapse of a $2 billion deal with Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group.
Monolith Productions (founded 1994) - Blood, No One Lives Forever, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Volition (founded 1993 as Parallax Software) - Descent, Red Faction, Saints Row
Arkane Austin (founded 2006) - Prey, Arx Fatalis, Dishonored
Onoma (founded 1999 as Eidos Montreal) - Deus Ex, Thief, Tomb Raider: Survivor Trilogy
"Those people together can really make magic. It's not like, 'Doesn't matter, we'll just rehire.' No, try it. That's what big groups do all the time. They try to just hire massively and overpay people to create those magic groups. It doesn't work like this. So to me, that was stupid. But what do I know?" --Raphaël Colantonio (founder of Arkane)
It doesn't work like this. So to me, that was stupid. But what do I know?
“No one ever asked me why we didn't ship Halo 2 on PlayStation or Nintendo. [...] The math is simple. [...] We're not a third-party publisher.” -- Phil Spencer 2023
This stance has since changed since earlier this year, a report from Bloomberg revealed that the Xbox division is being asked to hit a 30% "accountability" margin by Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, a number that is well in excess of the gaming industry's standard.
Phil Spencer, bless his heart, has been put into a position to enact wild profit potential for Microsoft following the $75.4 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. It's easy to see why this happened, as Satya Nadella has pivoted all of Microsoft towards the unproven economics of AI. The gaming division needs to make money for them to fund that whole doomed adventure.
For those keeping score, statements made by Microsoft during the FTC legal proceedings appear to have been contradicted by subsequent company actions. There are many. Here's one example per Gamesindustry.biz;
Microsoft argued to the court that the acquisition was a "vertical" merger that would result in limited integration, and its structure would "avoid eliminating redundancies."
In January 2024, shortly after the deal closed, Microsoft announced 1,900 layoffs across its gaming division, significantly impacting former ABK staff.
There are more and they are easy to find. I invite you to look them up.
This is easily compared to Nintendo's very clear mindset and strategy. "If you want our world-known names, you can't have them unless you own the Nintendo machine." --Satoru Iwata (via CNN)
A joke played by The Fates
Xbox hardware was outsold by a little-known Kinect-style console during Black Friday week in the US.
According to Circana, in the US, PlayStation 5 accounted for 47% of total Black Friday week hardware unit sales, leading the market. Nintendo Switch 2 ranked 2nd (24%), with the Nex Playground ranking in 3rd (14%).
For those keeping score, this is the ghost of Xbox Past haunting them. I wouldn't read too much into this platform being an extremely long term player, but it certainly is some kind of cosmic punishment.
It's also very funny and an outgrowth of Xbox's own "This is an Xbox" campaign, which turned many current fans and new buyers off of the platform. Do you really trust MicroSoft to operate anything long term?
Nex is made up of ex-Microsoft staff. A growing contingent of Valve as well. Be on the lookout over the next few years as things like the Nex Playground, SteamOS and Proton gain more and more traction. Developers, it turns out, can make great stuff without talentless management types.
The modern culture of Venture Capital seem misaligned with achieving Great Works. VC firms seek massive returns (often 10x or more) on a small number of "home-run" investments, expecting a quick path to a major acquisition/exit or Initial Public Offering (IPO) within a relatively short fund cycle (e.g., 5-7 years).
That is not what creates good games. It is, however, what creates good slot machines. Excess capital can lead to unnecessary spending and rapid, unsustainable scaling with outsider pressure to do things like heavily monetize the game quickly, often leading to a loss of independence or a compromised game.
This can lead to investors who will (very likely) not have a deep understanding of the unique gaming industry or the creative process. They often demand changes to the game design (citing things like "my nephew likes dinosaurs and redheads"), monetization, or content to maximize short-term revenue potential.
That leads us back to the issue of Continuity. The entire cultural goal of VCs is Exit Strategies that do not align with long-term thinking.
While the core financial goal of VC has remained constant, but the societal focus of the capital has evolved dramatically. Make of that comment what you will.
The gaming industry is at a crossroads. Funding models, business contracts, development methodologies, and distribution platforms have increasingly shifted risk onto developers while extracting disproportionate value. Publishers (~42% on average) and platforms (30%) demand that developers shoulder the burden of development and operating a studio, taking 60%+ collectively. Players expect more, yet we are given fewer resources and tighter deadlines.
As part of research of this article, I stumbled across this quote; "The bigger a games company gets the more people come in that have no interest in games and massive interest in revenue, expenditure, costs and profit. And every time, EVERY time, the gamer, the customer, suffers."
This reflects a reality we're seeing across the entire industry as creative people, developers themselves are removed from positions of power.
"External investors act as the money layer for publishers and often have close to zero public visibility or accountability. A good example of this is what happened to Embracer Group when a major investor pulled out, causing mass layoffs. [...] In broader economic terms, it’s a relatively small system, and its structure lacks many built-in redundancies." -- Forbes
I refuse to accept that as the only way forward.
"For those who come after..." -- Expedition 33
For those studio heads that are reading this, I say to you; reach out to others. This is the time to band together to re-create the bonds that created our "Industry" in the first place. The "Industry" is really just a very professional way to say friends. Call your friends. Rope your ships together and fight as one. Let us cling together. As you can see with how fast the world moves today, there is no time like the present. You can still save the world you hold dear.
“I came from Hewlett Packard and they had profit sharing every quarter. [...] So I gave away a lot of my stock to almost everybody in the company in marketing and engineering jobs [...] I wouldn’t have gotten to where I got to without them. And I felt they deserved a part of it too.” -- Steve Wozniak (source)
From here, I will include some personal thoughts about actionable things you as a developer or studio could do. These are high-level suggestions and you should make sure what you're doing works for your staff and your partners.
Here are some suggestions;
Form an Artist Corporation. While this is still unproven, the core idea is there. Yancey Strickler has done a great job outlining things. The TED talk is here. This will be best for very small teams.
Floatilla/JV. Create a co-operative or Joint Venture (JV) LLC with you and your favorite partners and sister studios. Centralized functions like payroll, HR, and IT/Tooling. Act as the single entity to negotiate with publishers or investors, spreading the risk across multiple projects. A comprehensive Operating Agreement for the central LLC is critical.
Permanent Co-Development. Similar to a JV, but more trust community oriented. For example, Studio A's programmer could work on Studio B's game for three months. Standardizing tools, project management (e.g., Jira, Asana), and communication channels (Slack/Discord) is essential to ensure alignment, transparency, and efficiency.
I suggest that we create our own structures ready for the challenges ahead. Why?
Risk Mitigation - Spreading the financial and development risk of a single project across multiple entities, making failures less catastrophic.
Creative Cross-Pollination - Introducing fresh perspectives and diverse creative traditions to break creative stagnation and challenge assumptions.
Talent & Expertise - Overcoming local hiring limitations and immediately accessing specialized skills (like advanced coding or console porting) from partner studios.
Negotiation Power - The JV/collective acts as a single, larger entity with more leverage when negotiating for publishing deals, potentially securing better terms (e.g., higher Developer Revenue Share) and upfront Advances.
If you enjoyed or found value in any of this, my consulting services are available.
