Nope. This doesn’t make any sense. And it is exactly what I am talking about is part of the industry problem. What am I on about? Today, GameRant reported that Jason Blundell opened a new studio, Magic Fractal. This is the third studio he has opened in 5 years. None of which have shipped a game.
Before people go in on me thinking that I am making a dig at Blundell, that is not the case. I’m not putting him in the same bucket as I do Jade Raymond. My point is that, in 5 years, he has run into the adversity that the market, or at least PlayStation’s assessment of it, will not support whatever game he is working on, whether it be due to genre, content, or other factors. And that still applies if it has been different games that he pitched while at Deviation and then Dark Outlaw.
And that is not specific to PlayStation. And those market conditions will not change with Magic Fractal. The market still sends 19k games to Steam each year, 5700+ to consoles. The socioeconomic middle-class in the United States is getting squeezed with less discretionary income to put into video games spending. And there is more free content for the middle-class that they can partake of without spending any money on TikTok and YouTube, or with the allure of payouts in prediction markets (ie legalized digital gambling).
The industry needs fewer games. And less studios.
This penchant to spawn another independent studio when there are not enough people buying the AA and indie stuff. When the available funding in the games industry outside of the traditional publisher pipelines has become radically more scarce post-pandemic. And when those traditional publishers are aggressively cost-cutting…it makes less and less sense.
I wish Blundell and his crew the best. But there are more and more games and more and more studios seeking success in a world of decreasing opportunities for it. The market needs to correct for the oversupply. The industry doesn’t need more games—it needs a correction.
Rounding Off Infinity 