The State of Gaming 2025

[studbucket]

I work in the games industry and previously worked on various media/entertainment experiences as well. One of the most interesting voices in the space is Matthew Ball, and he just released his "State of Gaming 2025" document, which is a 200+ slide document.

https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025

I know it's a lot, but the data is FASCINATING. Don't take my word for it, check it out.

[SugarPlumFairy]

Wow, this looks like a goldmine of insights! Excited to dive into the data and see where the gaming industry is headed. Thanks for sharing!

[pietasterp]

Pretty interesting stuff. I wish someone would summarize my industry in such a tight package!

[piffbernd]

Gaming is more Mainstream now. Game studios should more paying attention to game physic than resolution. I dont think gaming industy losing to much with Piracy. Netflix and co will sooner or later feel the pinch. Buying Power is more there.

[canes21]

Nice read. Love me some analytics.

Purely anecdotal, but what has led to me buying less and less games over recent years has simply been due to the lack of creativity in the gaming space and the focus on the wrong areas in game development. It's no secret that so much money is poured into graphical fidelity. Graphics are one of the easiest things to market, they are literally what you see first when seeing a game for the first time. They also can be expensive to both produce at a high level and to run on modern hardware when not optimized properly, which optimization has become an industry-wide issue.

I think in general far too many developers put too many resources towards making a game pretty while somewhat ignoring making the game fun to play. That isn't to say graphics do not matter. They do, particularly art style. I don't need every single game to look as realistic as possible with 1,000's of mocapped animations that were expensive to create.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a masterpiece and one of my favorite games, but that game is full of bloat that the average gamer isn't aware of or doesn't care about. It's cool to watch an NPC have a routine they follow each day with mocapped animations, and I appreciate the efforts the team went in to give that kind of detail, but I also don't need 500 different NPCs to have unique lives and animations around the world for that game to be immersive. Rockstar gets away with it because of the high quality standards they have for all aspects of their games, but the cost is that we went from an era where we got 3 GTA releases in 4 years to now we're on year 12 since GTA V came out.

Other developers don't hit the same quality of Rockstar so we end up with a lot of games that are pretty but not fun to play, or they're pretty, somewhat fun, but they run like crap. There are so many pretty games out there that have flopped because their gameplay was boring, it wasn't creative, the writing sucked, an agenda was clearly being pushed above all else, etc.

Meanwhile, especially in the indie scene, there's not really an abundance of games with great gameplay that flopped because their graphics weren't up to snuff. Instead, there's a large number of games with purposefully dated graphics that have their primary focus clearly being innovative and deep gameplay.

Outside of the indie scene there are even studios like Hazelight that have their games produced by a company like EA but have a AA budget yet they are able to put out incredibly high quality games like It Take Two and Split Fiction. It Takes Two is one of the more innovative games to come out in the last decade or longer, has a nice art style, and was created on a $3 million budget. It's considered one of the best co-op games of all time, it's one of the highest rated games of all time.

It is that highly regarded despite having a budget that is 3% of that of the flop that was Watch Dogs Legion. 1-3% the budget of Red Dead 2. That's 1-2% of the budget that Dragon Age The Veilguard had, another EA production that was a massive flop because of the lack of vision from development leadership, a common theme at AAA studios these days.

Graphics are great, I am a sucker for things like Ray Tracing and Path Tracing. I love games that set out to be realistic looking in the right context. I think art style matters more than anything graphically and everything must flow together whether a game sets out to be realistic or not. However, gameplay will always reign supreme and a lot of game studios these days don't seem to realize that. If the industry wants more people like me to buy more games again, to spend more hours in a variety of games again, then start producing games that have innovative, deep, and engaging gameplay. That has got to be priority #1.

I am not going to sit here and anxiously await generic AAA title #126 that has a 12 hour single player campaign with dated gameplay solely because it has pretty graphics that aren't even optimized all that well. Instead of spending 50 hours mocapping animations for a 12-hour campaign, give me handmade animations that are the quality of It Takes Two, give me unique gameplay like It Takes Two, and you'll have me as a customer. It really is that simple. Games have simply gotten stale and innovation in gameplay is scarce these days. Everything is all about graphics anymore and since that became the case 10ish years ago it feels like that coincided with us seeing so many flops annually.

[Picci]

The charts are fascinating. Always love studying the economics of video games. Going to generally do updated posts as I read into it more but I'll give my take from a baby boomers perspective. Not that I'm speaking for all of us but generally from what I've noticed as an avid gamer all my life since playing Pong on the Atari.

Yes, there been bad games but also very good games too! The devs have also given us more perks in the last 10 years. Wish I could capture that one slide but we got F2Play, Cross-Platform, Battle Royales, UGCs, etc., as some examples. Internet upgrades further boosted its popularity. Everything seemed to have peeked as covid hit. People were confined to their homes! So what's going on? One thing for sure, it didn't help that PS5's and Xbox systems new generations weren't readily available for many gamers.

Need to go back to the study room

[studbucket]

Gaming has finally started seeing the death of the middle class, which we saw in other forms of entertainment many years previously. It leads to a lot of what canes talks about, where games are now these hundreds of millions of dollar monstrosities, or they are single game dev titles. It's hard to find the mid-size studios anymore.

And with more and more game studios being part of publicly traded companies, the pressure to drive shareholder value overwhelms any patience or room for creativity.

I want to see more "middle class" games released by companies that aren't forced to do annual releases or hit budgets to drive shareholder value.

Glad you all are enjoying the document. It certainly made the rounds in my team and has been really helpful in understanding industry trends.

[KSUowls]

I work in finance and geek out a bit over pretty graphs and analytics.

Lots of interesting data points in the presentation. These are what influence my consumer behavior though.

One area that I was hoping that the presentation dove deeper into was the price hikes (though I understand why this format isn't suited for that kind of a deep dive).

While it's true that inflation adjusted package price in 1995 for instance would have represented more real dollars today, that isn't the full story. For one, it isn't entirely unexpected that a still relatively new industry would be able to ask for a premium versus a mature one. Also, while $60 from 20 or more years equates to more real dollars today, it isn't an accurate representation of an individual's purchasing power during the two time points to only look at the inflation aspect alone. A deeper dive into the macroeconomics would probably suggest that the $60 game from 20 years ago represented a smaller portion of an individual's disposable income (due to higher costs of living: housing, rent, groceries, insurance, etc). So, even if games today are technically less expensive when you adjust for inflation, they don't 'feel' cheaper due to the level of disposable income.

In addition to this is the evolution into live service models which makes that $60 purchase 'feel' even worse. We now even have full-priced games releasing with day 1 premium-DLC single player components. I don't have all of the data here, but I can definitely say that my behavior as a consumer is heavily influenced on what type of content the game has, especially if there is early premium-DLC. I am more likely to either completely pass on these games or wait until some kind of discounted complete addition before buying them.

Separate from the economics but equally important, I am in the same boat as Canes with the point that he brought up. The areas that man games seem to focus on don't align with what I'm interested in a lot of cases. There are a lot of different subtopics to go into there, but suffice it to say I look at the list of upcoming games each year and don't get too excited. I will say that 2025 looks to be a banner year imo, but also at least half of the games that I'm excited for, they are not guaranteed for a release this year.

I also just want to end with a quote by Swen Vincke from Larian Studios. It was a speech that he gave when presenting the game of the year winner. Maybe a bit ideological, but I think that it is on topic for this point considering how massive of a commercial success that it was while coming from someone who has been pretty critical of the industry's processes. (ie: the industry does not need to find more ways to gouge players to be successful)

Quote:

The studio made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted to play themselves. The didn't make it to increase market shares. They didn't make it to serve a brand. They didn't have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if the didn't meet those targets. Furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue, and don't serve the game design. They didn't treat their developers like numbers of a spreadsheet. They didn't treat their players as users to exploit, and they didn't make decisions they knew were shortsighted in function of a bonus or politics. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue will follow. They were driven by idealism, and wanted players to have fun. They realized that if the developers didn't have fun, nobody was going to have any fun.