I saw some hysterical Twitter thread a couple days ago claiming that the end of AAA games was nigh. There are some weird vibes out there.
It's absolutely true that there have been a ton of layoffs in the past ~12 months. But I've seen zero evidence of actual sales slowing down. 2023 saw a ton of big hits, from Zelda to Diablo to Baldur's Gate.
The AAA gaming economics are a different issue: budgets have ballooned so much that it's near impossible to hit breakeven.
The games you mentioned are extreme outliers (no one expected BG3 to do as well as it did), and there have been a number of studio-killing bombs this year.
so much of game dev is work for hire that if the big publicly traded companies tap the breaks on things for a few months to mull over market direction or to make their stock price look better, it doesn't mean anything for the publishers, but results in a wave of game cancelations and layoffs for the tiny work for hire studios way down the line.
That's what is happening right now.
May well be that in 2025/2026 we see a light year of releases.
Honestly Unity has had a slew of problems for years. Completely useless purchase of WETA tech, product not improving markedly, ad network (IronSource) issues, problematic CEO.
The price hike fight was the last straw. They've had a ton of time to fix these issues but haven't responded to users asks, up to the point where viable open-source alternatives are starting to take root.
