The Gaming Industry Is Always Doomed

Video gaming always predicts its own demise, but it’s never actually the end

Photo taken by the author.

You can’t spend more than a few minutes looking at a gaming website or online community right now without running face-first into tons of reporting about how “doomed” the industry is.

Prices are up across the board for consumer electronics due to RAM and AI and all kinds of nasty world economic business, and games and their fans are feeling the crunch. I’m not saying that this is good for the overall health of the industry…but this is happening right when it’s about to have a megahit in GTA 6, and when Nintendo has made the Switch 2 the fastest-selling game console of all time.

The industry isn’t in a bad place. It’s just getting more expensive right now, and it feels like the end, so we all spend time freaking out about it, hopping online to defend the fortunes of the large companies that produce much of the content. It’s weird, and it’s largely fear-driven, and I don’t actually think it’s great for anyone.

This exact dynamic happens in video games all the time.

In early 2006, Microsoft was out there blazing the path for the next generation with the Xbox 360. Hardcore gamers were keeping an eye on the upcoming PS3…but they were also convinced that Nintendo was dead. Their portables were still doing okay, but the home-targeted Gamecube system was kind of a flop compared to the PS2, and no one thought that they’d ever recover.

Later in 2006, the Wii launched, and it became the most wildly popular console the company ever produced, pulling millions of new customers into the industry. Nintendo went through the same period of “inevitable death” in the transition from the Wii U to the Switch in 2017, and once again smashed all sales records. The Switch 2 is outpacing them both.

Yes, the Gamecube and the Wii U didn’t light the world on fire. But they didn’t end the company. They just weren’t all-time hits. But in gaming, you’re either a blockbuster, or dust.

In 2012, PC gaming was in the crosshairs of fate. Consoles were outpacing PC sales, and hardcore gamers felt that their desktop setups and intense graphics cards weren’t getting enough love. Enter Chris Roberts with his Kickstarter for Star Citizen, a game originally meant to “save the PC industry.” It was designed to run only on high-end PC hardware of the day, and not consoles.

Now, an unbelievable 14 years later…Star Citizen still isn’t finished. Some players feel like it’s an ever-evolving scam, though there is a playable build you can get if you want to spend some money on it. Meanwhile, PC gaming is going strong, with something like seventy million regularly active Steam users and millions more on other games and online platforms. The PC side of gaming was never going to die, and Star Citizen didn’t save it. Or itself.

In 2019, Google launched Stadia, a streaming service meant to bring Cloud Gaming to the masses and compete at a large scale with the other console companies. I had a couple of friends that worked in management at Gamestop at the time, and they were convinced that this was the death knell for that entire company.

Instead, Stadia isn’t around anymore, and my friends’ Gamestop stores closed for other stupid reasons involving strange management and “meme stock” investing. Google’s effort should have seen a huge bump from the captive audiences during Covid lockdowns, but instead it just couldn’t build a following. Gamers kept choosing the local platforms instead. Microsoft ran into this same problem headlong with their Xbox Cloud service. It’s still going, but it’s more of a bonus feature now than a mainstream thing.

It feels like “almost dead” is the natural state of the gaming world, both for the companies making the games and the enthusiasts enjoying and writing about them.

In 2020 during the lockdowns, gaming got a huge influx of players and money and no one really knew how to handle the unmitigated success. Companies overexpanded and greenlit tons of now-cancelled projects, and the industry has seen thousands of layoffs in the last few years thanks in part to this sudden burst of prosperity and investment. The gaming industry did objectively well for a couple of years, and the result was eventual layoffs and the slow death of prominent development studios.

I’m not trying to say that the current RAM situation and the increasing prices are a great thing. But I do think we all need to chill out, just a hair, and wait and see. There’s a big profit motive to marketing fear at you right now. You might go out and buy some new hardware hoping that you’ll get a “deal” before it gets “too expensive,” ignoring that you might not want or need new hardware or that you might not want any upcoming games. The RAM crisis is the perfect excuse to get you wringing your hands and hoping for sales on something you might not have been interested in at a lower price a year ago.

GTA 6 will probably move tons of hardware later this year at higher prices than we’ve ever seen before, and be hailed as the “savior of the industry.” Then next year the new PlayStations will come out and it’ll be the time for fear all over again. You’d better buy them. You don’t want your favorite game hardware company to run out of money, right?

Gaming is probably never going to die. It’s an ingrained, established entertainment art form now, just like movies and music and books. These all have their rough patches, but only gaming makes a huge show out of how miserable it apparently is at all times for all people, even as companies still quietly rake in millions of dollars.

I don’t like how expensive some things have become, but I don’t want to feel bad and worried about something that’s supposed to bring me joy, especially when that only plays into the hands of companies and executives that have millions of dollars more than I do. Gaming itself will find a way to be just fine, even if some bad business happens in the meantime. It has before. And it will again.