It’s not exactly a contentious thing to say that the video games industry is presently in, generously, a state of flux. It’s not even really contentious to go a step further and say it’s almost in freefall. Of the people I worked with at my last studio job closely, only one out of a half dozen has continued to find work in games since, and even that is contract/part-time. New, big AAA games are tanking, and successful indie games seem rarer than ever admist a deluge of crap appearing on Steam.

Anecdotally, friends of mine who have owned a console all their adult lives are increasingly letting it gather dust. Many still have a Playstation 4 and are mildly frustrated to learn that they can’t play new games on it. Rather than even considering buying a Playstation 5, they seem to just shrug and move on with their lives.

There is a certain kind of gamer who still exists, to be sure - people who regularly play new games, usually on PC. Actually, let’s face it, I don’t mean PC - I mean Steam, specifically, as they are the Standard Oil of game distribution. These people do play new games. Seeking out new indies, buying anywhere from a few a year to one a month. The problem is these types of gamers make up a minority. People who want to play lots of random small new games make up something like ten percent of the market, and as Microsoft discovered with their spectacular footgun-operation called Gamepass, that’s not enough to build a sustainable model on.

Yet we keep hearing that video games is making more money than ever, which is a claim more or less born out by the numbers.

There’s another thing happening right now, too. Call it whatever you want - the Touch Grass movement, the Going Offline movement, the neo-Luddite movement. Whatever it’s called and however big it is (it’s hard to tell how much is genuine and how much is just The Algorithm noticing videos on this subject are doing numbers and should be promoted), it seems genuine. Even people not actively part of this movement seem aware of it.

It’s a scrolling fatigue. A frustration with the fact that our devices use us, rather than the reverse. Talk to many of your friends about how they feel about scrolling reels on Instagram or the Tiks Tok or whatever endless firehose of dopamine is their poison, and most will express frustration. Again anecdotally, but more and more of my friends use lockout tols on their devices to stop them being on social media part of the day. More are using tools to entirely strip out most of the ‘smart’ features of their phones. One of my friends has a $1700 phone which has been modified to give her just a few boring icons for messaging, email and maps, with everything else either deleted or buried so that she can’t access it easily.

Frictionless Boredom

The other day I for some reason sat down and watched a half-dozen videos by Gen Z’ers who are finding themselves losing interest in gaming, and trying to figure out why. Their comments varied, but a common refrain was that they had been playing games regularly, mostly with friends but often single-player, since they were tweenagers. Call of Duty, Battlefield, some sports game or other, racing games.

One of them, described stopping not as an active choice born of frustration, but as a slow thing that just kind of “happened”. One year, he was losing evenings to whatever the latest big game was with his friends, the next, he realised he hadn’t turned on his console in so long than when he did he found his controller battery was dead and his console insisted on a 35 terabyte update before it would let him go online.

It caused him to muse on just why he had stopped without truly meaning to, and his conclusion was essentially this: games had stopped being fun, and had instead simply become addictive. He described grinding and going through the motions and realising that he couldn’t even remember which game he had been playing. As in, he knew it was a Call of Duty, but could no longer tell you which one it was. The games now start in a launcher, with the specific title (not that Black Ops 17 or Modern Warfare 2, not to be confused with the Modern Warfare 2 from a decade back, are that distinctive), and he couldn’t even remember what he had been doing. Not that it mattered. They ere all more or less the same. They even come with the same maps, along with the obligatory zombie mode.

He described this as a contrast to his excitement at a new game coming out. Going out with his friends for the midnight launch or at least to get it on release day. They’d get a coffee or a milkshake or whatever then rush home to install it. These days, the titles were so similar and the process so friction-free, that he couldn’t remember what he had been playing. Selecting the buy button in-launcher, credit card details already on file. In design terms, the friction had been filed off the process.

This is the kind of bullshit that turds in cheap suits at the top of EA or Activision or Ubiscum think is a good thing. Consoles want digital-only because it removes the “loss” of the second hand games market, and maximises their profits by ensuring a larger percent goes to them. Big studios want you a captive in their ecosystem for the same reason. Load up an Assassin’s Creed game now and the main menu shows not just the game you’re in, but a list of other titles, greyed if you don’t “own” them (side-note: you do not own anything digitally on consoles or Steam), hoping when you get tired of playing stomping on bosses and grinding encounters in Ancient Greece you will switch to doing precisely the same thing in Viking-era Eastanglia or Samurai-era Japan.

The logic is understandable. People keep playing when X mechanic is in our games, so ensure the next ones have X mechanic in them too. It’s why with limited exception, Assassin’s Creed: Origins plays more or less the same as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows or Valhalla, and why even their deviations ‘back to basics’ in AC: Mirage seem to feel more similar than they are different.

It’s a business decision based on optimising peoples’ play time, and it’s a decision that is, objectively, failing.

This is worse than just its impact on the bottom line of the Saudi Royal Family’s investment fund. If you’ve ever tried to convince a friend of yours who no longer plays the odd tentpole AAA game to try this new indie game you’ve found, even if it’s truly fantastic and on a console they own, you’ll know how hard this is. Someone who plays the yearly Call of Battlefield or Assassins’s FIFA may not regularly play indie games, but at least they are more likely to, between releases or for a bit of a change, wet their whistle on some new indie darling.

I’m not saying AAA dying is the reason so many indie games are having such a hard time finding an audience, but it’s definitely one of many small factors chipping away at the capacity of indie developers to make a living.

The Dopamine Machines

What prompted me writing this wasn’t really all the observations listed above - you can search on youtube or, if you’re truly bold, on indie games criticism sites such as Aftermath or Rogue and find articles saying more or less all this. What prompted me writing this was the flash of recognition as I saw numerous people describe the changes to big-budget gaming and what had turned them off.

The death of video gaming isn’t just happening at the same time as people being burnt out on para-social media - it’s essentially happening for the same reasons.

The friction is being removed. It’s easier to just absorb the new content than ever before. Hell, most big franchises now have a subscription model so you can pay a set amount per month and when the next identical Assassin’s Creed comes out where you’re scrabbling over the rooftops of Osaka rather than Londinium, you can just play it right away. The next one is there, scrolling, on a list, probably auto-downloading over night as your console sits in light-sleep mode. It may not auto-play like the Toks and Tiks, but the friction is still nonetheless being removed and the content is more similar than ever.

It made me think of a series of psychological studies I remember doing the rounds when I as working for an indie studio some years ago. It was focused primarily on freemium mobile game development at the time (which, by the way, can we just call those pocket slot machines already? I’ve got a few older friends who are still addicted to playing them, and watching their dead-eyed stares as they swipe on Candy Crush or whatever the current one is called remind me SO much of my uncomfortable experiences taking a shortcut through the one-armed-bandit rooms in large bars or casinos).

What it was talking about, however, was relevant to all game design. It was talking about neurological studies measuring dopamine rushes, and it noted that the biggest dopamine rush wasn’t when the player won a thing, collected a prize or shot an enemy goon with their virtual AR-15… it was the moment right before. The study was done primarily on poker machines - that the big dopamine hit was right before people pulled the lever (figuratively, it’s buttons all the way down these days), but it proved true in video games too.

This kind of study may not impact Jill making her highly personal game about brewing Tea in a small tea shop outside Boston where she grew up, but it sure impacted game design at the most expensive tiers.

Both big video games and Tik Tok are based on the same principle - people subconsciously chase the dopamine hit right before they swipe to the next video. Will this next video be The One? The exciting one I send to my other addicted friends? Will this push of the button be the thing that pays out? No? Well I’ll get a similarly good rush just by swiping again.

This fits nicely with something else that was brought up at GDC talks some years back - that the decline of mobile gaming was primarily because they were now competing not with other games, but with TikTok. If your game is competing for peoples time on TikTok, then you are functionally making the same product. A dopamine machine with as little friction as possible - and an app where the only friction is swiping to the next video will almost always win over the slightly more complicated choices in a match-3 game or the like.

The Best of Times for Indie Devs, And The Worst of Times for Indie Devs

It is easier than ever to make indie games. So many engines, so many tutorials, and if you’re lacking in all interest in the process, you can even serve up slop littered with genAI art and design choices. (Seriously, as chatGPT to ‘help’ you design am match-3 game and you get it to produce one with many middle-of-the-road design decisions in just an hour or so.)

The barrier to entry to release your game on Steam is now relatively trivial, too. $150 AUD and you’re in. Most games, it should be noted, will not even make this modest sum back.

Choice paralysis is a factor, too. I used to be what I’d call an indie game player. I always had some new indie game to buy each month, something new to play. But my backlog has gotten enormous, and the stupid number of new games (many, by simple virtue of volume, at least superficially similar to those I’ve played before) mean that often I stare blankly at the myriad new titles on the Steam front page, shut down my computer, and go do something else.

Everything is the Same

People complain about new AAA games in the same way they complain about their TikTok or Instagram addiction. Hell, even Twitter and Bluesky are the same. (Bluesky tries to claim it’s different, but it still prominantly features an infinite firehose option cleverly called the ‘Discover’ tab.)

All these things have become the same. One may require you sitting on your couch with a controller in your hand, and the other may require you sitting… well, anywhere, with your black rectangle-‘o-horrors in your hand, but the differences between them in terms of why people play them and what is being done is very little:

Big modern games are no longer exciting, new, and fun, they are addictive, by design. Built for many minor dopamine rushes, rather than genuinely giving you a new experience. Assassin’s Creed 2 may not have been that different mechanically from Assassin’s Creed Unity, but at least they weren’t quite so heavily designed around the TikTok-like dopamine micro-rushes.

In the modern world of the Attention Economy, companies are trying to keep you hooked, not provide an experience you can enjoy.

This also impacts how people promote them.

“How’s the new Call of Duty? I didn’t play the last one!” [Eyes lighting up at least a little bit] “Oh it’s actually really good! There’s this epic sequence where you are being chased through a collapsing building as helicopters blast the windows apart above you, and the ending is really satisfyting! Also there’s this new multiplayer level with a cool new team mode.” “Huh, I might pick it up.”

“How’s the new Call of Duty? I didn’t play the last one.” [Realising they can’t tell you just why they spent 7 hours playing it after work the previous night] “Okay I guess.” “Guess I’ll open TikTok up again.”

They may not be identical things, but the design principles of modern friction-less feed-based para-social media are so similar to the frictionless design-principles of modern big budget service-based games that they are directly in competition with each other - and people are suffering from exhaustion as a result.

I don’t blame people. I’m the same, even if I feel a little guilty about it. I make and therefore also play games for a living, and I’m tired of them much of the time. I know there’s a million truly great indies coming out almost every day, but the whole devices-begging-for-your-attention system is so toxic and so exhausting, that I’d rather shove on a scratchy old record and belt out a thousand or so words into a terminal window where no social media alerts pop up than even try to find something to new and fun.

Late stage capitalism and the attention economy has ruined everything, and done it in truly record time.

I’m not sure there’s a way out of this until enough people reject the addiction model and the money isn’t in it any more. Even genuinely unique-looking adventurously designed single-player tent-pole games like Grand Theft Auto VI probably won’t reverse the course, for two reasons:

Firstly because the ability for Rockstar & Take 2 to make such an enormous swing away from current AAA standards is because of their enormous cash reserves.

Secondly, and most importantly - because thoes cash reserves come from a huge dopamine-driven service based online game, Grand Theft Auto Online, and I am sure that the billion dropped on GTA VI is really only being allowed because they hope its unanounced-but-definitely-attached online version will make them even more billions by goading players using the same adrenline-chasing slot machine mechanics as every other service-based game.