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00:00You're fighting to change things.
00:05For those who come after.
00:09Right?
00:10Welcome to Mojo Plays, and the video game industry is looking at another crash that might actually be worse than
00:17the one in 1983.
00:18But, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, it might not be the worst thing to happen and could actually
00:24benefit gamers tired of the modern approach to gaming.
00:27Well, I promise you, everything will work out exactly the way it's supposed to.
00:33Just keep your eyes and ears open.
00:35Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest
00:40videos.
00:42The End of Live Service Chasing
00:45Follow me.
00:47Gonna generate a hit.
00:49Perfect. I'll take it.
00:51Publishers have spent the better part of a decade treating every single player IP like an infinite content ATM that
00:58never runs out of bills.
01:00They forced battle passes, FOMO timers, and loot boxes into games that never asked for them, then acted genuinely surprised
01:07when players started walking away.
01:09The official defense was always player choice, which sounds noble until you realize the only real choice was between paying
01:16or being locked out of content that belonged in the base game.
01:20A crash finally forces the industry to confront the obvious.
01:24Not every title needs to live forever as a live service zombie.
01:28Games that refuse to die usually become expensive, undead products nobody wants to keep feeding.
01:33When the money stops flowing so freely, the live service orthodoxy has to justify itself with something other than quarterly
01:41projections.
01:41The model only works while enough people are still willing to keep feeding it.
01:48So, figure out who we're killing yet?
01:52Oh, fuck!
01:53Force Finished Games
01:57Welcome to Constellation. We have a lot to talk about.
02:01Over the last decade or so, developers have gotten all too comfortable shipping half-baked products and treating paying customers
02:08as unpaid beta testers.
02:10Pre-orders and launch window marketing do most of the heavy lifting, papering over the cracks long enough for the
02:16executives to collect their bonuses.
02:18However, a real crash raises the price of that arrogance.
02:21When budgets tighten and reputations actually start mattering again, the cost of releasing a broken game climbs high enough that
02:28endless patch fixes stop being a viable strategy.
02:32Finished games used to be the baseline expectation, not a pleasant surprise.
02:36But somewhere along the way, that standard was treated like an optional extra.
02:41Nothing corrects that attitude faster than an industry that can no longer afford to hide its own laziness behind day
02:47one patches and apology roadmaps.
02:50Anyway, as I was saying before, everything will work out just fine.
02:58Messaging over quality
03:02You're not looking good, old friend.
03:05This will take more than you and me.
03:09What are you thinking?
03:10Far too many projects in recent years have openly ranked cultural signaling above the basic job of entertainment.
03:17The result was games that felt like lectures first and products second, complete with dialogue that seemed written to score
03:24points rather than tell a story.
03:26When sales inevitably tanked, the response was rarely honest self-examination.
03:31Instead, it was usually some version of blaming the audience for not being enlightened or progressive enough to appreciate the
03:38higher purpose.
03:39Suddenly, the teams that spent more energy polishing messaging than mechanics discover that Virtue does not generate refund-proof revenue.
03:46Quality becomes the only signal that still moves units, while the cultural credit card finally gets declined by the market.
03:53And no amounts of carefully worded statements can change that simple commercial reality.
03:57Along with an animation that tells the player how important this choice was.
04:02It'll be up to you to decide how the road trip goes and how your relationships will evolve.
04:07Safe Games
04:09I want everyone at their stations!
04:11Everyone, sir?
04:12Everyone.
04:15Risky and experimental games have become a thing of the past as the biggest studios stuck to endless sequels and
04:21safe reboots of the same handful of IPs.
04:24Iterative, low-ambition releases became the default because nobody wanted to explain a commercial miss to the shareholders or the
04:32board.
04:32However, playing it this safe has become the riskiest strategy of all.
04:36When every major release feels like a slightly shinier version of last year's slightly shinier version, audience fatigue sets in
04:43hard and stays there for years.
04:46A crash would force the industry to remember that the titles people still talk about a decade later were rarely
04:51the ones that played at the safest.
04:53The only way to get genuinely new ideas funded is for the old, comfortable ones to stop printing money on
04:59autopilot and force executives to take actual creative chances again instead of recycling the same formulas until they stop working.
05:07What is it?
05:09The end.
05:11Or how it begins anyway.
05:14Smaller development teams
05:15She'll be fine.
05:22She'll be fine.
05:24Studio headcounts in the 2020s post-COVID ballooned without mercy or much justification.
05:30Layers of producers, coordinators, and non-essential roles multiplied
05:34until the actual craftspeople were outnumbered by the people managing the people who manage the craftspeople.
05:40Costs exploded while the average quality of the finished product stayed flat or dropped year after year
05:46and scale became a status symbol instead of a practical tool for making better games.
05:51Suddenly, the lean teams that ship coherent, focused experiences look a lot smarter than the thousand-person armies delivering bloated,
05:59committee-approved mediocrity.
06:01Even if we fail, we lay the trail for those who will come after.
06:06Right?
06:08Looking for something a little less bleak in the world of video games?
06:12Then head over to Mojo Play's 24-7 livestream for all the best content that gaming has to offer.
06:18Scan the QR code on screen to join us live for non-stop fun.
06:22Anti-consumerism.
06:23Listen.
06:24There's trouble.
06:25Big trouble.
06:27What did you do?
06:28I made a mistake.
06:29The near-constant bombardment of always-online requirements, aggressive DRM, and games that simply vanish when the servers get switched
06:38off
06:38has sadly become completely normalized over the last decade.
06:42Ownership was replaced with a temporary license that could be revoked whenever the company felt like it
06:47or decided the title was no longer profitable enough and players noticed the ship.
06:52However, they just didn't have many realistic alternatives for a long time
06:56and most shrugged it off, or even more bizarrely, defended these big corporations' decisions.
07:02A serious market correction changes that math overnight.
07:05When money is tighter across the board, treating paying customers like potential pirates or temporary renters
07:11becomes a luxury the industry can no longer afford without consequences.
07:15Real ownership and reliable offline functionality stops being fringe demands from entitled players
07:22and instead starts looking like basic commercial metrics that might actually keep people buying.
07:27Alright, let's do this.
07:30See on the other side.
07:36Our story is out there.
07:48Criticism used to be something studios at least pretended to listen to when it arrived in volume,
07:54but somewhere along the way, it turned into a pure PR problem that needed to be managed,
07:59moderated, or characterized into something the audience was doing wrong.
08:03Commercial failure got blamed on toxicity, misogyny, or coordinated review bombing
08:08instead of the product itself more times than anyone can count.
08:12And that recurring pattern is corrosive.
08:14It trains entire companies to treat their own audience as an enemy to be managed
08:18rather than a customer to be served.
08:21A crash removes the possibility of that deflection completely.
08:24Suddenly, listening becomes more commercially viable
08:27than narrating another press release about values and toxic gamers.
08:31Let's get out there and buy our way to victory!
08:37Realistic Scope
08:39And mercenaries
08:41Who may have crossed it now and then?
08:45Developer crunch is rarely some mysterious force of nature that just happens to teams.
08:51Instead, it's usually the predictable result of some executive fantasy timeline colliding with feature creep
08:56that no one in the higher-ups felt empowered or incentivized to change.
09:00The industry got very good at protecting bad decisions with process, hierarchy, and endless meanings,
09:06but a crash makes those protected decisions expensive again in ways that are hard to ignore.
09:12When every extra system and every delayed milestone carries a clearer, more painful cost,
09:17the people setting the schedule suddenly develop a new interest in what is actually achievable with the resources on hand.
09:23I will tell you what I told them.
09:26Albion is broken.
09:28And I'm going to mend it.
09:32Gameplay focus
09:35A place where robots and automation are not allowed!
09:46For most of this generation, the simple question of whether the game was actually fun to play for more than
09:51a weekend
09:51has become completely overshadowed by narrative ambition, graphical settings, and bloated systems.
09:57All of a sudden, tight, responsive gameplay loops become secondary concerns
10:01while the team chased cinematic spectacle, layered progression systems, and whatever else looked good in a trailer.
10:07Players kept buying the trailers in decent numbers,
10:10but didn't keep playing the finished products once the novelty wore off.
10:13A market correction forces the industry to remember that the core gameplay loop is still the product at the end
10:19of the day,
10:20while everything else is decoration no matter how expensive it is.
10:24When the decoration stops selling on its own, the loop has to carry the weight again.
10:30Bow before me.
10:32Bow before the absolute.
10:35Bow!
10:36Destructive Growth
10:37I have more pressing matters.
10:42You should have stayed...
10:47out of my way.
10:48Any industry that never faces real consequences for repeated failure
10:52eventually becomes exploitative and stagnant by design.
10:56The video game industry has spent years proving it could keep raising budgets, headcounts, and prices,
11:02while the average player experience plateaued or declined for long stretches of time.
11:06That kind of growth is neither healthy, possible, or sustainable.
11:11The self-contained vacuum obsessed with better graphics, more elaborate marketing,
11:15and a lot of people who convinced themselves the good times would last forever
11:18was always going to face a reckoning.
11:21A crash is the market's blunt way of saying enough is enough and the bill is due.
11:26The studios and publishers that survive will be the ones that remember how to make games people actually want
11:31instead of games that mainly exist to please shareholders and investors.
11:44Would you like to see the industry crash and force a restart, or are you content with the way things
11:49are now?
11:50Share your thoughts in the comments.
11:52Did you enjoy this video?
11:54Check out these other clips for Mojo Plays,
11:56and be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified about our latest videos.