Is A Gaming Crash Coming? - Luke Reacts

do I think a gaming crash is coming obviously there's a ton of layoffs going on right now that is extremely unfortunate thousands and thousands of people being laid off uh and it's it's no mystery I mean I told you guys on Wednesday buckle up for more layoffs to be announced and already like within the last 36 hours we're getting announcements of like gearboxes being sold there's going to be layoffs um I forget what the name of the uh the smaller studio is saber interactives being sold off to somebody we'll talk about that in a a later segment on the stream so like there's a lot of stuff still happening and so obviously there's a problem within the community uh or within the industry rather and I think gamers are sort of separated from it for a handful of time handful of reasons but the the primary problem at the core of the gaming industry right now is just that games are too expensive to make specifically on the AAA and quadruple a scale and that lands on Executive shoulders that lands on the shoulders of the people greenlighting projects and trying to make everything into like massive open world action RPGs and even then like they aren't necessarily the most profitable or successful games even when they do that not every game needs to be The Witcher 3 and so I think what we're going to see as far as a crash is concerned is probably like a a focus on shorter story lines you're going to see scope significantly narrowed so like the next God of War I don't think we're going to see a god of war game that's like 60 hours long I I I just don't think we see even 40 hours as a stretch I think the Spider-Man 2 like 15-hour campaign is probably where most of these games are going to land even then you're getting a lot of games that are still stupid expensive like Spider-Man 2 apparently cost upwards of 300 million which puts it up there with the likes of like some of the most expensive superhero action films from Hollywood that were crazy successful in their own right so they have to find a way to trim costs that's going to come by shrinking the teams shrinking the the budgets and scope and everything and figuring that out I think that you're going to see scope lessened I think you're going to see a lot of these companies leaning more into new Innovative tool sets you're going to see love it or hate it I think an embracing of AI tools a lot um it's going to hit departments like probably art like concept art really hard because I think for these Executives they're looking at it they're like why do we need to pay 20 concept artists when we can pay one and then just give them a license to Mid Journey he can feed in pictures that he's drawn or painted or whatever and then mid Journey will create duplicates of different settings in that style easy do that I I think that's what they're going to start doing so you're going to see a lot of that stuff there are apparently some AI tools that are getting really good as far as like uh it's basically the modeling portion where you feed it pictures of different things and then it creates 3D models for you they were really bad like a year ago they're already getting pretty good so I'm sure there's going to be Investments made into that and they're going to really try to get that to be viable so people who model objects are basically out of work and that's going to be useful because that's a lot of contracted work that these companies are usually hiring outside Studios to do so you're going to see some of those specialized uh Contracting Studios get screwed over um basically we're just in a time where it's kind of a matter of reinvention the current industry is just not sustainable and we've said it for a long time you can't sell $70 games where the question of quality is really up in the air thankfully now unlike the 80s you can watch YouTubers stream ERS reviewers whatever and get an idea of the quality before you go out and buy it the problem in the 80s is that YouTube wasn't a thing the internet wasn't a thing the extent of like gaming journalism was an like semiannual magazine that you would buy there was and it was all like bought and paid for by Nintendo and these big companies so it wasn't a free market of information really now it is and we saw that with Suicide Squad kill the Justice League where that game I think in a vac probably could look pretty good to a lot of people could have sold a couple million copies at least and a lot of people would have I would argue gotten burned when they realized how short the game was how repetitive it was and all of that but because of the the broader community of reviewers of streamers of YouTubers just in general we were able to kind of warn everybody about those things before they wasted their money on it and so I don't really foresee a crash akin to the 80s happening but I do think that we're already seeing big huge budget AAA production value projects that release and almost nobody buys them Immortals of AVM is a great example for spoken is a great example uh the Saints Row reboot is a great example there are unfortunately many of these that you can point to and as a result like the companies are having to find ways to balance that out because they can't afford to Just Launch a dozen flops and just burn through billions of dollarss hoping that they get one that gets hit out of the park and I think that that was such a a business plan of extreme arrogance for these Executives to think that they could just make it's basically been PlayStation strategy for for the PS5 gen is that they wanted to make 12 live service games that launched before the second quarter of 2026 cool idea the whole premise of that though is that probably 10 to 11 of those are going to fly and make no money lose tons of money but the one or two that are successful like a hell divers is going to make up for the others turns out no the only ones that are finding success are the ones that are not egregiously monetized all of the others are just wholly uninteresting and they're affecting your production of single player titles that generate very wide margin Revenue figures for your your like single player Studios like naughty dog so they end up canceling a bunch of projects that never see the light of day wasting all this time and money and losing a lot of talent in the process and because now debt is not free and because financing is difficult and companies have to be careful with their money unlike 5 years ago or four years ago when you could just kind of do whatever you wanted cuz the government was footing the bill now they're having to reevaluate and actually find a way to run a sustainable business and unfortunately that takes the form of laying off a ton of people canceling a ton of projects and trying to reinvent themselves like honestly this current crash that's happening now with all these layoffs should have probably happened in 2020 or 2021 the reason it didn't was because debt was so freaking cheap when rates went to zero that these companies could just take on all of this debt to bank roll whatever projects they wanted to leverage themselves out above a cliff and then they just kind of went with it for as long as they could hoping that they could just stumble into a successful game that would print money and when they didn't now you see them suffering the consequences now now you see them being like okay well we have to actually run this like an effective business and unfortunately the people that suffer are the people on the uh bottom the people that the executives consider to be Expendable I also think Tobias I think you're right marketing has screwed a lot of games and you know it's it's like we said with Saints Row when when we first saw that trailer of like the hip cool gen z i remember the first time we saw this we're like oh that actually looks pretty good and then we start to see like this guy like what the hell is this what the hell is this and then you see all the like hipster dudes all the like metrosexual gen zers and you're like what or what do they call them Zoomers is is the Young Generation like this and I remember seeing this and thinking who is this supposed to appeal to like they put this together and clearly they thought people were going to see this and think he looks cool and be like oo I want to be like him I want to play that I relate to him I connect with him nobody I've ever met would connect to this individual everybody I know would not want to be friends with this guy because he embodies everything wrong with the younger generation you know like everything wrong it's I just I cannot fathom why anybody would think he's likable or or interesting or why you'd want to play a game where he's a member of the core cast as the the game you know got closer and closer we got more trailers more gameplay looks it just looked worse and worse and worse and I realized something I was like who does this appeal to I'm asking that question who would find this cool and then it hit me oh the people that are making and designing these games and writing these stories think that's cool because it's them it's these these people that come out of art school and think that this is really badass and they all sit in a conference room together without any outside input and so they're just in an echo chamber which is why we get Saints Row coming out everybody unanimously mocking it for being so cringey and they are genuinely shocked like they're actually stunned that people find this cringey it's the same thing with like for spoken the the cringe related to for spoken uh writing was a total surprise to the devs Apparently based on interviews after the fact they were genuinely stunned like we just we thought people were going to connect with her we we just start kind of in shock a little bit and it's because they didn't talk to anybody on the outside or if they heard somebody with an an alternate opinion they dismissed it as hateful or spiteful or bigoted or whatever else like I'm if I don't think that this guy looks interesting if I think that this guy is like somebody I would want to actively avoid in my day-to-day life that's not me being like a bigot it's me being I think a rational human being that doesn't want to be around Nar narcissistic megalomaniacs which is coming from a YouTuber if anybody knows narcissistic egomaniacs and megalomaniacs it's me I would know it and I don't want anything to do with this guy that should tell you everything you need to know so with it I I think that you're right like I think the writing and marketing of these games has really harmed them um and I think maybe it's the the fortnigh ification of games where like all of these companies are trying to tap into that same Market but it's the fundamental like fallacy of all of this is that they think you can just make sort of a fortnite game that looks vaguely like fortnite and fortnite players will come to it no no fortnite players are very much entrenched in the fortnite ecosystem they're not going to just bail for some weird Saints Row reboot like this they're just not they're not so you're trying to appeal to a market that's already been claimed it just doesn't make sense it's why like I think fan feedback I think uh the Early Access with Community Support is a great way to do it um you know there's plenty of games Boulders Gate 3 being a great example that have been built on fan and Community feedback and when the community doesn't like something they adjust it and change it and they bail on it but I mean you're seeing it even now like I won't go into it but um there were people that worked on suicide squad let's just say that were very very upset and took the critiques and criticisms of the game very very personally because they worked on it they're passionate about it I get it if I worked on something for years I would want it to be successful too but if it's a cringy broken boring pile of garbage that's what's going to be the narrative like all the other great work doesn't matter putting together a cinematic trailer like this is not easy just doing this is a remarkable feet for any group to pull off this is crazy cool but at the end of the day you're trying to sell me a video game I I don't really foresee there being a crash akin to the 80s I do think we're going to see well we're we're already seeing a lot of cancellations of big projects and I don't think we're going to see as many like big triple or quadruple attempts at reboots or at spin-off games or um new IP I just don't think we see that I think games are going to have to really earn their or franchises will have to really earn their budgets and you're not going to see companies taking big risks on like a $200 million Saints Row reboot but the reason why I don't think that it's going to feel like that big of a crash is just because players weren't playing those games anyways so it's not like we're really going to be losing anything if anything we lose maybe one or two really cringy games a year um that are just horrible but I don't think that that will necessarily be the worst thing it's an interesting question very interesting question but I I really do not foresee I don't foresee a crash quite akin to it he took my thing red flag red flag 16 times the detail

Channel: Luke Stephens LIVE

Views: 33,917

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Id: VB8a8W299wI

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024