He has some points but the main one, mentioned in the headline, is shite.
There are plenty of gamers to go around for just about any game, if it's worth playing.
If we wanna talk about soulless AAA bullshit like live service, or making trash out of a popular existing IP, that’s a different convo. Taking shareholders out of gaming would benefit everyone.
What's wrong with live service games? Soulless AAA games tend to be live service, but so are good games. All of MMO's are a live service and many are good games (if MMO's are your thing).
All of live service games are designed to disappear once they stop making money, which is a nightmare for preservation that doesn't have to be that way. Also, their incentives are to keep you playing for longer, which is not the same as making sure you have a good time. If you find a player base absolutely angry at the developer behind a game they play, it's going to be live service, because of these incentives.
I got slowly beaten out of Destiny by their live service model.
I play Hearthstone, but I've had a full collection for 4+ years now and I recognize spending ~$300/year on a single game isn't for everyone, I also recognize in 5 or 6 years they'll close the game down and nothing will remain, and then in 20 or so years even websites and YouTube videos mentioning it will become scarse.
The same is not true for games like Mario 64, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, even Tetris.
"There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up," Clerc says.
This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.
The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.
There is always a market for smaller more focussed experiences. They are cheaper to make, so easy to make profit on. But, they want to turn every game into open world, microtransaction laden shit fest. A good example is Diablo 4, which literally removed genre standard features to make the game more tedious. Throwing hundreds of millions on a single massive game shouldn’t be a standard.
I love open world games, but I wouldn’t mind playing smaller games like older CoD campaigns too.
Back in the day, so many studios tried to unseat wow with a fantasy mmo of their own. Seems an unwise strategy when playing an mmo is nearly a full time occupation. Very few players will have the time for more than one. Bad strategy. Which is why nearly every wow killer died.
Its clear the industry learned nothing when they started pushing perpetual live service games. Why would anyone play EA's destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
Now the big thing is the battle pass, that demand tens of hours to complete. Same issue there. Can most players justify more than one battle pass subscription? Probably not.
Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
There's a big reward for being second or third to market, but not too much beyond that. A few MMOs saw plenty of success despite WoW. League of Legends and Dota are massively successful, but Smite did well too. Minecraft is huge, but so is Terraria and Starbound. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone are huge, but Hyperscape couldn't cut it.
A strong, cogent argument can be made for having a wide variety of game developers. I don't see ANYONE saying, "we need more companies like EA, Activision or UbiSoft."
Games are an art form like any other, I don't see people complaining there's too many songs or too many movies, and it's easier than ever to make one thanks to all the free engines, hobbyists make something, push it to itch.io and move on with their lives.