I saw someone, somewhere, saying something like this recently: it’s always easier to play the role of doomsayer than the optimist, because far fewer people seem to care if you’re wrong when you’re predicting something will fail.
I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but in writing this one it is undoubtedly at the back of my mind. This is because I think the video games industry – that is, the established order of massive, western developer-publishers, each making multiple games that cost hundreds of millions and employing developers in the thousands – isn’t just in big trouble, now that GTA 6 has been unsurprisingly delayed to mid-2026. I think it’s finished. The games industry as we know it is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.
Big statement, so hold your rotten fruit for a minute while I qualify that a bit. The games industry as we know it – have known it – looks like this. Major, publicly traded western publishers such as Ubisoft, EA, 2K and the like would release major, triple-A (or even “quad-A”!) video games on an annual basis. Some of those are annualised franchises, like Call of Duty, 2K sports games, or FIFA/FC, while others are annualised via a kind of perpetually-rotating roster: Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Ghost Recon, The Division, etc. Platform holders in Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would largely do something similar, with a smattering of smaller games in between.
Meanwhile, smaller, more boutique ‘indie’ publishers – your Devolvers, Annapurnas, Keplers, Team17s and the like – would also release a steady stream of medium-sized games. The Japanese development scene would be far and away the largest other contributor to the medium. The indie scene would add thousands of games each year. The mobile games market would siphon billions from commuters’ idle moments. Consoles would get cheaper as generations went on, not more expensive. And every so often a new, zeitgeist-y service game would arrive with varying degrees of dominance, from the trailblazer of WoW to its spiritual kin in League of Legends and Destiny, and then to PUBG, Fortnite, Warzone, Warframe, Minecraft, GTA Online, Apex Legends, Roblox and beyond.