What the hell is going on with video games? | Analysis

gamesindustry.biz:

There appears to be two main story types on GamesIndustry.biz this year.

First, there are all these record-breaking sales. Hogwarts Legacy selling 15 million copies in under two months. Honkai Star Rail generating $1 billion in five months. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom shifting a record-equally ten million games in a weekend. Diablo 4 with its $666 million in five days. Starfield becoming Bethesda's biggest ever launch. Spider-Man 2 becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios title. Super Mario Bros Wonder becoming Europe's biggest Super Mario launch.

Then there's Baldur's Gate 3, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Resident Evil 4 Remake, the Super Mario Bros movie, The Last of Us TV show… hit after hit after hit.

The other story type is all about layoffs, job cuts and studio closures. There's been a reported 6,000 jobs lost in 2023 so far. We've seen Ubisoft cancel games and restructure the business, Volition close down, Epic cut more than 800 staff, and redundancies at Bungie, Relic Games, Creative Assembly, BioWare, Embracer, Team17, Media Molecule, Microsoft, Frontier, Twitch… the list goes on.

It's not just job losses, but there is a drop in available jobs, too. There are 1,000 fewer games jobs being advertised in the UK this October compared with October last year, according to Games Jobs Live.

Share prices have also taken a hit. If we look at the UK stock market for a moment, since the start of the year we've had hefty drops from all the floated companies: Team17 (down 41%), Frontier (down 74%), Devolver Digital (down 59%), TinyBuild (Down 92%) and Keywords (down 52%).

All this taking place at a time when the UK and US game sales are up, PS5 is delivering strong console sales, and Newzoo estimates