10 Signs We're Heading Toward ANOTHER Video Game Industry CRASH
10 Signs We’re Heading Toward Another Video Game Industry Crash
Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we are getting nervous. There’s a rumbling, it feels like 1983 again, and we’ve all been feeling it for a hot minute, these are 10 Signs We’re Heading Toward Another Video Game Industry Crash.
The Loss Of Mid-Tier Development
The warning signs are already everywhere. Back in 2012, more than 20 game companies collapsed, taking names like Hudson Soft, Psygnosis and Rockstar Vancouver with them. These weren’t tiny studios nobody had heard of either; their work included "Bomberman", "WipeOut", "Lemmings", "Max Payne 3" and "City of Heroes". Then THQ went under, despite owning huge brands like "WWE", "Saints Row", "Red Faction" and "Warhammer 40,000". Rising development costs and expensive new games that failed to catch on simply buried them. Even Crytek later faced reports of unpaid wages. If successful companies can vanish this quickly, the industry starts looking less stable and more like it’s quietly removing the floorboards. This was more than 10 years ago, and the industry hasn’t suddenly boomed either, let’s keep looking.
Shovelware and AI
Finding a good new game is getting harder when storefronts are buried under mountains of junk and shovelware. For the layman: Shovelware is low-quality software and video games rushed to market where the focus is on high quantity over anything else. Shovelware has always existed, but cheap development tools, asset flips and now generative AI have made it easier than ever to pump out barely finished games at ridiculous speed. That creates a visibility problem for everyone else. Players scroll past hundreds of near-identical survival games, lazy mobile ports and AI-generated slop, while genuinely interesting smaller releases struggle to get noticed. Eventually, storefronts start feeling less like curated shops and more like digital landfill. If consumers constantly have to dig through garbage to find something worthwhile, trust drops, discovery gets worse, and the entire market becomes harder to navigate.
Everything is Broken
Nothing kills excitement faster than buying a new game and discovering it barely works. Name a time this happened to you .. I bet you had an answer straight away, what was it? “No Man’s Sky”? “Cyberpunk”?, I could keep going .. And I will. "Assassin’s Creed: Unity" became the poster child for this, launching with crashes, broken co-op, menu problems and the occasional ability to simply fall through the floor. Ubisoft eventually handed out free games as compensation, which says plenty. But it wasn’t alone. "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare", "Halo: The Master Chief Collection", "SimCity", "Battlefield 4", "Driveclub" and "LittleBigPlanet 3" all arrived carrying serious problems. Bugs will always happen, especially in huge games, but selling something fundamentally broken destroys trust. Once players stop believing developers, sales suffer, and expensive studios suddenly have a much bigger problem.
Everybody Wants Their Own GTA Online
Every publisher seems to want its own forever-game now, because "Fortnite", "Roblox", "Call of Duty" and "GTA Online" make recurring revenue look irresistible. The issue is that players only have so much free time, and live-service games are incredibly needy. They want constant logins, battle passes, seasonal events and enough hours to qualify as unpaid employment. That leaves new releases fighting against games people have already invested years into. When one of these expensive projects fails, publishers aren’t just losing launch sales; they’re eating massive development and support costs too. There simply isn’t enough attention to go around, no matter how badly every company wants its own money-printing machine. And think of the failures.
Too Expensive to Fail
AAA development has become absurdly expensive. Some games now cost hundreds of millions, take half a decade to finish, then get another mountain of money dumped into marketing. This results in a weirdly backwards issue: Selling millions of copies can be a huge disappointment for publishers, they need 10’s of millions. And with the amount of money that goes in, and the return being a little slice of the cost on top, one flop can put an entire studio on life support. Naturally, publishers respond by taking fewer risks, leaning on sequels, familiar brands and ideas already proven to sell. So games are getting bigger, longer and more expensive while companies become increasingly terrified of experimentation. This gives us games like The Grand Theft auto Trilogy, not Grand Theft Auto 6.
Too Expensive to Succeed
The price of games going up would sting less if players felt like they were actually getting more for their money. Instead, a full-price release can now come with deluxe editions, battle passes, subscriptions, paid DLC and several fake currencies designed to make buying one stupid hat feel like filing a tax return. Spending is still growing in some premium price ranges, so publishers clearly see room to keep pushing. The danger is assuming that tolerance has no limit. Games are competing with Netflix, movies and every other monthly expense people already have. Keep asking for more money, and eventually players won’t just skip extras, they’ll start skipping entire games. I’ve got two games service subscriptions, and I still think I spent a couple hundred dollars on games this month. It’s kinda stupid when you think about it.
Who Cares About The User?
I hate to harp on it, but if gaming ever does completely implode, "Assassin’s Creed: Unity" deserves a small plaque at the crime scene. The bugs were already bad enough, but Ubisoft somehow made the situation even uglier by locking content behind companion apps and delaying reviews until after release. That meant plenty of people bought the game before learning just how broken it was. Then, once complaints exploded, one of Ubisoft’s early priorities was fixing problems with Helix Credits, the system that let players spend even more money. Brilliant timing. Arno might have been falling through Paris or temporarily losing his face, but thank God the microtransactions were getting attention. Nothing rebuilds customer trust quite like that.
Digital Ownership
Back in the day, physical games gave players something simple: you bought the disc, put it on a shelf, lent it out, sold it later, and generally knew it was yours. Digital storefronts make that relationship far less comfortable. Purchases now depend on accounts, licenses, servers and companies keeping everything running. I mean just THIS month I went to play “Kingdom Hearts III” in preparation for “Kingdom Hearts IV”, only to find out I’d lost access. Not because my subscription had lapsed, it’d just been removed. Take-Two has said more than 90% of its business is digitally distributed, showing just how far the industry has moved. Digital sales aren’t inherently bad, but when prices stay high and ownership feels temporary, trust starts slipping. Paying seventy dollars for something that might disappear one day feels less like buying a game and more like renting it long term.
We’re all Overwhelmed
The biggest threat to a new release, and the industry in general, might be the hundreds of games already sitting in someone’s library. Between Steam backlogs, subscription services, free-to-play giants and older titles that still hold up perfectly well, players have no shortage of things demanding their time. That makes visibility brutally difficult. A mid-sized game can earn great reviews, look fantastic and still vanish almost immediately because everyone is busy with "Fortnite", "Minecraft", "Counter-Strike", "GTA", or some random bargain they grabbed years ago. Honestly, this week I put more time into “World of Warcraft” and “Age of Empires II”, than “007: First Light”. The industry is releasing more games than ever, but that doesn’t mean more games are succeeding. Sometimes the biggest enemy isn’t bad quality. It’s simply that they are trying to grab the attention of gamers who are comfortable with what they have.
Is This Our Fault?
Publishers didn’t invent this mess entirely on their own; we helped train them. When "Call of Duty", "FIFA" and other familiar franchises keep selling huge numbers, companies learn that repetition is safer than taking risks. Pre-orders make things worse, because millions can be locked in before anyone knows whether a game actually works. Then one successful trend inspires a flood of imitators, most of which arrive late and die quietly. THQ learned that lesson the hard way with expensive bets like "Homefront". Eventually, though, consumers do get tired. If enough people stop rewarding broken launches and recycled ideas, publishers may finally discover that “what worked before” isn’t a permanent business plan.
