The Inflection Point

Perhaps if we turn the chart upside down, everything will trend upward again

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

"May you live in interesting times", so the ancient proverb goes. Well, the video games industry is certainly experiencing... something at the moment, though there are many opinions on how "interesting" they are. In all my years being an active participant of video games and dutiful watcher of its trajectory, I've witnessed some events. I saw a well renowned console manufacturer tear itself apart and let its competition force it to only work on developing and publishing games. I've seen not one, but two upstarts upend the traditional "console wars" to become behemoths in their own right. I've seen the oldest, most traditional games maker succeed, stumble, succeed, stumble again, and succeed again in a repeating cycle. I've seen smaller developers completely run rings around giant publishers in terms of sales and critical reception. I've heard stories of glorified studios who apparently could do no wrong, yet had to shutdown for their hubris. I felt the same collective sigh as a major event in the gaming calendar to excite everyone about what they could look forward to playing next had no choice but to succumb to the times and become no more.¹

So many things have happened in the space of four decades. I'm struggling to think of another time when so much seems to be happening all at once - and at the moment, it feels a lot more negative than usual.

It is at times like this that people collectively raise their voices as events unfold, such is the glory of the modern internet. News headlines are made, people react. We can do it so quickly now that it has simply become instinct. I try very hard not to let those instincts take over me. I have a terrible habit of fully believing the first thing anyone says to me, followed by the next, and the next, and so on - which can lead to a lot of contradictory opinions and thought patterns that I cannot untangle. Wishing to believe that the world can be a fair place and everyone has their say, that leaves a lot of different perspectives I feel I should understand - too many, in fact. Which is why I let things settle, take my time, try to ignore the hubbub, and figure out what I believe.

This is why this post has been delivered so late after recent events. I've found that, for my head to truly feel free of too many thoughts fighting for attention, I need to write them down and let them escape. This is therefore a collection of issues I've been thinking about in the past few months; possibly with a throughline, possibly not, yet all related to gaming as it is today, and its future. I am no analyst or journalist, I don't even work in the video games industry or have any connections, and I certainly provide no answers that would likely please anyone. I'm just someone who has enjoyed playing video games from the first time I saw them at the age of seven or eight, and still loves it, even today.

There is a lot to unpack though, and this will be a long post. I don't mind if you split reading this into segments. I don't even mind if you want to skip this one entirely. I'll try my best to be balanced yet also put forth what I think.

Where shall we start?

“Tea, Earl Grey, Hot”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) to me is like an illusion; wonderful and amazing when you witness it, yet look behind the curtain and watch how the mechanism works, then you start to realise how you were duped. While research has been carried out by computer scientists for decades, it is only in recent years that it has exploded into society thanks to, originally, startups trying to change the world, which then became capitalist behemoths who seem to control the world.

Humanity has had the dream of intelligent machines for as long as the computer has existed. Science fiction has foretold of the wonders (and horrors) that artificial intelligence could bring. A particular highlight that comes to my mind is Star Trek: The Next Generation, a television series I fondly remember watching after dinner in the UK on the BBC. The future of Star Trek has inspired many real-life inventions actually (tablets, communicators, and so on), yet the ships computer is always intriguing. All a character has to do is utter a sentence - in English, the least formal, least descriptive and most ambiguous language ever created - and the computer responds to the command perfectly. That's how entire virtual worlds can be created on their Holodeck, and how Captain Picard gets the perfect beverage from the food dispenser: "Tea, Earl Grey, hot". No need to specify what "hot" actually means - do we mean mild to lukewarm? Boiling point of water? Surface temperature of a nearby star? - the computer just knows, it is intelligent.

This can of course be explained as "it's just a television show", yet many people have been inspired by this and other fiction: what if a computer really could work like this? Now we're beginning to see the results, effects and consequences of that answer.

Yet I take issue with one glaring problem: what we have today, what we call "artificial intelligence", is only half correct - the first half precisely. Intelligence, to me, describes the ability to think, to reason, to learn and to adapt based on what you learn. AI today does not seem to do this. It can certainly learn in a fashion - as everyone is now aware, thanks to companies consuming all available resources on the internet to train models, whether they were legally allowed to or not - but can these models learn from itself? Well it could, but the results would not be pretty, in fact the results would be less than what we started with, since all a model can do is assume that false information it already said was correct, then keep following that pattern. That is what a model does - recognise patterns. Humans can recognise patterns too, yet a computer can do it at a scale and speed previously unheard of. The trick behind the "intelligence" is to deduce a pattern from billions of nodes of information so fast that it appears to be "thinking".

And, generally, people are loving it. Although I could be more cynical and say technology companies are loving it, so much so that they want in on the action, at any cost. How many times have you opened an app on your phone or work computer, and suddenly there is now a big button, prominently flashing usually, for an AI chatbot, or an agent, or a copilot? Whatever the name, the purpose is clear: use me, please please use me, let me help.

What happens in these interactions with an AI model though? The most general use ones, the Large Language Models (LLMs) from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, store billions upon billions of parameters which have been trained on every nugget of information that can be scraped together. These act similar to neurons in the human brain, building up a network connected together to produce a huge amount of thought patterns, for want of a better word. A model of this size is enourmous - too big to fit on your average laptop or phone. So every question - no matter how deeply philosophical or ridiculously inane - must be sent to somewhere that can house it properly, today meaning a data center managed typically by a cloud provider like Amazon, Microsoft or Google. Every question sent is small, then goes through a huge amount of processing in a central location, then returns an equally short answer. Multiply this by the population of the connected world, and you can imagine some consequences to this mode of operation.

To have a centralised so-called thinking machine serve all its users, requires a large amount of resources - including hardware, power, physical space, and people to keep it all running. Every computation running through a processor produces heat (the reason why your laptop includes a fan for cooling and not overheating your machine), and the more processing involved, the more power required and the more heat produced. AI models perform a lot more calculations than a typical computer application, so that adds a lot more cooling requirements. You can imagine why, then, there are so many environmental concerns surrounding AI usage. What is the impact of generating the next TikTok video, all so someone's feed can add more content and farm more popularity?

There is also of course an ethical debate to be had. Companies have built all these models using public and private information. Training a model is essential, just like a human is trained to perform a task or learn a new subject - training will set in place the pathways to learning, memorisation and knowledge gathering. At this scale, models need the entire internet and then some to "know" everything. Legally, who allowed for this to happen? A typical Silicon Valley solution is to do it now, then deal with the fallout later once governments start knocking on the door. The situation is made more galling when you realise these companies that have taken all your data for free and now charge you back for using it again.

You might so far think that I'm very much against AI, which isn't entirely true. In my profession as a software engineer, I've had the privilege of helping researchers use AI for medical purposes as an example of "good AI", as a tool. Rather than use enormous, general purpose models, medical device AI models are trained on very specific sets of data to assist in diagnosis - not replace doctors, assist; the healthcare industry is far more governed in safe practices than the video game industry. Imagine having a scan taken and an AI model is able to analyse it and detect for abnormalities or cancers, or determine the development of your unborn baby from an ultrasound, or help neurosurgeons plan delicate procedures. These kinds of problems would have been extremely difficult or impossible ten years ago; now, they become feasible within our lifetime. Doesn't that sound like a good future?

Which highlights an area of AI I would consider to be more worthwhile with a steadier evolution - smaller, dedicated use cases. I remember some years ago during the VR trend (remember that?) where John Carmack, then working for Meta, kept pushing for smaller, cheaper headsets effectively using your mobile phone, a device which many people already own. Through that avenue, smaller and less powerful devices which are more affordable could drive faster, larger adoption and make VR a viable market. Instead, Meta went the opposite direction of centralising everything, creating expensive, powerful headsets, and being in control of a metaverse - and as you can tell, that particular future did not pan out.²

The AI industry has succeeded much better than VR, yet I see some similarities. Instead of a decentralised system of simpler models and agents, running on cheap devices that you can hold in your pocket, all under your control, we have been forced to use a centralised system of connecting to massive brain centres, all under the control of a few mega-corporations that get richer every day. We have been sold on the Star Trek future happening today, right now - computers that think for you, create your work documents and presentations for you, maybe even your apps, books and films for you - yet I think we can all see the uncanny results of the output. Sometimes it is genuinely hard to tell the difference, yet with images in particular, I can always tell immediately what was AI generated and feel their artifice and lack of humanity.

There is a famous saying in my profession which I'll paraphrase: "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". At the moment, that sums up AI in general for me.

Silicon Nightmares

None of what I say changes the fact though that AI is growing bigger each day, and like an all consuming monster, needs more - more data, and more power and hardware to run on. Specifically, it requires high powered GPUs to perform the intense and complex mathematical calculations required to predict the next statement to provide, and it requires RAM to store contextual information in short term memory to keep a conversation going. Guess what else requires high-end GPUs and lots of RAM?

There are several examples of the knock-on effect of AI gobbling up all available hardware resources on the market, yet none highlight it so well and so succinctly as the price reveal of the Steam Machine³. At probably the single worst time in history to make such an announcement, being told that it would cost around £1,149 GBP ($1,349 USD) means this is not a purchase option for many people, despite its apparent design to the contrary, especially as the stock levels themselves are low and require you to enter a lottery. I do applaud Valve for at least publicly blaming the price on the AI market, though it doesn't soften the blow.

It's not just the smaller hardware companies that are struggling though, everyone is. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all raised the prices of their current-gen consoles, some multiple times, partly (but not entirely) because of the high demand on the components required. I have been playing video games since the age of around 8 or 9, spanning over 30 years, and I have never, ever, ever seen the price of a console become higher than when it launched. It is one of the reasons why I bought a Nintendo Switch 2 only a year after its release. Normally, my logic would be to not become an early adopter, wait 2-4 years for the price to come down and build up a library of games, then purchase it at around half the original price. Those economics and patterns have now been thrown in the shredder; either buy now, or pay even more later.

And that's just the current generation of consoles - what of the next? Excluding the Switch (Nintendo seem to operate on their own cadence), the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X are now six years old; precedent would dictate that the next generation would be a year or two away. Yet in a hardware market being gutted by AI, and a world economy that is chaotic at best, what would be the benefit? The big three companies talk of continuing growth but - and pardon my ignorance on matters of business, for which I am the least qualified person to consult on - how do you grow if you start pricing out your customer base?

Based on recent news events, it sounds like you find cost-cutting measures in other ways. Sony recently made the decision to rely purely on digital distribution of games from 2028 onwards⁴. That means no more burning games to discs, no more reason to buy a box with a cover on it, and no more need to add a disc-reading hardware component, all of which will save some money on manufacture and distribution. Many people online took this news badly and gave many reasons why. I admit that I could see both sides to the argument, so was not as outspoken on the matter. On the one hand, digital seemed to be the direction of the future anyway; PC games already long ago gave up on physical media, and I cannot even remember the last time I saw a PC or laptop sold with a disc drive. If ever there was going to be a culture that relied solely on digital media, video games were surely going to fit the bill. I can also see logistic reasons too - games are getting larger and some cannot even fit on physical media anymore, and I suppose there would be cost savings in manufacture, distribution, shipping and perhaps marketing. There are clear statistics proving that people buy more digitally downloaded games year on year since, lets face it, it is very convenient. The data is all there, we're just following the trends.

There are downsides too, of course, a key argument against being control. Once again, we go back to the centralised, consolidated system where one company controls everything - who gets to sell the game, who gets all the profits, who determines discounts and when. And, perhaps worst of all, who gets to revoke your use of their game, because game ownership of digital games is somewhat of a misnomer - "ownership" is now the wrong word to use. Companies allow you a perpetual license to play a game you "purchase" - until, that is, the terms of that license change. It could be for any number of reasons, but maybe some of us have already experienced a common occurrence; delisting of games, because of expired copyrights from companies or online servers shutting down. I even possess a few games in my Steam library that are now delisted, and I have no intention of giving them up as best I can.

Nostalgia is also a burden for many who've played games for years; it's hard letting go of a certain way of life. There is a certain romanticism around the purchase of a physical game. I remember clearly as a child saving up pocket money and choosing very carefully which game to buy next using magazine reviews, then taking my hard earned money to a shop and getting in return an object which I would then get to use. It came with a manual, which allowed you to understand how to play or to fill in backstory or lore. The anticipation of playing it would build up, adding to my enjoyment. Birthdays and Christmas would then become further opportunities for getting games, hoping that the wrapped present was what you wanted (trusting my parents understood my instructions enough to get the right game and not something like Superman 64) and, yes, it was! And it was mine! The only way I could be parted with it was if I chose to sell it on, or if you crowbarred it out of my hands. However, I watch my own children now and they don't really see games that way; you can download them and get them almost immediately (internet connection willing). I don't believe they really think about how valued they are as possessions, because they can simply get more when they are bored of them.

So while I understand this is what the future holds and nothing will stop it, I also wonder what happens to our surroundings and culture when there are no more physical games. No more discs or cartridges means no need for game boxes with enticing title artwork, no need for physical stores to peruse what your next purchase will be, no second-hand market for reselling games you don't want anymore, no tangible ability to gift a game to a loved one. This year I went to a video game convention with stalls selling retro games; how much longer will they exist for? Will "retro games" even be a word we use in the future? If games become ephemeral, what attaches us to them, and why would we look back fondly on them? Will we even care?

Quantity over Quality

There is another cost factor that worries me; the cost in creating games in the first place. I'm no expert in finance at all, so a rough estimate I found for the cost of a AAA game today could be in the range of $100-300 million USD - not even including marketing costs for a game that large, which could push it well above that to half a billion, or maybe even $1 billion USD for some outliers (looking at you, GTA VI). To me, that tells me that a game that expensive would not only have to be great, it would have to be exceptional, to the point that a significant portion of the gaming audience should buy it at full price and consider it close to a divine calling, such would be its magnificence. Except that many AAA games are released in the same window of time, competing with each other, and more keep coming. Surely there are only so many people in the world to play them?

It leads me to wonder if, perhaps, there are too many games now. It may well be that I'm sounding very old-timer like, and I apologise, yet statistics don't lie. The number of games released on Steam alone have pretty much increased year on year, peaking it seems in 2024 with 16,212. That's a lot! As a comparison to previous decades, the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis had 924 games in its entire library, 1,749 for the Super Nintendo. Obviously times change; it is a lot easier to create and publish a game now, particularly indie games, and there are a much wider variety of games and genres too. However - and this is where I appreciate I definitely sound old - in the same way it now becomes harder to decide what to watch on Netflix due to having too much content, it concerns me that games may have a similar issue. The difference though is that games are purchased with usually a significant amount of our money, even more so if it has transactions or subscriptions built in. Have you ever wondered how much money you actually spend on your games?

Lets change tack and focus again on the cost of developing games, bearing in mind I'm making many assumptions here. For a AAA game to succeed, I would imagine it would have to have very high graphical fidelity, no performance issues, a killer idea that sounds exciting, a reason for the gameplay to keep you engaged for long periods, probably some connected, online component for longevity - basically the game equivalent of a summer Hollywood blockbuster. To achieve that, you would need hundreds of staff at a studio (or several studios to support you), including artists, designers, engineers, modellers, musicians and sound engineers, testers, actors - both physical for mo-cap and voice - and what might be considered the less fun yet vital background roles; producers, managers, finance, sales, marketing, localisation teams and so on. For a game the scale of Call of Duty, lets say, that must amount to a lot of salaries to pay in order to be able to complete a game within a timeframe of a year or two. And the complexity of making these games has been increasing too. Early 3D graphical games were extremely primitive compared to today, yet now you can include so much detail on characters and environments, detail that has to be created by an army of talented people in a short amount of time.

Games of the scale I was just describing have to absolutely succeed out the door, or they are considered failures - profits must happen on day one. So there is perhaps a lack of creativity in what we see now. Not to imply that no creativity or effort is put into these huge games - far from it. Yet how many games have you seen that are at least similar to each other? Or at least have released sequel after sequel because they are known properties? It is because they are safer bets, with a better chance of recuperating their costs. It becomes rarer each day to see a new intellectual property (IP) appear when a known franchise could be used over and over.

You know what is also a safer bet? Remakes! Remasters! In the same vein as producing more sequels, instead you could recreate or polish the same game again. I think these are a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes they are relevant and good to see appear. Shadow of the Colossus, for example, was remade for the PS4 and introduced a magnificent game to a much wider audience (myself included) compared to the PS2 original. A similar argument could be made for Capcom's recent run of Resident Evil remakes to bring nearly all of them to the modern age. Remakes can sometimes keep a beloved older game alive and allow people who never knew they existed, or were even born at the time, to experience them again with modern conveniences. Though it's a fine line as well, because they can also feel like an obvious cash grab. Even Nintendo appear to be remaking many more games than usual; the recent Star Fox release has been joked that it is the same game remade four or five times over.

So with a much higher quantity of games now, a subjective dip in creativity, and a trend to repeat the same thing again or return back to the well one too many times, it feels very easy to feel jaded. My personal take has been that I have felt less excited about games this current generation (PS5) compared to the previous (PS4), buying far less AAA games than before. Then again, I also have a growing backlog of games to play because they are so accessible now, going back to the problem of having too much of a good thing. Whenever I look to play something new, I have felt it harder to jump into something simply because there are too many choices awaiting me.

Dear Valued Employee…

No matter how excellent or amazing a game is these days, there is now so much competition that expensive to build games must succeed or die. When those sales don't come flying in, consequences are severe. While this has of course always been an option, we're seeing in news cycles on a far more recurring basis a word that hangs over everyone in the games industry now: layoffs.

We go back to an idea of capitalism that I have never understood; the idea that growth must always happen in perpetuity, it is infinite and is guaranteed when you are successful. All company executives seem to believe this, and it always seems shocking when that growth either stops or, heaven forbid, goes in the opposite direction. I'll admit I must have the wrong mindset and would make a terrible CEO, because I do not understand how, in a world with finite resources, people and money, growth can keep happening forever. I've heard many outlandish claims before of how the largest games publishers intend to keep growing, increasing their player base, yet they continue to build the same games aimed at a target demographic of 18-35 year old males. The most recent quote to give pause was from Microsoft currently aiming to "entertain more than a billion players each day" - which would equate to about 1/8th of the world population. We'll come back to Microsoft in a moment...

You could of course point to the COVID pandemic as the point where things started to slide, yet ROP introduced me to a video explaining how we could potentially trace everything back to decisions and events that happened in 2007 - the start of downloadable content, patching and day-1 fixes (meaning games don't have to be "complete" on release), microtransactions, and so on. A broadening of how games are published, marketed, distributed and can provide new kinds of revenue streams, all of which built up to a peak during the pandemic where, when everyone is forced to stay at home and with far more time (and money) on their hands, it only makes sense to buy and play more video games. Supply and demand, right? And once again, companies looked at this blip in history, possibly scanned forward a financial quarter or two, and made some big conclusions - the only way is up, growth forever. To grow more sales, more workers are needed to make more games to make more money.

We all know what happened next. Despite the pandemic feeling like it lasted forever, it was always going to decline eventually; people started to return to health, returning to their jobs and schools, and the free time afforded to those lucky enough to survive was taken away again, meaning also a decline in games sales and playtime. Many companies, particularly in the technology sector, suddenly found themselves with too many workers, too many salaries to pay and not necessarily enough revenue and profits coming in. And so the great "rightsizing" started happening.

It always appears that the executive level have to make "hard decisions" on laying off staff, despite the issue that it seems the executive level created these problems in the first place. While every large company are not excused - Sony, for instance, made some big gambles on hoping that live-service games were an easy revenue stream waiting to happen (they weren't) - this particular paragraph I think deserves to be devoted to Microsoft, where I, and perhaps many others, have to ask the question "what were they thinking?". Once again, recent news covers that Microsoft have, for another year in a row, made a huge cut in employees across their Xbox division, and even let some of their studios go⁵. The same company that spent the best part of a decade going on a spending spree buying as many games studios as they could, resulting in their largest acquisition ever in Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion USD. They willingly bought a significant chunk of the gaming sector and, unfortunately, that gamble has not paid off, resulting in a bloated, cumbersome company that doesn't quite know what it wants to be and what direction it is meant to head in. A fair question might be if they can afford to spend obscene amounts of money like that, why treat their employees so shoddily?

Yet it keeps happening, and all across the industry, all across the world. Unfortunately I cannot think of anything more to say on this - it is simply not good that so many talented people have to lose their jobs at once. For it shrinks the entire job market and, even if there was some small hope of those people getting another job in the industry, the ever increasing likelyhood of this happening again must mentally weigh them down so much. Even if they were successful - with a popular game, critical acclaim and, who knows, actual money coming in - their jobs seem as secure as standing on thin ice over a frozen lake, one tiny crack away from everything falling away under themselves. How's that for a morale booster?

And still, as I mentioned, games are not getting cheaper to create. Though if the workforce are churned through and disbanded on a recurring basis, games have to be produced somehow. Perhaps that something may be here already, with no desire to unionise or push back, just do what its told and produce (not create, produce) at a far faster rate than any human...

“Tea, Earl Grey, Hot”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) to me is like an illusion; wonderful and amazing when you witness it, yet look behind the curtain and watch how the mechanism works, then you start to realise... Wait, haven't I just talked about this?

Forwards or Sideways?

Well, what a dour post this has been! Over 5000 words of me pointing out, just like many others, all the pitfalls in our beloved hobby as of today. Yet this is how events have unfolded, all neatly connected to each other as well, like a snake eating its own tail. You might be wondering where my conclusion is after you have spent so much of your precious time reading all this. Where is my deep analysis, opinions and predictions on the future? I cannot say, because I'm not so clever or insightful as to judge how such an entire industry can right itself, nor have I the right to do so even if I did. I can tell you what I personally am going to do though.

Nothing.

Seriously, nothing. Perhaps I should explain.

I try very hard to live by a certain personal philosophy. I can complain as much as I want for as long as I want, but ultimately I will be left with two choices: take action to make things better, or accept how things are and let go. Option one is out of the question in this case, since I do not have the ear of tech billionaires and CEOs to politely ask if they could maybe slow down the AI train for a bit, or perhaps play nice and share the RAM around so everyone gets a fair, equal slice, or if maybe they could look into a different way of saving money instead of obliterating their workforce. The facts are that my tiny voice, one of millions, won't make a difference, and certain actions in our society will keep happening over the years because that has is how it has always been.

The second choice, acceptance, does not necessarily mean I am resigned to our fate though. Instead I mean that, while we don't have to be happy with the outcomes and consequences, we still have some level of control over what we can do in our own personal spaces.

In my case, patience is something I attempt to practice as best I can. I have delayed this post on purpose, not just because it took me a long time to write, but also because it distanced itself from the news, current events, and zeitgeist. News is meant to drive reaction, and now it spreads like wildfire, yet if you stop and think about it, how long does it linger? Even repeated events, such as mass layoffs which are tragic, become distant as time passes. With so many opinions for me to process at once, I struggle to distil it all. So instead I wait and, guess what, it usually passes. The opinions, thoughts and feelings are always there, but now time has dulled them somewhat.

Some things I've pondered about the future of gaming are not really about what I want from gaming, rather what the larger collective wants. And I cannot control or reconcile anything for that many people. What I can control is what consoles I buy, what games I purchase, what I want to play, and who I want to play them with. When I look at it from that perspective, I see some positivity... for myself at least, perhaps you too.

What I see is that there are already enough games for me to play. Hell, there are already too many games for me to play in the remainder of my lifetime, and my backlog grows all the time, calling out wistfully to me. If games suddenly stopped being produced tomorrow, I would still have plenty of opportunities for playing well up to the point my children cart me off to a retirement home. Not only that, but there are whole sections and genres I've only just discovered. Being able to talk to new people, on Substack and Good Game Lobby, has widened my perspective so much to more ideas and creativity that I had no idea existed before. I've discovered without realising that my tastes have changed too through age. No longer do I crave epics that require all my free time, I am no longer interested in the most graphically intense games anymore. I want colourful, wacky games, ones that are easier, gentler, unique. I have stopped becoming the target audience for the mass market, and I'm fine with that. Luckily, there are such games available catered to me, and I get to discover so many of them conversing with everyone here.

While we can lament how AAA gaming appears to be flailing, indie games seem to be proliferating in all kinds of ways, with all kinds of crazy ideas for fun that a billion dollar corporation would sneer at. Yet that is meant to be the point; games are meant to be fun - somewhere along the way, I feel many people may have forgotten that. And even if there were fewer games released, there are still so many older (or "retro") games available that could still be enjoyable. Preservation is a key topic that I hope companies take seriously, although we still luckily have many opportunities for playing retro games somehow.

Do I even need a next generation console? Over the decades, the technological advancement of PCs and consoles seems to have plateaued to me; there are only so many improvements you can make to graphics before you start to wonder what the difference is. Will a PS6 make such a huge leap forward compared to my PS5? And at a possible price of over $1000 USD, would I find it worthwhile? Many people do look forward to new tech and are able to distinguish frame rates; good for you, if that makes you happy. I myself may have to accept the possibility that an upgrade is many years down the line now, if at all. And again, I don't worry too much about that - see my previous comments on my endless backlog of games I can still play, I think I'll be well occupied.

When I was a child, I owned one console at a time and had to choose very carefully what I bought due to having no income. I learned how to spend what money I did have wisely. Today, as I look around my family home, I count... (quick check) ... ten devices that could potentially play games, including four mobile phones and not even counting the three older consoles I've packed away and stored under my bed. Ten! My children have access to so many games now, and they have known no different, this is their normal. Perhaps the time has come, with an economy going crazy, that we all were a bit reflective and considered what we really want to play, who we really want to support with our money. And I learned long ago not to tie yourself too closely to a brand; companies are only as loyal as the money they receive from you. You may prefer one over another today, yet all it takes is one choice or consequence that you don't agree with, and you're no longer obliged to stay with them. That is how competition stays healthy, not by pulling everything together into a critical mass, but by having different layers and scales in the industry; some titans, some small studios, and different sized companies in-between, providing many more opportunities to cater to a much wider audience.

This is why I still feel a glimmer of hope - not necessarily on a macro scale, but reduced down to a personal level, within our personal worldview. AI will continue its relentless march forward, the days of affordable hardware may be drawing to a close, game quality may either improve or not, layoffs will still happen - these are factors outside my control, so I must not be consumed by their negativity. What I can manage is enjoying the games I already own, become more interested in smaller games which can be just as enjoyable, and remember that I have had so many experiences over nearly 40 years of playing games and still get to build more. And we will ride the wave of history just like everything else; things happen, then they pass, then new things happen, and so it goes on.

Perhaps the takeaway from this very long post, if there is one at all, is: based on the state of play, what do you - personally - want to do about it?

1. Bonus points if you can name these events I’m referring to.

2. Carmack: “There’s a bunch that I’m grumpy about” in virtual reality - Ars Technica, October 2022

3. Steam Machine launches with £879 price tag as Valve cites component costs - BBC News, June 2026

4. Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles - PlayStation Blog, July 2026

5. Resetting XBOX - XBOX Wire, July 2026