Crash Videogamecoot

      Video games have, historically, seemed immune to general economic recessions. All signs point to the U.S. economy, as a whole instead of just at the bottom, entering a recession. Rich folks are about to be poor. To avoid being too poor, rich folks move their money into sure things like oil, government debt, and video game publishers like 2K or console makers like PlayStation.

    There is a problem, though. Video game publishers and console makers aren't growing, so stock values aren't going up, so video game publishers and console makers aren't looking very recession proof. So what happens when the economy finally takes a bow and the consumer class, not the uber wealthy, lose the ability to buy a PS5 Pro or new video card to run that new GTA VI? 

     A crash. A very big, very definitive, market-changing crash. It has looked like 1983 for a while with digital distribution flooding the market will low-quality titles, publishers spending too much money on uninspired license tie-ins, and a withering respect for Quality Assurance. The difference this time is the looming dissolution of PC on X86.

    Windows wants to push everything to the cloud and put the power on servers and pull it away from the local users. ARM PC is poised to take 50% of the market in the next 5 years. Meanwhile, Sony, Xbox, Valve, AMD, and Epic are largely commited to X86. What happens when both the end-user and the corporate accounts stop buying X86 equipment?

     Even after '83 solidified the end of Atari and the end of CISC consoles leading the market, CISC gaming lived-on in a diminished PC capacity. A crash of video games at this time, of this magnitude, could mean the end of CISC gaming as we know it.

     A change like that will sink any business without the ability to pivot. Valve and PlayStation stand-out as two companies that have largely ignored mobile development. PlayStation practically killed the Vita and shifted to tethered VR. Valve wants to shove a laptop into a tablet and call it mobile. Xbox, at the least, is pushing cloud. In the end, it could be very feasible that PlayStation and Valve have started their end-of-life. 

      But with every end there is a beginning, so what does the bounce back look like? Nintendo is already well-positioned to survive. Samsung, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are ready for a change, too. But why hasn't this happened yet?

    Largely the resistance to change that humans tend to embrace, and the echo chamber created by influencers that has made that resistance stronger, has prevented the death of X86. Change is most successful when it is forced. Think about seatbelt laws or the rise of bidet use in the U.S. during toilet paper shortages. Recessions, in the past, were enough to reduce the power of the American Muscle Car and increase the adoption of Japanese econobox vehicles. This recession could be the thing that drives people away from the costly PC muscle vehicle and into the mobile econobox economy.

      In the case of mobile, it could be this change that finally drives Samsung and Qualcomm to find developers that get the most out of their hardware. Phone games are not mobile games, in the sense of how they are developed. Phone games are developed for phones. Phones meaning every phone. The developers are limited by the lowest common denominator. Imagine if a majority of MMOs were deigned to run on a Pentium 2 with 512 MB of ram. That is the current phone game industry.

      Opposite of the phone game industry is the mobile game industry. The iPad, Mac Book, and Nintendo Switch are almost exclusively the mobile gaming industry. They have feature- complete, premium payment software that pushes the limits of the hardware. Samsung and Qualcomm haven't had platform developers showing interest in their chips for purely gaming. That could change if a recession drives demand for cheaper, dedicated gaming platforms.

     It doesn't really matter how the economy bounces back. What is certain is that recessions are always the nail in a zombie market coffin. 1983 killed the Motorola 68000, 1999 killed the big box book store, 2008 killed the department store. The 2024 decline will take something with it. Something old, something expensive, something that refuses to change.