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I have an absolutely enormous collection of old games. Literally thousands of them. While I do play a lot of newer games, I also dip into this collection on a near daily basis. It would be easy to write this off as nostalgia, but I don’t think that old games are better than newer ones, or that game development peaked sometime back when I was younger. It’s more that I think a good game is a good game, no matter when it was made. And sometimes a game that isn’t very good might have some aspect to it that is worth investigating. I play with old games, because I play games. All of them.

There is a trend that I am noticing in my explorations. Sometimes it can look like the game industry is dying, but that’s only because it is moving from one place to another, from one style to another, from one type of development to another. If your eyes are still on the old venues, yes, it will very much look like the game industry is dying. It never is.

I was playing some older arcade games and when you start to leave the 1990s and enter the 2000s you can see the ideas dry up. The arcade games become copies of copies of older games. It looks very much like the game industry is dying.

In the early 2000s game consoles went online and the people that played games didn’t frequent arcades anymore. They moved. They went home. They took the games with them. Gaming wasn’t dying, it changed.

One of the most expensive games ever made will release soon. It will probably do incredibly well. We probably will never see a game development that expensive any time soon. The level of production that can create a GTA6 just won’t happen again. When no game comes along to top it, that will look like this is the last gasp of a dying industry. It won’t be.

Games and game development is in the process of moving. It will move to the small studio creating something unique and new. It will move to individual developers creating experiences that are cherished by a smaller group of fans. They will be funded through direct sales, donations, and patrons. The creators of these games will be in direct communication with their audience in a way that a massive production never can.

Many of the massive companies making games today will fail and fold. This will appear to everyone still looking at where the industry used to be as an industry in decline. A death. It won’t be. People play. It’s what we do.

Someone right now is building a new collection. This collection includes works from creators that interact with their audience through twitch streams and regular small game releases. Those experiences aren’t peripheral to the games. They are integral to how this audience will play.

The game industry ten years, twenty years, from now will look different, but it isn’t going away. People play games. Old, new, big, small, expensively produced, made in a bedroom and given away for free. All of them. People play games, because games are fun. People make games for the same reason, and they always will.