00:06Welcome to MojoPlays and today we're getting nervous.
00:10There's a rumbling, it feels like 1983 again, and we've all been feeling it for a hot minute.
00:15These are 10 signs we're heading towards another video game industry crash.
00:20Before we continue, we publish content all week long,
00:23so be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to get notified of our latest videos.
00:28The loss of mid-tier development.
00:34The warning signs are already everywhere.
00:37Back in 2012, more than 20 game companies collapsed,
00:40taking names like Hudson Soft, Psygnosis and Rockstar Vancouver with them.
00:45Now, these weren't tiny studios no one had heard of either.
00:48Their work included Bomberman, Wipeout, Lemmings, Max Payne 3 and City of Heroes.
00:53Then, THQ went under despite owning huge brands like WWE, Saints Row, Red Faction and Warhammer.
00:59Rising development costs and expensive new games that failed to catch on simply buried them.
01:04Even Crytek later faced reports of unpaid wages.
01:07If successful companies can vanish this quickly, the industry starts looking less stable
01:11and more like it's quietly removing the floorboards.
01:14This was more than 10 years ago, by the way, and the industry hasn't suddenly boomed.
01:18Let's keep looking.
01:26Shovelware and AI
01:33Finding a good new game is getting harder when storefronts are buried under mountains of junk and shovelware.
01:39For the layman, shovelware is low quality software and video games rushed to market,
01:44where the focus is more on high quantity over anything else.
01:47Shovelware has always existed, but cheap development tools, asset flips and now generative AI
01:52have made it easier than ever to pump out barely finished games at ridiculous speed.
01:57That creates a visibility problem for everyone else.
02:00Players scroll past hundreds and hundreds of near identical survival games, lazy mobile ports and AI generated slop,
02:06while genuinely interesting smaller releases struggle to get noticed.
02:10Eventually, storefronts start feeling less like curated shops and more like a digital landfill.
02:15If consumers constantly have to dig through garbage to find something worthwhile,
02:18trust drops, discovery gets worse and the entire market becomes harder to navigate.
02:26Everything is broken.
02:36Nothing, nothing kills excitement faster than buying a new game and discovering it barely works.
02:41Try and think of a time that this has happened to you and I bet you have an answer already.
02:44What was it? No Man's Sky? Cyberpunk?
02:47I could keep going.
02:48And I will.
02:49Well, Assassin's Creed Unity became the poster child for this.
02:52Launching with crashes, broken co-op, menu problems and the occasional ability to simply fall through the floor.
02:58Ubisoft eventually handed out free games as compensation, which says a lot.
03:02But it wasn't alone.
03:03Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, Halo the Master Chief Collection,
03:06SimCity, Battlefield 4, DriveClub, LittleBigPlanet 3,
03:09all of these arrived carrying serious problems.
03:12Bugs will always happen, it's fine.
03:13Especially in huge games, but selling something fundamentally broken really destroys trust.
03:20Once players stop believing developers, sales suffer and expensive studios suddenly have a much bigger problem.
03:34Everybody wants their own GTA Online.
03:40Every publisher seems to want its own forever game now.
03:43Because Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty and GTA Online make recurring revenue look irresistible.
03:49The issue is that players only have so much free time.
03:52And live service games are incredibly needy.
03:55They want constant logins, battle passes, seasonal events and enough hours to qualify as unpaid employment.
04:01That leaves new releases fighting against games people have already invested years into.
04:06When one of these expensive projects fail, publishers aren't just losing launch sales.
04:11They're eating massive development and supporting costs at the same time.
04:15There isn't simply enough attention to go around.
04:18No matter how badly every company wants its own money printing machine.
04:21And think of the failures.
04:23Well the boss is not happy.
04:28No way.
04:29Too expensive to fail.
04:31So we open on 15 year old Ellie.
04:35This is a few weeks after the events of the first game.
04:38AAA development has become absurdly expensive.
04:40Some games now cost hundreds of millions.
04:43Take half a decade to finish and then get another mountain of money dumped into marketing.
04:48This results in a really backwards issue.
04:51Selling millions of copies can be a huge disappointment for publishers.
04:55They don't need millions.
04:56They need tens of millions.
04:58Hundreds of millions.
04:59And with the amount of money that goes in.
05:00And the return being a little slice of the cost on top.
05:03One flop can put an entire studio on life support.
05:07Naturally publishers respond by taking fewer risks.
05:10Leaning on sequels, familiar brands and ideas already proven to sell.
05:14Like remakes.
05:15So games are getting bigger, longer and more expensive.
05:18While companies become increasingly terrified of experimentation.
05:22This gives us games like the Grand Theft Auto trilogy.
05:24Not Grand Theft Auto 6.
05:25It was coming down to the wire.
05:27And it's just, we had to shift resources.
05:29And pretty much everyone just ended up on Uncharted.
05:31Trying to finish it up.
05:33Too expensive to succeed.
05:34Today we're talking about PlayStation Plus.
05:36And whether it's still worth buying in 2026.
05:39The price of games going up would sting less if players felt like they were actually getting
05:43more for their money.
05:44Instead, a full price release can now come with deluxe editions, battle passes, subscriptions,
05:48paid DLC and several fake currencies designed to make buying one stupid hat feel like filing
05:53a tax return.
05:54Spending is still growing in some premium price ranges.
05:57So publishers clearly see room to keep pushing.
06:00The danger is assuming that tolerance has no limit.
06:02Games are competing with Netflix, movies and every other monthly expense people already
06:06have.
06:07Keep asking for more money.
06:09And eventually players won't just skip extras.
06:11They'll start skipping entire games.
06:13I've got two game service subscriptions.
06:15And I still think I spent a couple hundred dollars on games this month.
06:19It's kind of stupid when you think about it.
06:20So all of your game saves which are stored on your PS4 or PS5 are synced to the cloud
06:25and backed up.
06:26Who cares about the user?
06:33I hate to harp on it, but if gaming ever does completely implode,
06:38Assassin's Creed Unity deserves a small plaque at the crime scene.
06:40The bugs were already bad enough, but Ubisoft somehow made the situation way uglier by locking
06:45content behind companion apps and delaying reviews until after release.
06:49That meant plenty of people bought the game before learning just how broken it was.
06:52Then, once complaints exploded, one of Ubisoft's early priorities was fixing problems with
06:57Helix credits.
06:58The system that let players spend even more money.
07:01Brilliant timing.
07:02The player might have been falling through Paris or temporarily losing their face,
07:05but thank god microtransactions were getting attention.
07:07Nothing rebuilds customer trust quite like that.
07:15Where the devil are they?
07:18Digital Ownership
07:19Have you ever noticed that digital PlayStation games are more expensive than physical ones?
07:24Pretty weird, right?
07:25Back in the day, physical games gave players something really simple.
07:29You bought the disc, put it on the shelf, lent it out, sold it later, and generally knew
07:32it was yours.
07:34Digital storefronts make that relationship far less comfortable.
07:36Purchases now depend on accounts, licenses, servers, and companies keeping everything
07:41running.
07:42I mean, just this month, I went to play Kingdom Hearts 3 in preparation for Kingdom Hearts 4,
07:46only to find out I'd lost access.
07:48Not because my subscription had lapsed, it had just been removed.
07:51Take-Two has said more than 90% of its business is digitally distributed, showing just how
07:56far the industry has moved.
07:58Digital sales aren't inherently bad, but when prices stay high and ownership feels temporary,
08:03trusts start slipping.
08:04Paying $70 for something that might disappear one day feels less like buying a game, and
08:09more like renting it long term.
08:11And Dutch gamers can help by signing up on our website.
08:15Together, we can create a fair PlayStation.
08:18We're all overwhelmed.
08:22The biggest threat to a new release, and the industry in general, might be the hundreds
08:27of games already sitting in someone's library.
08:29Between Steam backlogs, subscription services, free-to-play giants, and older titles that
08:33still hold up perfectly well, players have no shortage of things demanding their time.
08:38That makes visibility brutally difficult.
08:41A mid-sized game can earn great reviews, look fantastic, and still vanish almost immediately
08:46because everyone is busy with Fortnite, Minecraft, Counter-Strike, GTA, or some random bargain
08:50they grabbed years ago.
08:52Honestly, this week I put more time into World of Warcraft and Age of Empires 2 than 007 First
08:57Light.
08:58The industry is releasing more games than ever, but that doesn't mean games are succeeding.
09:02Sometimes the biggest enemy isn't bad quality, it's simply that they're trying to grab the
09:06attention of gamers who are comfortable with what they have.
09:15Is this our fault?
09:23Publishers didn't invent this mess entirely on their own.
09:27We helped train them.
09:28When Call of Duty, FIFA, and other familiar franchises kept selling huge numbers, companies
09:34learned that reputation is safer than taking risks.
09:38Pre-orders make things worse because millions can be locked in before anyone knows whether
09:41a game actually works.
09:42Then one successful trend inspires a flood of imitators, most of which arrive late and die
09:47quietly.
09:48THQ learned that lesson the hard way with expensive bets like Homefront.
09:52Eventually though, consumers do get tired.
09:54If enough people stop rewarding broker launches and recycled ideas, publishers may finally
09:59discover that what worked before isn't a permanent business plan.
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