Between the never-ending layoffs, the one-hit wonders, and the overall depressing landscape for game funding, it's looking increasingly likely that the games industry itself—as a concept—was a zero-interest rate phenomenon. Or, to put it in another way, everything about making games is currently turbo-fucked.

According to the latest Game Dev Collective survey, 66% of participants characterize the current state of the industry as "bad", with the majority blaming unreasonable investor expectations and mismanagement.

I've been making games for 24 years this year, and I've been in the professional games industry for 13 years. It was always a struggle to make games, but it's never been this bad. I'm actually throwing in the towel myself. Starting in August, I will no longer work in games professionally, and instead make my weird porn games in my own time. I've worked on absolutely massive AAA titles, and moved countries to do so. But since 2023, it has become increasingly impossible to find new gigs.

For context, the way I've worked for the past four years is that I embed myself in teams from different companies to support them with my expertise in UI programming. But this model only works when companies have the funds to hire expensive contractors like me. And the problem that I keep running into to is that nobody has any fucking money.

AAA is in decline

Up to the end of 2023, I worked on a AAA game that I won't name here, just so I can pretend to have a future career in games. The project was a shitshow, not because of any of the people I worked with, but because nobody at the top had a concrete idea of what the game was supposed to be. It was the very definition of trendchasing

When I joined, they were copying Snowrunners, the game about driving trucks through muddy terrain, but as an open world coop game, of course. Then they realized that idea sucked, so they pivoted to making Death Stranding, you know, the game about driving around delivering packages. Then they wanted to copy Sifu, the martial arts combat game. And finally, Helldivers II came out, and it was the solution to all their design issues. And yes, these massive design shifts all happened in a span of under three years.

These games are insanely expensive to make because it takes an army of professionals to produce them. And it used to be the case that you could rationalize these expenses by pointing to the potential of immense returns. Yes, sure, we spent $150 million on mostly salaries, but we're gonna make that back many times over!

If that all sounds like an absolutely bonkers way to run a video game production, welcome to the professional games industry. And yet, I've not been able to secure a gig that solid since. I've done a short stint at another AAA company, but it wasn't a good fit on either end. And I've made a web game in three months for a client as a full stack developer, but that only barely paid enough to cover my salary. Unless you're willing to relocate to another country every six months or so, there are no good jobs left.

The good times are over

Matthew Ball, now the Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft, was previously an investor known for his annual reports about the games industry. Every year, he would write a collated "State of Video Gaming" that outlines trends backed up by graphs and figures. And I want to give particular attention to his slides from 2025. He notes that in 2011 through 2021, annual revenues rose 138%, which outpaced global GDP growth by 3.1x. Put in simple terms, everyone in gaming was making shitloads of money in that glorious decade, and that can't be explained away by saying "economy good".

But that money spout was rudely turned off in 2021. Mr. Ball talks about analytic forecasts being "billions of player hours short". And this decline was in spite of arguably one of the best years for (mainstream) gaming ever, with massive titles like Diablo IV, Armored Core 6, and Baldur's Gate 3 raking in GOTY awards and audience praise.

He continues, noting that while player hours and consumer spending on video games was down in 2021 and onwards, it was actually up for other forms of entertainment. Music spending was up 5%, digital video was up 15%, hell, even books were up by a percentage point. Yet games were down, across all relevant metrics.

Since the, active players remain down, still not recovering from the pandemic. And the players that remain are aging up. The signs of decline are everywhere, if you dare to look:

When I read these tea leaves, I see an insular AAA gaming industry frantically holding on to an aging playerbase, not one that is actively courting new players.

Mobile won't save us

The median gamer is a mom in her forties playing a game on her phone. So it makes sense to think that there's money in those hills instead. After all, the industry makes a combined $133 billion in revenue.

When I started my AAA career in 2013, the lie us gamedevs told ourselves was that mobile gaming players would eventually "graduate" to the console and PC gaming experiences we were working on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Free-to-play gaming on mobile became an absolute juggernaut, dwarfing the revenue of the "traditional" gaming industry by a factor ten. But the players of these games were never interested in shelling out money for expensive consoles and PCs. They already had Candy Crush on their phones, they maybe shelled out some money for microtransactions, and they were satisfied. As a result, mobile games are extremely sticky, and companies have to spend an ungodly amount of money to entice players to switch to new experiences.

An example cited by Mr. Ball is Monopoly Go!, which hit $5 billion in revenue in two years, an insane amount of money for a mobile game your aunt plays while waiting for her spin cycle to complete. But the company also spent $1.25 billion (36% of net revenue) on user acquisition, i.e. ads. This makes it impossible for new companies to enter the market, and even worse, the only way to win is to knock someone else off the leaderboard. Meanwhile, Apple and Google make money on every transaction, and they have no incentive to change that.

Everybody just needs to go indie

If everything's so terrible in AAA and mobile gaming, surely things are going great in the indie space, right? Well, let's put it this way: A healthy, thriving games industry is able to support mid-range studios making mediocre titles until they've built the experience to make a "sleeper" hit. Taking even a cursory glance at the biggest marketplace for PC games, Steam, will tell you this is currently not the case. Instead, what we're seeing is a dog-eat-dog zero-sum game being played out in the New & Trending section every day.

Did you hear about the latest viral friendslop game that everyone is playing?? That's great, wonderful even, but the tag combination "Casual" and "Multiplayer" returns literally thousands of titles on Steam. By definition, they can't all be viral hits, or everything would be. Even Among Us, arguably the viral indie hit that started the "friendslop" trend, has a Steam player chart that was mostly flat until it blew up when it was picked up by Brazilian streamers:

But the difference between now and six years ago is that the market is so punishing for indie game makers that median earnings are just a paltry $249. 99% of games are released to a whole lotta nothing. They will not get any attention, which means no sales, and the companies behind them just die on the vine. I'd love to spiral out about this for another three thousand words, but the short of it is:

  • Indie gamedevs are fucked because they can't get attention from journos or streamers and they have to pay the Steam tax on every sale + refund the assholes who play just enough to claim they don't like

  • Streamers are fucked because only a handful of people can actually make money doing it, and most of that goes directly to Amazon

  • Gaming journalists are fucked because nobody values good, interesting writing less than an audience of fuckwits who screech about low review scores and shallow cleavage

No new players

Unfortunately, while I very much appreciate Matthew Ball on his detailed analysis of video gaming trends, he did go off the deep end in 2026, blaming the decline in player attention on TikTok and chatbots. My interpretation is instead that gaming has hit the middle of an S-curve in adoption, and we're frantically looking for the Next Big Thing to pump those numbers. But virtual reality is too cumbersome for your mom, augmented reality is for pervs (present company excluded), NFTs were a bust, and players haaaaaaate generative AI.

So what's a guy supposed to when he wants to peddle his sweet gaming wares?

What I'm doing

I've been making games for more than 60% of my life, and I'm not going to stop now. But I do need to pay the mortgage and support my family, and life is becoming increasingly expensive. So I will be doing a so-called "real job" for the foreseeable future. Something boring, like programming browser applications for refrigerator displays, or whatever. I'll never stop making my weird porn games, of course. But I'm under no illusions: It's a hobby now. I don't see a path forward to where I make enough money that I can do that nonsense full-time.

I'm also not sure if I'm cut out to run my own games studio. It is a very, very different skillset from making, or even promoting games. Unless I find some magical way to tap into a new playerbase, there's not going to be enough money to justify hiring people to take all the boring shit off my hands. So I'll continue to help out other indies wherever I can, and make-do with contractors and my own horrible art skills for the games I want to make.

In the meantime, you can follow me on Bluesky or play my adult visual novels (with programmer graphics) on Itchio.