This isn’t meant to be a wholly negative post but we’ll see how that goes. Basically it’s been such a negative tear for anything relating to video games. Prices of games are going up, monetization is everywhere, big AAA developers are getting bought out by unsavory groups, hardware components cost more than ever, layoffs across the video game industry (and tech as well), games media keeps getting obliterated, and AI being such a little shit.

Yeah it sucks. It’s easy to assume everything will be okay eventually which as a mantra of mine, I do wholly believe. But how this industry has been shaping itself in the last few years and how it continues to go doesn’t give much hope.

There’s a large amount of news and topics to pick and extrapolate from about the health of the industry. We can talk about how Steam Machine, a PC that is meant to operate like a console for the masses, is over a thousand bucks and that price may increase in the future depending on how expensive RAM and SSDs get. Speaking of consoles, PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and Nintendo Switch 2 all got a price increase this year due to a combination of tariffs, production costs, and other bullshit. It’s weird to think in a few years, the next-gen consoles for PlayStation and Xbox may start at $1000 given how this current gen started almost six years ago. Fucking AI.

All these price increases for hardware components are only because of the greed of AI. People everywhere are too afraid to miss out on this stupidly deformed bubble so we gotta build more data centers, and invest in ponzi-scheme ass, same $20 Billion switching between a handful of companies. And the price of anything computer related just keeps going up. 64gb RAM is like six times the price it was three years ago. Hobbies relating to tinkering a computer with shit just got more expensive. Just so these companies can force Joe Schmoe and Jane Doe to keep asking their chatbots to make genAI slop. Just fuck AI. Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Larry Ellison, and all the other boneheads of AI will not see the pearly gates of heaven.

So prices have gone up to buy or build a machine to play video games. Luckily I got them at the initial MSRP, but now it’s just a money grabbing schemes by these big assholes everywhere. Sony stated they’ll stop producing physical disks for their console in early 2028 so they’ll just force everyone to buy through through digital store. This doesn’t help the consumer in any way except for the convenience of being able to buy a license from Sony so they can play when their servers are running. Oh and Sony can delist any of these games at any point too so goodbye to the idea of game ownership (to be fair, even buying a physical disc doesn’t mean you own the game, but at least you can play it without some network call to a server). Nintendo has already been serving up game-key cards (a physical cartridge allowing you to download the game on any system) which will work until Nintendo decides to shut down the servers. And eventually Microsoft will follow up with their own digital only future of some sort.

So prices will stay high I guess but that means companies can make more money then. Too bad layoffs is a normal thing these companies do. Already throughout this year, almost ten thousand people have been laid off with several studios getting shut down. Not to mention Microsoft has been a prolific layoff machine, having multiple rounds and warning their employees that more are to come. And these developers aren’t making bad games or games that don’t make money. EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson got a huge bonus due to how successful Battlefield 6 turned out to be but they also laid off a bunch of people after the game launched. And they just got bought out by a private equity group through a leverage buyout (load the company with all the debt and everyone else gets the money) and they’re already planning more layoffs. Success is a metric only rewarded to the top.

So we got vampires, fraudsters, and idiots making money moves just to enrich themselves. Where’s the hope?

I honestly don’t know.

But I know there’s still good games coming out. There’s still small indie studios making cool games and releasing them and I hope they still thrive. I played Mina the Hollower and I hope Yacht Club never goes out of business. Devolver Digital, a huge force in the indie game space, intends to go private so they can “focus on the long-term health of the company and less on satisfying the requirements of the public market, which have nothing to do with being a successful game publisher.” They realize the bloodsuckers don’t care about video games.

And also my hope can’t just be pinned on the indie space. Even though Nintendo is a for-profit company, they still seem to be focused on making quality video games even when their lawyers are on standby ready to shoot at any given moment. And their direction doesn’t seem to waver with Shigeru Miyamoto stating “If you only think about whether something will make money quickly when you create it, you can’t create anything unique or with potential.”

But luckily I have a huge backlog of games to play. I should focus on it instead of chasing all the new games maybe.

At the end of the day, each video game (the good ones) is made by people. I can only hope this trend will continue and the sun will continue to shine on them and hopefully on those ugly, vile vampires so they can perish.