Ideas on the State of Video Gaming

I’ve spent 24 years making video games folks play for hundreds of hours. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, WWII, Vanguard, Modern Warfare 3; all shipped below my artistic path for multiplayer.

I’ve learn Matthew Ball’s State of Video Gaming 2026 report a couple of occasions now. Here’s what I see because the “fun” half.

There aren’t any new gamers.

Private funding is down 55%. Margins are shrinking. The AAA playbook is now: squeeze the viewers you have already got. Raise costs in small increments earlier than anybody notices. Bump microtransaction prices by 50 cents right here, a greenback there. Then finally somebody drops the $100 price ticket and the remaining observe. GTA VI will in all probability be the one to interrupt that seal.

I watched this precise sample play out from inside Activision. The query each single day at EA was “how are we increasing shareholder value today?” At Activision it was the content material treadmill; when you begin, you possibly can by no means cease filling the pipe, and also you’re completely behind.

The a part of Ball’s report I discover fascinating is the competitors is not different video games. It’s OnlyFans. It’s sports activities betting. It’s prediction markets. It’s TikTok.

Adult gamers do not have the persistence to be taught one thing new or be susceptible in a brand new social group. They need dopamine with out effort and most danger. Short-form video, a playing rush, parasocial relationships which are all immediate, all frictionless. We’ve sanitized the attention-grabbing bits out of video games and the viewers discovered their hits elsewhere.

Meanwhile, youngsters are on Roblox. 380M+ month-to-month energetic customers and it is mainly the one UGC platform that reveals up in Ball’s knowledge. Not UEFN. Not modding communities. Just Roblox. Why? The youngsters have time, their whole social community lives there, they usually cannot gamble but.

I assure you there are boardrooms filled with tieless fits asking “how do we make our game more like Roblox?” I’ve been in these rooms. The reply they will land on is incorrect as a result of they will attempt to bolt a creator economic system onto a sport that was by no means constructed for one, workers up a 40-person accounting staff to handle payouts, and blow the margins they had been making an attempt to guard.

The smarter transfer, and that is what I left Activision to construct, is to deal with the creator economic system as infrastructure, not a characteristic. At
Oncade
we automate UGC payouts. No accounting staff. No six-month integration. A developer indicators up and their creators can earn, withdraw, and get tax docs dealt with routinely. We’re already powering the UGC economic system for Adventure Forge, that is

Jordan Weisman

, the creator of the wonderful video games BattleTech and Shadowrun, and several other different studios going reside this quarter.

But again to the macro image. (

Brian Miggels

you possibly can add that to my “terrible marketing” tab )

Do main publishers begin treating Roblox like a console? An official Call of Duty branded Roblox expertise may truly be a greater funding for participant acquisition than a F2P loss chief. Lower dev spend, decrease requirements bar, use the IP and model recognition. The distribution is already there.

Or do video games go the TikTok route? Fast, explosive mini-experiences below a bigger model with light-weight development. Companies like
Bitmagic
are constructing platforms for speedy sport era. Unity is displaying their first “playable” title constructed with generative instruments at GDC this 12 months. The price ground for transport a sport is about to break down.

When I used to be working reside seasons on Modern Warfare 3, my staff was transport new modes nearly weekly. “Get High”, a 420-themed platformer inside Call of Duty, began as a nervous experiment. We slowly leaked it, watched the sign, and the response was huge. We adopted it with huge head(Bit Party) mode, 40K-inspired Juggernaut battles, zombie weapons in multiplayer. A small, passionate staff with few restraints and the flexibility to kill what did not work.

That’s the mannequin. Not billion-dollar bets. Not three-year dev cycles the place a sport of phone between 2,000 folks dilutes each artistic resolution till the imaginative and prescient is unrecognizable.

Narrow focus. Own your area of interest. Ship quick. Let your group take part within the development: financially, creatively, socially. The builders who work out that their gamers aren’t simply shoppers however financial individuals of their ecosystem are those who survive what’s coming.

The way forward for interactive leisure is vibrant. The way forward for the “video games industry” as we knew it’s already gone.

We simply have not all admitted it but.