FFXVI only PS5?

[SaitoHikari]

-snip-

I feel like the notion of another crash in today's environment is ludicrous.

The gaming industry in those days was much smaller. Gaming since then has been very digitalized, and far more accessible (not to mention that it's now far more socially acceptable to be playing games too). After seeing how the gaming industry basically escaped unscathed in terms of revenue during COVID lockdowns (though actual development took a hit for reasons we all know), the so-called economists predicting another gaming crash sound more and more like doomposters trying to will one into existence because reasons.

The only way a gaming crash is happening at this point is if a society-altering event happens at a level far worse than what COVID did, to the point where even the indie sector of the gaming industry is unable to make games, and at that point, we have far worse things to worry about.

- At the peak of the console popularity (PS2/Xbox 1 and early 360 era + Wii) people claimed PC gaming was numbered. Remember those day when you go to gamestop and 90% of the estate are console game with some deformed PC box share a lonely sad corner? Then Steam happened.

- In the hayday of WoW, everyone wanted their own slice. Many SP developers jumped ship including some of the most famous one like Bioware, Bethesa and even Square. Again, people were herald the day of single player was limited because everything is MP driven. And really, after the majority of those projects fail, these days single player option are still as strong as it ever was, if not even stronger.


The point here is you're literally contradicting yourself in your 2nd paragraph. It's because the market is so vast right now that many company won't live or die with after one failure. And any attempt to create a hole that can destabilize the market will eventually be plugged by competitors and there is nothing you can do about it, regardless of how big you are. Competition and diversity is not an "industrial-destroyer", it's what make the market healthy. And competition means company will try to one up each others, time exclusive is just one of way to do that.

And it's exactly because the market is so strong today that you know most time exclusive is just that, time exclusive. In the end, good thing comes to those who wait, better thing even.

I am in full agreement with these points too. There have been so many attempts by 'market analysts' to predict trends in the gaming industry that simply didn't pan out, to the point where people really shouldn't be paying much attention to them anymore. The entire past two decades seem to have been a massive cycle of 'someone makes breakout hit -> a bunch of publishers try to claim a piece of the pie -> most of those attempts crash and burn -> someone makes another unique breakout hit -> rinse and repeat'.

On a side tangent, Yoshi-P's recent comments about the JRPG label stem from a time where the big western publishers and the western gaming media during 2005-2015 seemed to be making an effort to push more traditional non-AAA RPGs out of existence, and were also simultaneously trying to push handheld gaming as inherently inferior. It's so fitting that the western publishers and gaming journalist outlets that perpetuated that bullshit the most have been force fed shit pie for the past five or so years. It wasn't a coincidence that Bioware, Bethesda, and the formerly thought to be untouchable 'we'll leave greed to other publishers' CDPR got so high on their own bullshit that they got punished by their own fanbases for pivoting their focus towards live service games that were broken on release (when, you know, they could have looked at FFXIV 1.0 to see the consequences ahead of time, but that would have meant being able to see past their massive ego due to the constant praise that the gaming press and analysts showered upon them at the time). And now, their dev teams have experienced so much burnout from the widely reported crunch conditions that much of their lead talent has left them, and their reputations are now so shot to hell that there's an uncertain air around any sequels. Even the upcoming Starfield feels like it has barely any hype, compared to what Bethesda games once enjoyed a decade ago.

There is another consequence that people seem to overlook too - I've observed that there are a lot of lapsed former western game developers sharing horror stories meant to tell new programmers to stay the hell away from game development, dissuading new talent from entering the industry through the major western publishers at least. I am not sure this mentality exists among Japanese game development.

You know what? If we are headed towards a crash, maybe we are in right now. Just not an industry-wide crash - we're in one localized within the live service sector of the gaming industry, which I suppose does represent a 'gaming crash' to the bean counters in the industry. It sure feels like there's a lot less of them releasing nowadays, with already established franchises seemingly only able to stay in for now. That's the primary reason Sony is fighting so hard to break the Activision/Blizzard acquisition, after all - they know nobody today can make a shooter that can even compete anywhere close to the level of monetization that Call of Duty has.