So financially shit has officially hit the fan for the video game industry. There's that lootbox thing I was talking about, but something also going on in the video game industry is that games with price tags beyond the range of $20 to $60 are currently having problems A lot of indie games that are $10 are currently having problems, because the median sales for those price ranges are going down. The video game industry is continuing to grow, but some of the big companies are losing a lot of stock value because they doubled down so hard on lootboxes that now that gamers are playing Fortnite they're losing money.
Rather than typing out a long fucking post:
Companies that genuinely enjoy making games right now
#nofucks
Companies that don't care about their finished product and just want money right now
We're not seeing the death of lootboxes, p2w, scummy tactics, lawsuits against other companies for "stealing gamemode concepts", etc; rather they knew that by refusing to make a game that gamers would enjoy they were gambling and they got snake eyes and now a lot of their "games" aren't selling well. It's not a second video game industry crash, rather a lot of video game developers are making games people don't enjoy so people aren't buying them anymore.
What do I think is going to happen in the long run? Obviously with multiplayer games we are genuinely seeing the death of pay to win. There's still a lot of microtransactions, but most of the new games being announced are cosmetic only. As for single player games, something I don't necessarily agree with but is justifiable is I've been noticing a lot of say $20 to $30 games that aren't worth $30, they're worth more like $15 but they're good games. If say you saw a game that was $20 and it's pretty obvious that it's only really worth $10, BUT you know it's a good game, the developers are quick with fixing bugs, the game has long term support and you know they don't have spyware in the game would you be willing to bite the bullet for a game you know you'll enjoy?
Future of online gaming: cosmetic only microtransactions
Future of indie gaming: $20 to $30, overpriced but fucking good, but still overpriced