Gaming peaked during pandemic, all these publishers chasing that sweet money by building bajillion service games are in for a rude awakening when consumer spending normalizes due to not being locked in at home all the time.
Very astute observation. Not something Jimbo is capable of seeing as how he's about to release 12 GaaS games in the next 3-4 years.
This reminds me of both Sony and Microsoft chasing the Wii Motion Control fad in the PS360 era. Every conference had half a dozen kinect and move shovelware, and while MS was far more successful, it didnt translate into longterm growth.
It's clear that there can only be so many subscription based games on the market at one point. A lot of these guys have already missed the fortnite and warzone craze. Even battlefield and traditional cod cannot compete with these juggernauts, what chance does sony have? I love Destiny so dont mind ND's take on PvE raids, but man 12 is just way too much. you are flooding the market at that point. People dont invests hunderds of hours into one game only to abandon it three months later for another gaas game. Thats precisely why Sony was selling so many of their single player games during the GaaS boom of last gen. People wanted something different and Sony was able to create their own niche while EA, Activision and Ubisoft chased the gaas trends. It's far easier to buy a new 20-30 hour single player game every 3 months than it is to drop 3 months of progress to pick up an entirely different gaas game.
Shawn Layden once said something that annoyed me but i can see what he was trying to say now. He said he didnt want to make online multiplayer games because he didnt want to compete with Activision and Ubisoft. I was angry because I wanted to see Sony make more online games like KZ, Warhawk, Mag and Resistance. But now I see that he simply looked at how difficult it is to penetrate that market and astutely decided to stay the fuck from it. Their games started selling 20 million after languishing around 5-10 million for over two decades, and even that is not good enough. Incredible.