Big budget games have nearly killed the gaming industry.
It finally seems that people are waking up to the reality of unsustainably massive video game budgets, but it’s sadly a decade too late.
In a new article in The New York Times, Rami Ismail explains how and why the focus on high-end graphics created an unsustainable budgetary arms race that has ravaged the games industry.
He’s entirely correct, but this is something I’ve been consistently writing about since 2015.
The widespread and ongoing layoffs in gaming are also due to this runaway budget problem, but what is happening now was already set in motion a decade ago.
Modern games have a 7-8 year production cycle, with many taking even longer than that. Thus, the decisions and investments made to make…