Well, break out the cites, Breezy; they should be so easy to find! Massive growth! Is that why there were like 14K+ layoffs last year in the Video gaming industry?
The U.S. Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is the largest in the world at $649 billion (of the $2.8 trillion global market) and is projected to grow to $808 billion by 2028 at an average yearly rate of 4.3% (PwC 2024).
The info is straight from Pricewaterhouse Coopers and I'd trust them over any gamer site on the planet and so does the GOV and large swathes of corporate America.
For gaming alone. Again steady growth YoY in the US.
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Like yeah shit year for layoffs and all that, but it doesn't make it a trend nor does the outlook look like it's on the decline.
I get numbers might not tell the tale if you see 5 of your beloved series bomb, but in aggregate the industry is still printing, games are still being made by the thousands annually and we're still going to see hits and flops whether they tickle your pickle or not.
That 2024 newzoo data was interesting though. No taste gamin forkknife/roblox/cod/sims players by and large.
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The question I was trying to ask is how did we go from original games/movies TV to sequelitis/lame/woke. There are always singular exceptions but the industries as a whole, including Western AAA studios who produced the vast majorities of those classic games you listed, are in obvious and unmitigated decline. I didn't expect someone to come in Song of the South style and tell me everything was Zippity doo dah.
This isn't new though. Every generation has also had WTF moments across their "beloved" media. Every generation has ripped off or ruined said media since man invented stories. The 90s and 00s had a fuck ton of bombs from people/studios we thought were cool at the time. Tribes 2, EQ2, Daikatana are top of mind PC game failures for me and I have dozens from Sega/TurboGrafx before I got into PCs, but their flops got me into other games so it's a wash. It's easy to forget how much trash there was back then because the good games stand out so much.
This era of "sequelitis/lame/woke" will die and hopefully this past year is the deathknell to stop fucking around. Maybe it'll throwback to macho 40 year old dudes with guns again, maybe it'll be orthodox hasidic jew space shooters, maybe everything will be a live service from start to finish and what a bummer that will be but we're going to constantly cycle through new trends decade after decade for better or worse until we die. All the more reason to not get hung up on it and really explore all the shit that is available and genuinely great if you really love gaming.
I hope you enjoyed your -
Just as a note, your quoting/formatting sucks, its impossible to read that. I know what I wrote that you are trying to quote and its still hard to tease out.
So your proof is one fucking PWC ( nice appeal to authority argument there as well) aggregate chart and something from the "This aways happens" feels like table. makes you think everything is hunky dory? Sweet summer child. This is like arguing with a retarded baby.
Did you even read your own study you cited? The report breaks down what it expects from each of those sectors. You know where that gaming growth comes from? Asia, "social/casual games" and ad revenue:
PWC said:
Gaming is a global business. But the culture of gaming—and the business models that support it—varies significantly from country to country. The biggest region globally for total video games and esports revenue is Asia Pacific. (The Asian Games, held in Hangzhou in the fall of 2023, included esports as an official medal event for the first time.) In 2023, video gaming in the region generated revenues of some US$109.6 billion, 48.1% of the segment’s global total. By 2028, the region will account for US$181.8 billion in gaming revenues, or 54.4% of the total.
PWC said:
Historically, revenues from video gaming have been dominated by subscriptions and purchases of games. But advertising is gaining prominence. Of the two main revenue sources, app-based social/casual gaming revenue (US$82.9 billion) was narrowly ahead of in-app games advertising revenue (US$72.4 billion). By 2028, the latter will rise at a 15.4% CAGR globally to US$147.9 billion in 2028, while the former will grow at just a 5.15% CAGR, to US$106.6 billion. By 2028, social/casual gaming will account for more than three-quarters of the overall global video games and esports market.
Everything's just fine: Oh and by the way, huge potential with that in-app games advertising revenue. Just like it ever was!
A large chunk of that E&M growth is in music, which is growing due to expanding revenue from Live Music. So when you wonder why tickets prices in doubled or tripled in the last decade, here's a backline reason:
PWC said:
E&M is a realm in which real-life, in-person, increasingly tech-enabled experiences—music performances, theatre, cinema, sports and more—matter a great deal. And in the wake of the covid pandemic, IRL (in real life) events have been enjoying something of a revival. Live music revenues rose by 26.0% in 2023, and accounted for more than half of the overall music market.
Numbers in aggregate aren't telling the full story, are they?
Like yeah shit year for layoffs and all that, but it doesn't make it a trend nor does the outlook look like it's on the decline.
I get numbers might not tell the tale if you see 5 of your beloved series bomb, but in aggregate the industry is still printing, games are still being made by the thousands annually and we're still going to see hits and flops whether they tickle your pickle or not.
That 2024 newzoo data was interesting though. No taste gamin forkknife/roblox/cod/sims players by and large.
And conversely, "thousands of games being made" doesn't mean that everything is OK, or that the failures are "same as it ever was" or that 2024. Is it just a "shit year for layoffs" when an entire industry downsizes by 11% one year, after downsizing/firing/laying off 7% the previous year? There are now about 20% less people in the gaming industry than there were in 2022. Does that feel like "same as it ever was"?
Btw, Roblox lost more than a billion dollars in 2023 but seem to be on pace to lose under a billion (slightly) in 2024. I would have thought they were printing money by now. Ooops.
In 2023, gaming company Roblox Corporation reported an annual consolidated net loss from of over 1.16 billion U.S.
www.statista.com
Overall Video Games Industry stats:
Find the latest statistics and facts about video games. Action, sports and shooter games are the most popular in the U.S., and video games generally enjoy stable sales figures.
www.statista.com
This isn't new though. Every generation has also had WTF moments across their "beloved" media. Every generation has ripped off or ruined said media since man invented stories. The 90s and 00s had a fuck ton of bombs from people/studios we thought were cool at the time. Tribes 2, EQ2, Daikatana are top of mind PC game failures for me and I have dozens from Sega/TurboGrafx before I got into PCs, but their flops got me into other games so it's a wash. It's easy to forget how much trash there was back then because the good games stand out so much.
This era of "sequelitis/lame/woke" will die and hopefully this past year is the deathknell to stop fucking around. Maybe it'll throwback to macho 40 year old dudes with guns again, maybe it'll be orthodox hasidic jew space shooters, maybe everything will be a live service from start to finish and what a bummer that will be but we're going to constantly cycle through new trends decade after decade for better or worse until we die. All the more reason to not get hung up on it and really explore all the shit that is available and genuinely great if you really love gaming.
While I appreciate the "It's all happened before" platitude, of course there were things that bombed, and bombed famously; that's why you can cite them without doing any research. You left off a bunch of things that might have enhanced your point, such as Hellgate: London, Lair, and a thousand failed MMOs, which many of us played. Looking back through a list of bombs and flops, its amazing the number of good games which didn't sell well, either at first or never at all. "Almost Human" was a big-ish flop for Sony. Each of the big three in the Console space has done dumb stuff, trend following BS things: PS3 was going to be a home media center, Xbox One was going to leverage motion sensing/controls to do Wii games without controllers, Nintendo made the WiiU to follow up the Wii, etc.
From my own "feels like" argumentation to somewhat address my actual point, there were less AAA bombs in the past but the nature of the industry has changed. The increased consolidation means that there are more AAA studio efforts than ever before. Previously, the studios were smaller independents with deals with the publishers; then publishers became the corporate entities with various studios, and with the ultra expensive arms race between Microsoft and Sony, this bi-polarization of much of the gaming world meant that rather than trying to make something of their own and then selling that first to a publisher and then to the public, they are/were making things assigned to them from on high. Sony and Microsoft managed their stables of studios differently but much like the streaming wars budgets ballooned as these large corps were footing the bills but the stakes are also higher. These corporations are more centrally organized and easier to target with HR/Sweet Baby Inc/ESG/DEI, so activists and ideologues have more inroads.
Sorry for working all that out on the page but it makes more sense to me now.
Additional failures documented here:
A History of Unique Failures in the Games Industry | University Observer
BTW here's an interesting interview with John Romeo re: Daikatana that I hadn't seen before, talking about it's failure and the studio politics that were going on behind the scenes. If anyone cares, an artifact from the Old YouTube: Warning, its a 14 year old youtube video, with all that entails; intro, music, etc.
"Things always change but then they don't really do they" is an OK sentiment but isn't much of an argument. Did you really futz around off the cuff arguing your feelings trying to tell me "not to get hung up" on it "if I really love gaming"?
How embarrassing for you.
Vorph ) Once that runs out, it will be Steam and a base online service at best for one console. Add to that, they take out 6 games, which are then "added as new" 6 months later and call them new games. The value is no where near the asking price and only made sense when it was 80% list using Eneba cards. Their 1st party games that come out on launch day have fallen completely flat. And for that, you can always just sub for a month, not buy the game if it gets good reviews, and cancel and run through the game in 30 days. PS Extra isn't any better.
