Video Game Crash 2.0

Back in 1983 there was a video game crash, it happened due to a couple issues. The oversaturation of low quality games and consumer burnout of those low quality titles.

Now we are in a similar situation that I predicted a couple years ago. Everyone called me crazy and honestly about two months ago, I was starting to question if it could happen. Gaming is massive, it’s the biggest entertainment industry in the world, far surpassing movies at this point. Everyone games and also everyone can make games, thanks to free game making engines like Unreal Engine and Unity.

So the last couple of years, I saw the writing on the wall of the gaming industry and started talking about how we are repeating the same mistakes as the early 80’s. Tons of horrible quality games being released at a break-neck speed, which is oversaturating the market. This is mostly due in large part to small indie developers. On the opposite side, the bigger publishers that have been a part of the industry since it’s early days, like EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft (who all are buying up smaller and bigger publishers and studios at an alarming rate) have decided to take forever releasing games.

One of the initial reasons I thought the Gaming Crash 2.0 would happen, is thanks to big publishers not releasing games like they used to. We had a whole middle tier game, usually consisting of smaller budget titles and licensed movie or TV show tie-in games that don't really exist anymore. They still are found mostly in the mobile scene, but that’s such a different beast, it really doesn’t even count. It’s the equivalent of a Theme Park ride vs a gumball machine.

Not only is that middle tier budget game gone completely, these publishers are now taking much longer than ever to release a single game, and those single games also aren’t surrounded with other releases. Originally we’d have at least 10 major game releases from a single big publisher every year. E3 presentations were hours long with preview after preview of things releasing in the same 6 month to year timeline. Now, we get one new big release once every few years. The releases might line up to two per year, but that’s about it, because these games are taking around 6-7 years to produce.

This was my initial reasoning for calling the Video Game Crash 2.0 a certainty. The industry can’t sustain itself, and these devs, studios and publishers can’t stay in business if they release a single product every 7 years, it’s just not possible. You also have the scope of games wildly out of control. Games from earlier generations were defined by pretty rigid genres, and for the most part, stuck to those pre-defined limits. A racing game, had you racing. A platformer had you going left to right and jumping. A shooter was linear and had just a simple amount of objectives. But modern gaming has morphed into every game pulling genre defining mechanics from every type of game and melding them into their own game. Every game now has RPG elements, every game has multiple stat trees and leveling up techniques along with multiplayer and “meta” that reach far beyond the outside of the game.

Every game now also requires years of balances and patches and always online play. No longer can a game just be released and the studio moves onto a new product, they need to keep it updated and push out weekly patches for several years, thanks to “Games As A Service” philosophy. Meaning a game has to continually capture players, keep them within the game’s ecosystem and have them constantly purchase new cosmetic items. This again is unsustainable for a developer to do. To keep a game going long after it’s been finished, and devote time and staff to older products just seems insane, and it is.

All of these are massive issues within the gaming industry and have been going on within the last decade. There is also the fact that the last decade of the industry has been hijacked by social activists and people who hate the gaming industry, and the entire world ended up caving and catering to these lunatics. I don’t want to get into it, or rant about it, because all sane people know what I’m talking about and while it is an issue within the topic of the gaming crash, it’s a whole topic in and of itself. Instead we can shift our focus to the new looming threat, one that I didn’t really foresee happening, the Price Wars.

The Price Wars started really being an issue during the Pandemic in 2021, prices of everything skyrocketed due to the closure of the entire world for months. Not allowing businesses to build products or manufacture anything. This caused demand for items that were in short supply, it’s simple economics. This bled over into the gaming industry slowly, but now in 2025, 4 years later, we are at the dawn of the new era that is so far off base, that it’s the new big issue of what I believe will finally cause the Video Game Crash 2.0.

Nintendo’s long anticipated Switch 2 console was unveiled on April 2nd and with it, saw a modest price bump of the hardware. At $450 for the console itself without any pack-in games, we saw the most expensive Nintendo console ever produced. The original Switch launched at $300 and the Switch 2 costs $450. With a $150 price difference, this isn’t awful, but Nintendo isn’t known for making very powerful hardware, they always are the least powerful hardware in the big three gaming manufactures (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo). But what really is the underlying issue, and what most people decided to get up in arms about, is the new pricing standard for their games.

The largely anticipated Mario Kart World was announced as a $80 digital version, with other countries announcing that it would cost $10 more for the physical version of the game (in their own currency). This set off the powderkeg discussion, where most were rightly upset, and those on the other side, mostly said people were making a big deal about nothing, and that due to developers having families to feed or working hard, that the games deserved to cost more and that we should be thankful. This also was followed by the sharing of old game advertisements that showcased Nintendo SNES and N64 cartridges costing between $50 and $90.

What most didn’t realize is that there were several issues with trying to use those old advertisements.

1. Cartridges in the 90’s cost significantly more to produce than discs. Those ads also had Playstation games, and they all were marked as reasonable $20-$50 prices.

2. Cartridge chips were in short supply, meaning the bigger the storage space of the chip, the more it cost. This basically meant that if the video game was larger in size (data-wise), than it cost more to produce, which is why the cost of these games varied wildly from game to game, some costing $50 some costing 90$

3. Most of those advertisements were from Canadian storefronts where in the 90’s the price of Canadian goods was much more expensive than those in the US.

4. And finally, the fact that while games did cost more, it was due to the rental craze of the 90’s as well. Using VHS as an example, VHS tapes originally cost hundreds of dollars, which normal families could never afford. Rental stores popped up providing a place to “rent” the movie for a small fee, and then have it returned. A rental store would rent the same movie out hundreds of times allowing the cost to be recouped very quickly, and then turn a profit. Video Games were the same in the early 90’s. Disposable income on entertainment like “owning” video games just wasn’t the standard for most, when we all usually rented the majority of games we play. It wasn’t until around the turn of the century when the game playing audience grew up and was able to spend disposable income (being in the late teenage rage, and not spending the majority of money on food and rent) able to buy pretty much every game they wanted.

This also applies to the modern area, where hobbies are not only insanely costly, but the dawn of the Internet fame and bragging area puts a major focus and spotlight on highlighting collections. If you don’t own every game in a console's library, clearly you aren’t a true game lover right? This status symbolism that is placed on the retro gaming or console collections YouTuber community has twisted the history that no one was able to own the majority of games back then. It just wasn’t a thing.

So here we are back in 2025 and games now as a default, thanks to Nintendo starting it, we are in a Price War to see how much games get to cost. Late last year, the games media started rumors that Grand Theft Auto 6, which is so highly anticipated that it will sell more than any game ever made, was probably going to cost $100. These writers just pulled that number out of thin air and ran with it (they aren’t actual journalists, because that would require integrity, which they certainly don’t have). They also don’t pay for their games, as they are access media, meaning they get their games for free to write about (I also have received some games for free to cover, as long as I’m honest about my opinion)

Once you put something like “Hey, GTA might cost $100” and it’s written by every major gaming news site, that will get back to TakeTwo and that seed of a thought will be planted. That will get brought up through the ranks and chain to a meeting, where it will be presented that the public already is anticipating it, which will in turn make it happen.

Later on in April, after the Switch 2 reveal, once pre-orders finally became available, Nintendo raised the price of hardware, and just today Microsoft also announced the raising of hardware prices for their 5 year old console.

We are in a time and era that has never happened before. Where older technology that should normally have seen several price slashes, are seeing price hikes. Items cost $100+ more than they did 5 years ago, and are significantly less impressive and struggle to keep up with the performance of today’s technology.

As of May 1st 2025, the gaming industry has a crisis on its hands.

1. Games cost more, defaulting at $80 for the base game, digitally
2. 5 year old game systems cost over $100 more than they did when they launched, and are the same model.
3. Big publishers are taking 6-7 years to make a single game, that has scope creep and too many different mechanics
4. Indie games are over-saturating the market
5. Indie and Big Publisher (AAA) games are both suffering from low quality. Due to hiring the wrong people, and no talent or creativity from most of the development staff.
6. Games As A Service has taken over and requires studios to continually update older products and entice players to stay on them, while forcing pointless cosmetics.

This will cause the Video Game Crash 2.0 to happen soon. And we have been seeing it happen slowly over the last two years. Every week we see studio’s close their doors, employees lose their jobs in massive layoffs, and again, the industry can’t sustain itself when this is a weekly occurrence for over two years. Some of those layoffs are because of the wrong people being hired, and pushing agendas into games that no one wants. The likes of games like Concord and others deserve those products to fail, it's the market pushing back and saying “No, we don’t want this”. But we also have to have compassion and realize there are human beings at the end of these news pieces being laid off. I try to look at the studio and product to see what those people actually put out and see if the staff is the type of person who cares about what they make and loves video games and wants to make the best game possible, or if it’s just a way to get their agenda pushed out.

This is the beginning of the end for the modern video game industry. And honestly, I’m actually happy. If you look at the last decade of gaming, we’ve been in a weird holding pattern of sorts. Trying to see what games become popular and take the world by storm, like a viral video sensation. That’s no way to make a product or run a company or have an industry. The industry at large, both big publishers and indies, have gravitated to trying to appease an audience that mostly doesn’t exist. Without getting nasty or hateful, it’s a very tiny but very vocal minority of people who can’t deal with real life and have to tie their personalities and life to a certain ideology.

Getting rid of these parasites within the industry is the first step to fixing video games as a whole. The focus on agenda and ideology pushing, with the entire focus of modern games having a story that is only for a very specific and non-existant demographic in games is a major part of the way gaming has been for the most part awful. Getting back to basics, like making games “fun” is required. Spending less time on shoving every mechanic in the game, and focusing on good gameplay or good mechanics and blending them into a balanced and enjoyable smaller scoped product that doesn’t require reading dozens of discord server updates and patches and meta commentary about what new mechanic got “nerfed” will also bring the industry back to a much more grounded place.

This isn’t doom and gloom, this is hope for a better industry in the next handful of years. But like I said in 2024, 2025 and 2026 are going to be rough. It’s happening, and the culture shift, or more like the people got tired of being pushed around and finally stood up and together and said “enough is enough”. This is the industry on the rise that I’m excited to see. Give it a few years, but gaming is being restored, and it will be fantastic!