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Former BioWare stalwart Mark Darrah started his profession at BioWare as a programmer on the unique Baldur’s Gate, and completed greater than 20 years later as government producer on Dragon Age and Anthem. He’s been round, in different phrases, he is seen some issues, and he has some ideas on the present state of the videogame trade—probably the most pointed of which is that as unhealthy as 2024 was, 2025 is even worse.
“Last year, it was survive til ’25,” Darrah mentioned in an interview with MrMattyPlays. “This year has definitely put the lie to that, because it’s more brutal than last year from everything I can see.
“Last yr it appeared like, contained in the enterprise a part of it, it appeared such as you had been beginning to see the beginnings of, ‘We’re bouncing off the underside.’ So you had been seeing the small cash, just like the those that spend money on the very early begins of tasks and studios and that, beginning to come out of the shadows once more. But then this yr appears shakier than ever.”
2024 was certainly terrible, and so was 2023, and 2022. PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon wrote on the finish of ’24 that after 1000’s of layoffs and dozens of studio closures by way of the yr, it felt just like the trade was “poised for a vibe shift—or maybe a reckoning” this year. Instead, somehow, the blood has continued to flow.
It’s a mess out there, and Darrah reckons live service games are a big part of the problem, for two reasons: One, because a successful live service game “makes all the money,” and two, because major publishers would be happier “if they each had five live services that made all the money and no other games.”
“I don’t think anyone who plays games really wants the industry to look like that,” Darrah said. “But from a business perspective, that’d be awesome. You know that you’re going to have five games that you only have to worry about, five games at your publishing organization. And then one will start to slowly decline and then you go and start to hunt for the one that’s going to replace it as it eventually dies.”
That’s a C-suite fantasy no doubt, but reality has demonstrated that pursuing live service gold is a high-risk enterprise: From Anthem to Concord, the landscape is littered with the corpses of games that were going to be the next big thing, until they weren’t. But, reinforcing Darrah’s point, reality also demonstrates that you can piss away $200 million on a humiliating live service flameout, and immediately turn around and pour even more money down a slightly differently-shaped hole because maybe this time you’ll hit a dinger.
Darrah mentioned the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, “a game made pretty cheaply with good but not over-good visuals [that] didn’t sell 15 million copies, but it sold great,” may sign that players are perhaps prepared for a shift away from the reside service deluge. But what it actually comes right down to is Grand Theft Auto 6, which is what is going to actually set the course for the trade in years to return: Whether it shifts away from the relentless drive for reside service success (and the attendant huge budgets), or doubles down.
“Ask me again after GTA 6 ships,” Darrah mentioned. “If GTA 6 doesn’t sell 70, 80 million copies or whatever GTA 5 sold, then that’s going to signal something. But if it’s the most successful launch of all time, we’ll see.”
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