The Video Game Industry is NOT Collapsing. A Lawyer Explains.

Thanks, I hate it.

Who are these investors to "lure" if you are a megacorporation with huge deep pockets? It seems contrarily dumb for directors to base what their company does based on the decisions by other companies to follow boom-and-bust economics when that really won't affect them due to their massive, stabilizing cash reserves. Furthermore, putting people out of work en masse results in, at least for a year or so, increased video game sales, while the unemployed have more free time. Also, stock buyback is a direct path to idiocy.

Devs don't know what gamers want.

Thanks!

Came here cuz i hate moon and want to support you

Those numbers you quoted at the beginning, the projections were corrected. Go back and look, 2023 was projected at 180+ and is now below pandemic levels. Your whole video hinges on "Games doing well", and your data is wrong.

The Triple A are in collapse. Not ALL GAMES

ONLY AAA

It explains a lot actually, thanks.

Please when putting music, don’t use ones with lyrics, it’s hard to focus on what you say

This video in brief:

"7 For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. 8 But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. 9 Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." - 1 Timothy 6, New International Version.

I do not think that anyone is or was saying that gaming is dying . I think when people say that gaming is dying they are saying that gaming is becoming boring and generic .

Amazing channel! Keep up with the good work!

Why is this video an hour long and why is a lawyer explaining how an industry works that he isn't involved in. The reason why this happened is very simple it's the same reason why companies borrowed a ton of money for cheap and over hired, now they are returning to status quo, the end. You can look at the hiring pages for these companies pre and post covid and it's obvious, there I save you a hour.

Venture capital is responsible for many of the pains everyone complains about when they say things like "capitalist hell". And it's justified...

how about Valve?

Very random but honestly your chinese pronunciation is great

Why would we trust a lawyer though?

I hope to be that exception.

Many thanks for this video, I was struggling getting into Game industry from Movie industry. It was extremely difficult last year, and it was really difficult to understand why the profit was growing so well but there are so many layoffs. Now it’s all clear after watching this video, thanks again.

I think I need someone to explain it to me like to a 5 year old.

Tbh it seems a bit naiv to just believe nintendo, when they tell us that their employees are so happy, they don't want unions. I don't believe for a second, that there isn't something more sinister going on behind closed doors

Nearly 10k now.

Guess what. Nobody EVER said it was dying. Congrats on a terrible point.

I needed to watch this, thanks.

Games companies in America have really dove off the deep end for greed and the overall disgusting behavior of laying off thousands of workers to pay executives from their bonehead decisions. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that alot of games for the past couple of years have taken awful turns because of the greed of companies here. Palworld being a massive success with a very limited crew working on it is great for that studio (who also is hiring more people to work on it) is probably going to be a bad thing when executives inevitably point at that and expect underpaid and overworked employees to catch lightning in a bottle

Thank you, Moon Channel! This is an example of those "God Bless the Internet" moments. Meaningful education behind the "WHY" of these massive layoffs. I learned a lot today about finance and the gaming industry.

i've unlocked . i always assumed as studios put out projects that failed it was for experimenting and training staff to recycle the good into their main money making IP in sequal number 21 at expense of their new similar IP that would never again see the light of day. i thought about it in this context becuase i was a project manager for an engineering services company. I wasn't ever working closely enough with the finances department to see things this way...

Reminds me of a hydraulic ram pump, except instead of shedding water you shed employees...

Watching this video as many friends at Beenox just got laid off is pretty infuriating.
Thanks for the video tho, great explanation.

No way you are a real lawyer with the logical fallacies you made us endure.

Nothing personell kid. It's just business

Dang, really informative video. I came here because I've been doin my research after seeing way too many hot takes on twitter about why this keeps happening.

side-eyeing at Riot games

Fake ass lawyer with L takes

Nice video!!

(Before watching the video):
My first though was "90% of the games I buy are from people who were laid off from a game developer who makes more money in profit than ENTIRE COUNTRIES." Its obvious the reason why the market share of games goes up but large developers cut people is because there is a maximum amount of buyers you can get from re-releasing call of duty again.
They hit the theoretical maximum of buyers for their $500m budget game but refuse to split off an indie team to work on a $250k budget game. Instead, To make more money per year they crunch, buy and cannibalize other studios, and lay off employees. They cannot grow because they are so greedy that they have to make 'all the money in the world' or they won't be happy. They would rather feed their massive cash-cow until it pops rather than pay for a couple chickens to lay eggs.

It's the reason Kojima was fired, MGS:V took around $80m to develop and made $180m the first day with who can say how much in the next year. The issue is it took 4 years to develop and made only $100m aka $25m in profit per year with a huge up-front cost. The issue is games like Genshin Impact made ~$400m in 2020 alone and over $1.9b in 2022, thats 1,900m per year or over 76 times the amount of money that MGSV made and will ever make. Obviously they fired Kojima, made the phone game guy the ceo, then cannibalized the leftover kojima team to force them to work in the phone game mines.
Kojima then went on to head Death Stranding with a development cost of around $10m and a 6 month sales of around $27m more than breaking even and securing money for future projects.
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After half of the video, its one step ahead of my split second thought process. The cycle of "buy studio, then cannibalize and shut it down" is what I noticed and they pretty much are doing it to feed their cash cow. Its sad though that increased game sales market share isnt only due to people fed up with the current system and is actually proof of the AAA feeding on the industry and manipulating hype cycles. Its like they're purposefully overpopulating deer just so they can hunt them.

now its the question if i should trust your videos at all, seeing how bad you did with the whole openhand and karl jobst video.

You're a fool!

Essentially all the business people that created the economic bubble in the previous decades jumped shipped to the tech industry that they are now leaving off due to the crash that they themselves created? No wonder.

Personally I don't think this malicious way of doing business can last much longer. People are only going to put up with so much and contrary to popular belief the average person is getting better educated and harder to fool, one day people will no longer fall for the hype and for a number of reasons that would take too long to explain all these malicious methods of "success" will no longer work.

The short version of it is that we are people we can adapt and grow and we get to chose what is and isn't allowed, there is a bias where people obsess over the colossal gap between the highest and lowest points rather then comparing the lowest points now with the lowest points in the past, there are systems and technologies and assets that are becoming better and more widely available. I should speed this up this was supposed to be the short version.

Another way of looking at it is this method of doing business as a whole is itself a speculative bubble and not everyone is participating in it so the world is developing in a way that is real so when the bubble "bursts" most of the world won't care because we will have real tangible improvements that aren't part of this bubble that the people who are potentially hurt by the bubble "bursting"can fall back on.

Universal basic income is looking more likely, workers unions are already increasing, education is getting better, the only thing left to shut down this "big tech" business model is to abolish copyright law and with the amount of blatant copyright violations by common people I think there is a clear desire for it to at least be reformed.

I just hope this happens on the time scale of years rather then decades or even longer.

I would love a dedicated WotC video.

Love this guys channel.

Bonus points for Persona 5 music in the background.

Thank you for these quality uploads.

Is there a name for this strategy? I'd like to look into it further, but trying to Google terms around this pattern of acquisitions followed by layoffs just gives news articles about it happening, or basic definitions for business terms.

I like Nintendo and Atlus even more
Even though Nintendo can be shituy to its fdan and atlus has terrible problems of DLC and abandonware
They treat their employees right

holy crap I thought the video had ended only to find out I had only gone through a third of it.

What a monstrous work you've made here Moonie.

And they actually aren't allowed to focus on the best talent, they're forced to hire with diversity in mind.

Unfortunately those valuations include gatchas and phone games, which aren't games. They're games for people who don't like games.