The Video Game Crash of 2024...

hello guys and gals me mudahar and today we got to talk about is gaming dying is gaming gonna crash again now ladies and gentlemen I want to just really start off by saying that I love video games I really do like I mean my Channel's name is some ordinary gamers I play video games you know since I was a kid and I still do to this day one of my favorite video games very recently is Final Fantasy 7 rebirth okay yeah it's a remake of Final Fantasy 7 I get it but it's pretty much the vision that the original developer I guess wanted and it's one that I appreciate but this isn't a review of a video game this is a talk about one of the biggest industries in entertainment that's currently being talked about and the reason we're talking about it in such a weird shaky way if it's going to crash is I don't know if you've been following ladies and gentlemen you probably have been gaming companies are laying off employees like the plague ladies and gentlemen it's pretty bad right now so you know you might have heard literally like a day ago are EA Games fire D 670 workers okay they sunsetted games in production respawn literally lost a firstperson shooter in the Star Wars franchise we are getting we we are literally sunsetting games from some of the biggest IPS that we know will sell millions upon millions of copies right and they're moving away from licensed IPS in the future I guess they want to work on stuff on their own now of course that's just EA Games doing it ladies and gentlemen you've also got PlayStation how many people do they lay off 10 20 30 n try 900 employees across some of the biggest Studios imaginable even Sony was like the PlayStation community means everything to us so I felt it was important to update you on a difficult day at our company we made the extremely hard decision to basically reduce the overall head count of 8% globally so 900 people over there subject to local law and consultation processes blah blah blah and what's insane about it too is like in the United Kingdom an entire Studio the London studio just completely closed completely shut down reductions in fire spite Studios reduction in a bunch of different areas and of course everyone is affected so you could be a naughty dog you could be an insomniac you're still getting thrown out and it's funny because Insomniac literally made one of the highest selling games of like last year Spider-Man 2 and they're still facing actual like you know layoffs even after making a boatload of cash for Sony and the industry in general literally making one of the most top selling games out there on the market and now of course if you thought that Sony was maybe going through some hard times no even Microsoft which by the way I think is the second largest company if not I think it might just be the first largest company in the entire world the biggest corporation in the entire planet laid off 1900 Activision employees Xbox employees in general so even the biggest company in the world also chopped off around 8% of its actual Workforce uh literally because I guess they they're going through some hard times it seems now the reason I guess everyone is saying that this is kind of a crash is because it's not normal at least to see all of these layoffs happening in unison especially around the gaming and tech industry in general now obviously there's a bunch of factors in the situation I'm not an expert but obviously I've been around this long enough to kind of see some of the signs obviously you know during the period of Co during lockdown during the pandemic there was a whole period where these companies were making a lot of money because people were stuck inside their houses and the gaming industry and again just entertainment in general you know if you were like an influencer in this space or if you were in like the gaming World your numbers were higher than ever you made a lot of money you basically got to sit home with an audience that was also sitting at home and that's the the audience that all of these companies were catering to and for a while when the when the world went remote hiring individuals to work on games was something I guess a lot of the industry really jumped into now with the whole pandemic over and US returning back to that normal life we once had pre 2019 a lot of these companies are pulling people back into the actual like uh you know offices you literally had Rockstar Games pretty much tell the actual employees they had a month's notice to come back to the office because they're on the final stretch of working for GTA 6 and they were not going to risk any security issues which is understandable but that's the world that the company that the world wants to return to and obviously the entire gaming industry is kind of suffering from that reeling right like obviously when you bring that many people in and now that you know the world's back to normaly some of these video game sales some of the engagement numbers may have slipped enough for these companies to realize maybe we need to scale back the workforce just so we can meet that same world we had pre pandemic that's about my analysis and the situation and what I see coming in now I guess the question could be asked muda is this a sign of another crash is the gaming industry about to die now obviously I think video games if you've looked at them now compared to 1983 when the video game Crash happened it's a little bit disingenuous first off the entire industry is way more mature than you could ever expect okay a lot more people play video games it's not a kids anymore there are adults there are grandparents at this point that actually can fire up a computer or a video game console and are playing video games there are millions of players every day on various different MMO games Shooters and whatnot arguably Call of Duty is probably never been as popular as it has been now we might like to complain about it but there's probably more players on war zone than the people playing Call of Duty on the 360 PS3 generation in its entirety a lot of people play video games a lot more than you could ever expect there is an entire industry of people who make millions upon millions of dollars a year streaming video game gameplay to people who are watching in the tens if not hundreds of thousands if not millions of people it would be outright weird to say that gaming is going to die because there's just not enough engagement even sales-wise video games continue to sell millions upon Millions if not billions of dollars for some specific games now obviously games have gotten more expensive to make and they take a lot more time you know it used to be that the Mass Effect Trilogy could drop on the same generation of consoles now a same trilogy The Final Fantasy 7 remake stuff literally releases between One console generation to another and honestly if you ask me we might not even get the third and final part to the Remake Saga for Final Fantasy until the ps6 drops okay or towards the very end of the PS5 is probably when you're looking at that stuff releasing that's just the reality of it games have gotten so big and so uh expensive to produce that it takes not only years but literally magnitudes more cash than you could ever imagine so that's where the one problem is and maybe that's like a AAA gaming problem a lot of games nowadays are coming out that are made by like doublea Studios games like hell divers 2 you know smaller experiences that are making good money but obviously they take a fraction of the cost to actually produce which are the kind of games that personally I actually enjoy playing more than a lot of the AAA stuff that ends up being slopped out the consoles anyways now obviously the video game Market is huge and people have been comparing this to the crash of 1983 so I kind of wanted to give a crash course in understanding why that actually happened back in the day see back in 1983 what had happened was in a 2-year period 83 to 1985 their the actual sales of video games dropped 97% you went from an industry that at the time was valued in the billions of dollars all the way to under 100 million in the span of 2 years and to give you an idea of how bad that can be obviously is for the companies that were involved seeing sales drop off that hard led to widescale bankruptcies across the entire industry okay literally Studios Publishers had to start shuttering and it wasn't until Nintendo Rose From the Ashes with the NES that the video game industry actually ended up coming back and rising to the popularity that it is currently today so of course what happened back in the day well there was a lot of different consoles to give you an idea nowadays you've got the PlayStation you've got the Xbox you've got like the Nintendo switch these are three consoles plus the PC market that obviously exists so there is obviously choice but it's not crazy amounts of choice and honestly nowadays if you're looking at Xbox or Playstation it's really down to like the three or four four exclusive games between the systems that matter now back in the day you had different systems you had the kico Visions the intell Visions you had the Magnavox Odyssey you had multiple different Atari systems you had so many different consoles with so many uh you know unique pieces of software dedicated towards those systems that obviously the market was flooded with so much different choice and even back then the games weren't entirely all that great either nowadays at least with video games if you buy the Xbox you get access to like Xbox exclusives you know like for Forza Horizon stuff like Starfield stuff like that when you go to the PlayStation side you got your Spider-Man's your last of us your final fantasies a lot of those exclusives there are actually quality games that are different depending on which Hardware you go to back in the day the different software that we ended up getting was like different versions of like Frogger or like arcade games that had to be ported for home consoles anyways so the quality of software was expensive and it literally wasn't even that good you could buy a video game that could either be complete dog cheeks or give you 2 hours of enjoyment that's the entire industry back in the day so you had way too much choice and the choice wasn't really that good and obviously for an industry back in the day the video games even the worst video games back in in our time you know games like Left Alive are bad but they're not bad to the point that you're looking at games like ET on the original Atari okay imagine buying that coming home I would never touch a video game in my life if that was the situation and that's obviously another factor that contributed to the crash of the video game industry honestly it was a period where like so many interesting and different pieces of Technologies all came out at the same time taking the market share away from everyone else you know imagine if nowadays you had 105 different console manufacturers to pick from other than three I think people could genuinely be confused imagine if you had like 10 to 15 different types of Xboxes and PlayStations and Nintendo switches on the market even like the steam deck where you have different types of handheld computers at the end of them they all run on either Linux or Windows based like operating systems and you basically just have like slightly different Hardware but it runs the same set of software around back then different hardware and also all of that came with completely different software as well too now look at the end of the day what I'm trying to say here is like the actual like Market uh factors are not the same I don't think another crash is necessarily going to happen but what I do think with the amount of layoffs that have been occurring is I really feel like companies have started to look into things like artificial intelligence and feel that maybe it's going to be a good replacement for the human factor anyways now bear with me for a minute I think for a lot of people understanding artificial intelligence is going to go through a point where like laws are going to be have to having to be made to talk about the training data and the copyright ass associated with it but I also think that the companies involved in that process are probably going to be on the side of themselves more than they will be for the artist and some of the biggest companies Apple uh Microsoft some of the biggest players in Tech are all in artificial intelligence and for the people involved in gaming and those Tech Industries like Microsoft I think they care more about lobbying for laws that allow for generating AI to be copyright you know hasslefree as much as they can and I think when it comes to studios in the future I think looking at using generative AI versus hiring actual artists or you know voice actors or whatever might be the unfortunate future going on look we're getting to a point where AI even if you've been following the the Sora AI or whatever the generative stuff is getting really good imagine in the future instead of hiring like an artist to make like a Call of Duty weapon skin instead all they do is they actually just write up a few prompts generate the actual weapon skin and ingest that into the game it's going to cost far less than hiring the actual artist and when you look at the entire industry what they want to do is they want to spend less money obviously producing these assets producing these video games and then they can put that up on a store for somebody to buy for like 15 bucks in Call of Duty war zone and they can just rake Millions upon millions of dollars a year billions just off of that practice literally minimizing the cost but maximizing the actual profit and obviously you and I will probably see that as shitty but in general sense most of the actual Casual Gamer doesn't care about that they'll just be buying that stuff anyways I could imagine for open World Games right like if we get to a point where you can use generative AI to quickly make buildings or streets or whatever instead of hiring like an artist to sit down and like craft an entire portion of an open world section and AI could out whatever they wanted just to fill out a map and Pat out whatever you wanted out of a game we're getting to a point where is the stuff evolves and matures and can be used pretty convincingly we're going to get to a point where a big for big Publishers big game developers big like companies instead of hiring human be human people and paying them an actual salary you can pay literally like one tenth of that for generative AI stuff and obviously even less than on10th and just get by and produce your video games faster and without obviously requiring human beings now I don't agree with that but obviously if you're making a video game and you're in big business those are the kind of people that are making those decisions and they're going to make them so they can keep making millions of dollars more than what they could have had before now again even when you look at these layoffs I honestly don't feel that the people being laid off are the ones that should be kicked out for instance it really feels like the people that I talk to the developers the actual individuals that are putting their Like Blood Sweat and Tears and making the games that we love they're the ones that are getting kicked out out of an industry that they are Wolly too good in like their their expertise does not reflect the paychecks they should literally be receiving they're the ones that get kicked out and the people that aren't getting laid off are the actual Executives and the people that don't understand video gaming asides from making a boatload of money out of it it's a weird part of the industry and it's never going to lead to the crash where like the entire industry Falls because honestly it's too stacked with casuals at this point both in the mobile console and PC Sphere for it to even matter you and I might get jaded but we represent a very small very small but loud part of the gaming community that will talk about this topic but for most people that are actually just playing their Call of Duties and their fifas and whatever slap that gets thrown in it's just a matter of them logging in for an hour and a half a day playing a video game logging off and doing something else and honestly if those are the people that are willing to keep chucking money at microtransactions Battle passes skins and whatnot the industry is as healthy as it's ever going to be in the worst possible way but yeah I wanted to talk about gaming and is it dying obviously it's not but I think in the next few years we're going to be seeing a point where like a lot of these games are going to have a lot more AI stuff put into it and it's really going to start showing but let me know what you think in the comment section below if you like what you saw please like comment and subscribe dislike if you dislike it I am out

Channel: SomeOrdinaryGamers

Views: 703,341

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Id: dnbqMW_cxyc

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2024