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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I think it is even tempting to suggest video gaming may be in trouble, after a multi decade long technology advancement enabled cambrian explosion of possibilities, now it has settled into the narrowest field ever seen.

The last time it was remotely like this was the brown first person shooter phase circa 2005, but yet another walkfest with super high production values is no more interesting. If you happen to be into that stuff it is a golden age, but that is like saying the Marvel era of cinematic domination was a great thing.

The question really becomes if games were ever interesting to the mass market as games at all, or merely proxies for technological experimentation or storytelling, both of which can be done by other means.

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> now it has settled into the narrowest field ever seen.

Funny, I just played a game where you carry worlds within worlds and leap between them. And that's the tip of the iceberg of the games coming out these days. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1497440/COCOON/

Interestingly, the video game industry has regularly grossed more than both the movie industry and the music industry combined[0][1] since at least 2019.

I can't seem to find the relevant article, but esports is now topping viewership of other sporting events (e.g. the SuperBowl). I'm sure eventually, there will be monteization models that follow and it will inevitably be grossing more too.

If anything, it seems like video games are still on the upward trend, and the narrowing is somewhat natural to the maturity of the industry. AAA titles need to gross alot to be profitable, and they stick to well traveled areas most of the time, however one thing I have observed that the video game industry has that the movie industry is lacking is a far more flourishing indie side to the industry[2], such as Yact Club Games or the folks behind Undertale

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46746593

[1]: Mind you, the BBC article is from 2019, you can search for current year and get even wider gaps between the video game industry and the movie / music industry

[2]: With a proper addendum here, that its still, like acting in a movie, ridiculously hard to make it as a indie developer. Still, there is a flourishing of indie game developers

Thinking about the difference in scale and scope between a AAA 3D HD real-time shootfest and a small 2d Visual Novel, I wonder if the problem with Indie movies is that we don't consider things like Youtube videos et al to qualify.

> now it has settled into the narrowest field ever seen.

That's a hot take. It's never been a better time to be a gamer. In addition to most of the gaming backlog being available via emulation, it's never been easier for a small number of people to build a great game. So long as you're not extremely picky there's more good games to play than time to play them.

Eh, I'd put an asterisk on the "never been easier for a small number of people to build a great game" comment. On one hand, what can be achieved by an individual with today's engines is indisputably incredible relative to what was possible in the past. On the other hand, expectations from players have also had a pretty huge runaway explosion as well, meaning the ability for a small team to achieve commercial success is more of a mixed bag.

It obviously still happens. Lethal Company is a great example of that (1 developer, currently the top seller on Steam), but compared to the DOOM/Myst/etc era where ALL games were developed by small teams it's harder to establish a niche.

of course it is, but the industrialisation of games seems inevitable. You had craft workshops then, with 10-30 people, now you have factories like Ubisoft making yearly releases of whatever game they can (Assassins Creed, Far Cry, etc)

The fact that Steam exists and dominates the industry however, was not inevitable, and its incredible that we have things like Early Access and other tools to enable smaller developers to carve out their niche!

No, the problem is not expectations. There's a viable market for pretty much anything. The problem small developers face is not so much finding a market, but rather being able to be seen. Since it's so easy to make games nowadays, the indy market is flooded with titles. If you go browsing through Steam it's not too hard to find games that will appeal to you, but that you just never heard of. If the AAA studios are analogous to Hollywood, then the indy studios are analogous to YouTubers.

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