The video game industry is in the middle of a crisis. Budgets for big releases are ballooning out of control with games like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) costing up to $700 million to produce. The developer workforce has also been ravaged, with dozens of studios closing, amounting to over 10,000 layoffs in 2024 alone. Pair that with the fact that many of the titles have flopped — like Concord, whose servers didn’t even last as long as a free trial for Hulu — major questions have arisen about the health and future of the video game industry, and where things go from here.

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