Devolver co-founder says large-scale game dev "crushing under its own weight a little bit"

gamesindustry.biz:

It's been a difficult stretch for the industry, so when we speak with Devolver Digital co-founder Nigel Lowrie at the Game Developers Conference, our first question is fairly open-ended: What is happening?

Lowrie mentions the well-established impact of the industry's pandemic boost receding, but believes there have been compounding factors impacting different aspects of the industry as well.

"There's us, on maybe the smaller-to-medium-size end. But on the larger end, it feels like it's crushing under its own weight a little bit," Lowrie said. "The consumers are so tied up in some of these really fantastic live service games, but there's only so much time they can spend. So there are more and more huge games being launched asking for an enormous amount of time, but there's just not that much time available for people to play."

It's fairly common to talk about the indie space where Devolver operates and the AAA space as distinct markets where competition is less direct, but when the bottleneck is game players' time and not their money, we ask if that distinction becomes less relevant.

"That's what we've talked about a lot internally," Lowrie acknowledges, adding, "We avoid big games obviously because the momentum they'll have in the press and with influencers, but then you also have to think of the consumers.

"Helldivers is an excellent example. I play a lot of Helldivers with coworkers and friends. It's hard to pull people away from such a fantastic experience. You're really fighting for time. I don't care if you're a one-person, self-published studio or someone that has 1,000 people making a live service multigenerational game, you're still competing for that player's time. And you may have a very interesting game, but to pull them away from whatever for the two hours or 20 hours a week they have to play games, you have to make a pretty compelling case. I think we're all competing with each other."

While the audience has always had limited hours in the day for gaming,