The other day I was browsing YouTube and came upon this rather depressing video about the death of console exclusives from Eurogamer:

The gist of it is that AAA games are getting too expensive and anyway young people don’t care about consoles; they play games on mobile or their PC. “They” say that young people don’t even have TVs but instead watch everything on their laptops. Based on my own circle of social media folks that I follow, I’m not sure that is limited to young people. I think more and more people in general just skip the giant TV in the living room and instead use their computer monitor.

Even though the video is about the end of console exclusivity, it also goes into a predicted decline of AAA games in general, just because they’re getting so expensive to make and the economy we live in is all about making maximum $$ for shareholders & CEOs with minimum investment in the developers and artists who actually make games. We’ve seen so many job losses in the industry over the past few years. (According to Wikipedia, there were around 25,000 job cuts in the gaming industry between 2023 and 2024.)

I don’t actually do a lot of PC gaming so I’m unsure of how many AAA games come out on PC exclusively but I’m guessing the number is pretty small and would be limited to titles from Valve or maybe Epic, just because these companies are invested in a storefront that can help them recoup the costs. If I’m wrong about this please correct me but it seems like the giant AAA games are generally console oriented, at least initially. I also guess there is some wiggle room in what we mean when we say AAA, too.

Assuming any of this is correct I do wonder what the future of gaming will look like. I too am someone who enjoys big blockbuster games played on a 65″ 4K TV, and I’d hate to see this experience fade. But what can we, as game consumers, do about it?

Realistically, not much. But I guess we can try to pay more attention to “AA” games, which is a tier that seems to be vanishing but maybe there will be room for it to come back when the AAA monsters stop sucking up all the development money. The Indie space seems healthy at least in terms of numbers of games coming out, though we’ve seen a fair number of indie developers close shop too. In that case it feels more along the lines of “We made a game and it didn’t make us enough $$ for us to stay solvent” vs “Our shareholders need more return on their investment so we’re axing a bunch of people.” Mind you how an Indie game gathers eyeballs when platforms like Steam are adding 19,000 games a year, I just don’t know, but that feels like a different issue so we’ll set it aside for now.

Not really sure where I’m going with this post. To a large extent I just wanted to surface that video but since I watched it I’ve been rolling this stuff around in my brain trying to make sense of it. The gaming scene I love is changing/dying off, I guess. But then so am I. I kid that my backlog is big enough that it would probably last me to my end of days, but it is legitimately true I think, assuming I keep playing at the rate I play and that I have another 15 years or so to spend on this ball of mud (15 years from now I’ll be 80). But I do feel like future generations will be missing out on something kind of wonderful if these big budget games go away.

Header image: A screenshot of the night sky in Horizon Forbidden West, exactly the kind of AAA game that I LOVE to play on the biggest screen possible!