The premise of the article’s headline is immediately contradicted by one of its first quotes:
"What we’re seeing at the moment are huge changes in the market, where forecasting models haven’t caught up with oversaturation, the impact of subscription services and the prevalence of aggressive discounting. Companies that overstretched during times of plenty now find themselves in a world where more agile companies are moving in and performing better.
“I’m still tremendously excited about the market. There are great games launching all the time, and breakout hits popping off week after week. It’s not that people aren’t buying games – far from it. It’s that the foundations some companies have built their operations upon rely on games selling an unrealistic amount. Many of these companies are still very profitable, which is what makes it even more heartbreaking.”
The saturation point is one I can definitely agree with. There’s far too much good stuff to play this year.
The premise of the article’s headline is immediately contradicted by one of its first quotes:
I’m not sure I follow what the contradiction is?
Interesting read. Summary seems to be “some publishers over extended themselves during covid and also it’s hard to know what games will be popular.”
Which seems like a pretty typical state for the industry. Knowing what will be a success has always been a gamble and companies are always over/under investing in certain areas (mmorpgs, FPS, live-service, etc.).
Manor lords is a good game for being alpha but so much more work needs to be done.
Hopefully main Dev got a proper team in place to finish the project.
Venture capitalists have managed to ruin the part of capitalism where profit means success. Turning money into more money isn’t good enough, somehow.
It’s almost impressively stupid.
