The Gaming Markets
Video Games started as a luxury product. You needed a computer, which wasn't just expensive, but you needed a solid power supply, a place to buy software from. This could only accessed by the upper classes in the richest countries.
The first game market crash happened because the market tried to expand, but could not, as there was simply not a market to expand into. People just didn't have home computers.
Nintendo solved this problem by making a Family Computer, FamiCom, that you didn't need to know anything about computers to use. Because, in this day we used DOS, which was entirely command-line based.
This opened a new market, which other countries followed.
And now almost everyone in the world has some sort of computer to run games on.
Reminder that the simplest modern phone has more processing power than the computers that went to the moon. So, the potential gaming market is that big.
BUT, this is not a luxury market, which - explicitly - most people cannot afford to take part in. For many people, the proper pricepoint for games is $0/month. For a lot of people it's $20/month, or $20/2 months, or something. And, for many of these people, they CANNOT pay more for games.
But wait, there's more.
Indie Games are better than AAA games, and cost $20. So, people can afford to drop $20-40 a month, and still consistently play good games. And that's excluding games that they already own.
As an RPG player, why should I drop $100 on a Squeenix game that hates me as a person and views my controller input with contempt, when I can play Ara Fell and Rise of the Third Power? For, at most $40? As such, the luxury market, the market with the most profit, is collapsing into ruin.
And nothing is replacing it. AAA studios are panicking, because apparently making full-priced games that actively hates their players was a bad idea. Maybe, just maybe, EA shouldn't have kept buying up studios and taking them out behind the woodshed to shoot them.
So, is the video market collapsing? As we have more people playing games than at any other point in Human history?
The luxury one is. It's gone. It might never come back. We have a few studios that might be able to become AAA games, but there's no guarantee that hiring that many employees will produce enough money will be justified. Because we don't need to pay luxury prices anymore.
And the worst part is that people have no problem paying for skins for their characters. They have a problem with everything else the AAA companies have done. If it wasn't for the loot box bullshit, I'd probably still be playing Mass Effect 3 Online.

















