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this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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The industry is making a mistake if it forces everyone down this path.
Audiences have a limited income and will not spend above budget for gaming, their spending is already saturated, they don't have more money to spend.
The title is correct but it's not a positive thing like he frames it. All raising prices is going to do is force audiences to choose between games, meaning they buy fewer games. It will shrink the size of the industry by crushing the companies that people choose not to buy from in order to afford the higher priced games.
There will be fewer games and fewer professionals in the industry as a result. Talent and skill will be lost permanently.
My most unnecessarily doomer take on the subject:
The industry recognises that things cannot continue as they are, and is shifting to making video games more of a rich (or at least well off) person's hobby. This price increase will coincide with attempts to crack down on piracy as much as possible and will also attempt to patent more video game gameplay, and sue indie developers out of existence. As we've seen with this Palworld lawsuit, the big companies will probably start trying to eliminate the competition as much as possible, and rely on a legal system that still treats video games as "pac man, but with fancier graphics." Additionally, If the big publishers refuse to allow indie games on their systems, or take huge portions of the sales, it will result in indie games having far less reach, pretty much being limited only to PC.
I know this doesn't all really flow very well, it's my most doomer take, not my most coherent or reasonable take.
To properly monopolise this industry they will have to find a way to prevent indies from existing at low cost altogether. The best method I can think of to do that is to go after the engines. Forcing indies into developing their games from scratch without a comfortable engine that already exists as the foundation.
I do think this is mostly about consolidating and monopolising within the industry though. Capitalism is at work doing what it always does, consolidating industries into fewer and fewer companies.
maybe a shift of consumer indulgence to indie? I feel like this hurts mid-budget games specifically.
Yes. Medium studios will drop out of existence as they get bullied out of the market. Either they'll be swallowed into the big publishers doing AAA titles at high prices or they'll break up into indies selling low priced games.
Yeah but think of the AI !
There's a lot of wildcards here though.
The movie industry is impossible for small movie makers to enter. You can't distribute for one. And you can't really make ""good"" movies without much budget. In games however a single person can work for 3 years and make a hit.
The tools of gaming also aren't on the side of the goal big publishers have here. Every update to game engines makes it easier and easier to mass produce high quality assets and environments, it gets easier to hit the quality level of bigger studios with less people.
They might successfully kill off medium to large publishers by competing among themselves in this way. But they're going to increasingly have problems with indies and they can't stop that without strangling or controlling the game engines that the indies are using. If they do have the goal of monopolising the market then I would expect that to start manifesting eventually.