The rampant contraction, consolidation, and uncertainty in the games industry risks boxing out creators and denying opportunities for teams to develop and master their craft. A new generation of household names like Larian, Remedy, FromSoftware, CD Projekt Red, or Respawn may never be allowed to bloom today. At least, that's the concern of veteran game developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. of (mostly) Strange Scaffold fame.
Originally, I spoke to Nelson Jr. about how, in his view, generative AI won't solve the games industry's budget problems – one of many reasons a lot of game developers don't want to use gen AI. In short, AI didn't cause the unsustainable approach to game development afflicting many publishers, and worse games made cheaper with AI won't fix it. As Nelson Jr. puts it: "We are spending an unknown amount of money in an unknown amount of time to make a game of unknown quality to reach an unknown amount of people." And so far, AI has only added another budget problem: the AI-driven RAM drought has seen console (and Steam Machine) prices rise so high that these machines are no longer accessible to many.
Taking another step back, Nelson Jr. raises an increasingly evergreen point about the confounding combination of industry-wide disasters and endless good games, and it touches on how the effects of the past few years will linger.
Good games in bad conditions
"That's part of why everyone seems like they're losing their minds. It's because, every day, a game is coming from an unexpected place and having an impact on the industry and on players," observes Nelson Jr. "It seems like, without even trying, great games will continue to emerge." Just this week, I wrote about how two devs made a game in four months and watched in awe as it earned over $360,000 in 24 hours.
"The invisible damage of investors, executives, publishers, and even players waiting for great games to emerge from the ether is that the voices that could be producing those projects and refining their craft and making your next favorite game will never have the ability to practice their art such that they can bring that to you," he adds.
A huge problem, Nelson Jr. reasons, is that more and more successful games are coming from unexpected places. Now, this sounds like a good thing. People are finding success and good games are coming out. The actual problem is that the expected places, the bedrock of the industry and the spaces that once represented stability and legacy, are shrinking or dying. This contributes to that uncertainty, making a career in games more dangerous and stunting studios.
You don't get the next FromSoftware without having a group of people, individually and together, exercise their craft.
Xalavier Nelson Jr.
"We regularly celebrate the studios and the individual artists that have had a chance to refine their craft for decades at a time, not just in games, but beyond," Nelson Jr. argues. "When an artist gets that much time to figure out what they're doing and why and how to make it meaningful, great things occur. And it happens over and over again. We look at Remedy, we look at Larian. Every single time these studios talk about what they do and how they do it, people get excited. Then simultaneously, we create none of the conditions for another Remedy or Larian to occur.
"If you look at FromSoftware before [its] modern era, they would put out like three or four video games a year minimum. If you look at their time between releases, Dark Souls 3 to Sekiro to Elden Ring was three years each time. How fucking crazy is that? And how much of that is built on a team which has shipped dozens of games beforehand? You don't get the next FromSoftware without having a group of people, individually and together, exercise their craft."
Your first game
Likewise, CD Projekt Red didn't start with The Witcher 3. Larian didn't start with Baldur's Gate 3. But if any of these studios were just sprouting today, they'd be hard-pressed to ever get the chance to make their Elden Ring, Witcher 3, or Baldur's Gate 3. That might require a debut on the level of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is a huge outlier. Which is not to reduce the scope of the games industry's culling to, horror of horrors, fewer games to play. The actual problem is that more people will not have the means or opportunity to build and sustain careers that enable games like that. Because games don't emerge from the ether. Ask Amazon, Xbox, Hasbro, or Embracer what happens when all you have is a bunch of money, control of some IP, and people who are worried about their livelihood.
For all the deserved concern in the air, video games are not going to up and vanish. But plenty of people will be forced out of game development, or forced to accept misery to stay in it. In Nelson Jr.'s view, an approach to games that is decidedly focused on people is probably the best way to help those people.
"I mourn the world where we are waiting for more studios like that to emerge because we haven't created the conditions for it to happen," he concludes. "It's like waiting at the door for a package you've never ordered. That's what the games industry has created in terms of not consistently supporting creators, and one of the only ways we can reverse that is by audiences paying attention to who makes the games that they are loving right now, and showing up for them as often as possible, and evangelizing those projects so that they can keep making them."
"I like finding a new, special, best-selling game on Steam that takes a hold of the zeitgeist as much as anyone. But when that story comes out of nowhere and I can't especially identify with a journey that the developer has gone on to build it, there is something missing. And I also know, because of the patterns in the games industry, I might not see them ever make a game again, and we have to change that."
