Ares42

Here's three different business and market research groups projections for the industry.

https://www.precedenceresearch.com/video-game-market#:~:text=The%20global%20video%20game%20market,forecast%20period%202024%20to%202033.

https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-game-market

Any data I can find that indicates that the videogame market is slowing down it's either because of post-covid recovery or when adjusting for inflation, neither of which indicates that there's a problem with consumer retention or growth in the industry. All other prospects are still projecting good and steady growth.

Ever since internet arrived and multiplayer games grew to popularity there has always been a few "monolith" games that hogged a huge portion of the market. They might've not (initially) monetarily dominated in the same way games does today, as they weren't made to continuously charge their players at first, but people sticking to games is not a new phenomenon. Go back a handful of years and LoL was comparatively similarly popular as Fortnite is today, go back further and you have WoW being a worldwide phenomenon, and even before that you had games like Quake and CS being comparatively massive for the size of the market. The numbers are just getting bigger and bigger because the market is still overall growing.

But yes, many of these live service games are competing with Fortnite (etc), because they are actually competing with Fortnite. We're seeing the same exact thing that we saw with the forementioned games, a plethora of studios trying to re-create the same success of the "monoliths" currently dominating. It's the MMO-wave or the MOBApocalypse manifesting in a new form. Maybe a bigger portion of the market bought into it this time around, but that's pretty hard to quantify. The results are the same though, a swathe of failed games and the "monoliths" standing tall through it. But while this creates somewhat of a lull for other types of AAA titles I don't think there's any reason to think that it has a drastically different impact on the industry as a whole this time around.

@bigsocrates: I was just using Forspoken as an example. My argument is largely that there is a much bigger catalog of viable (old) titles than there used to be. Games like Witcher 3 and Bloodborne came out 9 years ago and are still competitive with RPGs (of their variant) coming out today. If I was to ask for a recommendation for a great action-adventure chances are I'd be recommended a game that's at least 3 years old already. Looking at a game like Skull & Bones, the entire conversation around that game was that people wanted a better Black Flag and it failed to deliver. That's a new game being compared to a 11 year old game, and people going "nah, I'd rather just go replay the old one".

If you were to do a similar comparisons in 2014 (to ten year old games), not only was there fewer high-budget games being released every year but the growth in quality over that time-frame was much larger. This whole drive for big budget mega hits started sometime in the late noughties. Before that the vast majority of AAA games were still fairly modest. It's only over this last decade or so that we've had this escalation where more and more studios are focusing on insanely big budget games and we're now reaching a point of saturation of the market. Anyone new to the market that opens up their choice of digital store and looks up first-person shooters (or some other category) has a mountain of high-budget top-quality titles to choose from.

This seems like a false narrative to me. It's far from the first time the industry has been dominated by a massively successful franchise that keeps players coming back year after year. In my experience the problem isn't that if your game isn't perfect people will go back to play "X popular game", it's that consumers have 50 other similar games that they can pick and choose from instead.

When a game like Forspoken gets released not only are there 10 other similar AAA open-world games coming out the same year, but there's 30+ AAA open-world games that came out the last 2-3 years that you can regularly buy cheaply as well. The competition for standing out has grown intensely fierce over the last decade, and "good, but flawed" games just doesn't stand a chance anymore. Everyone came rushing in to dig for gold and now they're all fighting over the handful of nuggets available.

@bigsocrates: Yea, I already said that you could absolutely call them reckless. They took a bet on early acquisition and when their planned business fell through they were forced to quickly sell it again. They didn't bet their own company, the company they bought didn't have to shut down. They ended up having to reign in their own company because they had planned for a business negotiation to finalize (which is completely normal). But this is still just a borderline bad business decision that could've easily turned out fine, and in my opinion it doesn't warrant the "Embracer is ruining gaming" narrative we've seen develop lately.

@bigsocrates: You keep stating that their business plan made no sense, but any arguments wether it did or didn't make sense are pure speculation. We can't confirm anything about what their plans with these acquisitions were. For all we know if the deal had gone through they had a spectacular plan that would've made them super successful down the road.

If you don't agree that it makes sense for a company to assume that an already established business partner has a shared interest in keeping their business going there's not really much more to discuss here.

@bigsocrates: If you look at what they bought post re-branding 90+% of it is still in the same exact field they had been working in, with the two exceptions being the bigger (more publicized) Gearbox and Square deals.

I'm not gonna deny that they pulled the trigger early, but they were working with a business partner that had already invested heavily in the company so they had ample reason to believe that the new deal they were negotiating would eventually go through. They weren't just buying willy-nilly hoping to find an investor after the fact.

@bigsocrates: The Saudi company they had a deal with (Savvy Games Group) is by and large an investor group, with a special interest in growing a gaming industry in Saudi Arabia. They would almost certainly not be interested in buying a bunch of studios all over the world, even if packaged into a single umbrella company.

Embracer (pre re-branding) has been going for two decades at this point, and for the first 15 years or so it was very much focused on trying to pick up "hidden gem" studios lost in the middle. The idea that they weren't trying to run a business has basically no merit.

Yes, they started aggressively expanding when they suddenly caught the interest of bigger investors, and you could call them reckless. But there's little to no evidence that they were just trying to pump and dump companies.

@bigsocrates: They were trying to establish themselves as a mid-tier publishers, and had a great investor deal. But to be a successful publisher on that level you need a diverse portfolio, so they started acquiring assets. Then the investors pulled out un-expectedly and everything fell apart. The way people have turned this around into "Embracer bad" is really strange. Embracer was an attempt to support "AAA-indie" studios, and its sudden failure has basically nothing to do with their actual projects/products.