The video game industry is collapsing. The video game industry has never been better. There are no sustainable jobs in video games. There are more people sustainably making games than ever before. There is no long term future for video games. The future of video games is wide open.

If you follow this industry long enough, you start to see the trends. Sometimes there are waves. Waves of layoffs, waves of closures, waves of cancellations. But there are also waves of startups and indie developers and overnight successes ten years in the making.

I think the thing to remember is that games isn’t an industry. We call it that, just like we call films an industry, but this isn’t manufacturing. Video games are a collaborative art form. Like theatre or music. One person could possibly create these works of art, but, by their nature, they are best created by a group. Creating art is a human endeavour. Experiencing art is a human endeavour. It can also be a business, but no one shows up to experience your art because you have solid financial books. A handful of the larger companies in the video game space have forgotten that. They think they are in industry. They are in the business of creating art for other people to experience. They will remember eventually. They always do.

In the meantime, the fall of a few large companies means the rise of many small ones. Small teams that already know that they came to this medium to create art. Art that they want other people to be able to experience and enjoy.

The video games industry is not collapsing. It’s growing again. And that usually means that people return to creating art rather than creating profit for shareholders. Profit can be had. There are a lot of people out there that are ready to engage with the art form of video games, and they are more than happy to pay for them. Over the next few years a lot of that money will go to smaller independent teams. The large, publicly traded companies will call this a collapse of the game industry, because they won’t be getting that money. We’ve been here before and, trust me, the artform of video games will be better for it.