Five Reason for the Video Game Industry to Crash

Yes.
We need to return to the golden age... or is it silver... or is it bronze...
FINE! -I am going back to 2009 -the Video Game golden year IMO.
By that I mean that the quantity and quality has reduced over realism of graphics and lack of substance in games since well way before that year.
By that year however -again in my opinion is the stepping stone where the industry that was slipping is now in near free fall.

Sequel this, add-on that, expansions here, there, everywhere.
UGH!
Look what the current generation of video game junk has degenerated me into.
And again most games these days are not even worthy of the digital code they are made of -nor the trash bin.

Hmmm

1. Non gamers hold the CEO job.
   
   This implies 'non-hardcore gamer'. Not an issue in my view. In any case, CEOs will engage creative directors.
   
   
2. Gaming budgets have skyrocketed. 
   
   Yes, but live service rewards if well implemented also exist. Agreed, risks are greater than ever, the price of failure can be studio-killing, but industry-wide demand remains.
   
   
3. Publishers are skewing the reviews.
   
   More than ever the gaming community are aware of content upon release, even despite 'marketing'. Review scores are a little tougher now after the 'ethics in game journalism' spat and there are countless independent reviewers on YouTube / Twitch etc. If publishers could control the message in the past they certainly can't now. And making a case based on MetaCritic scores is deeply flawed.
   
   
4. Gamers are in the dark when buying a game.
   
   Hardly, again given the internet, a gamer who will wait for reviews can be more informed than ever, as long as they hold off their order. In the old days people would often judge simply on the box art.
   
   
5. Exploitative game industry
   
   Clearly there are exploitative practices but they get called out pretty fast. Companies that have reasonable game economies can sell games in good number.

Some choices made by certain company show that along the top tier of the food chain there are people who do not know what exactly are selling and to whom, for example:

- One of the problem i think DAI faced while in development was that i had to be made for 5 wildly different platform at the same time PC,PS4,PS3,Xbox360 and Xbox one. In this situation i cannot honestly blame EA for making this decision. The new generation was still a big ? in point of sells and diffusion so it made sense pointing on the old generation.

-The recent lootbox shit with battlefront 2 in all due honestly was boiling for months with some major signs that thing could go pear shaped really fast but still someone up there failed rather spectacularly in evaluating how the people would react .

Finally the crunch and other act like that are a big problem.
Recently i've read on kotaku that people in the VG industry are starting to finally put some serious thought on unionize (which as European it baffle me how a VG trade union doesn't exist in the US) for normalize those practice which is a pretty good thing in my opinion.

I firmly believe that any studio that use excessive crunch like CDPR or Naughty dog or shouldn't be severely punished for exploiting their worker

Unfortunately gaming can't crash the same way. AAA can crash. EA can ramp up mistakes, Activision can keep wasting money on a Destiny that no longer turns in long-term profit and so on but if those publishers go, like THQ went, there'll likely still be the indies and there are already small-time publishers specifically looking to help indie-teams get games out on the market.

It would take Valve to crash, it would take Google Play to crash, it would take GoG to crash etc. etc.

Sure, some of the bigger boys going under can make a ripple effect on the industry but at this point everything is so big and diverse in the industry that I don't see how the heck it could ever happen without being a mere nosedive that quickly recovers from whoever picks it up because there are so many more eyes on video games now.

(1) Non gamers hold the CEO job.
-I am pretty sure they play games, they might not to the extent people around here do, but I bet they do some gaming. Even if not if people who played games were in charge I bet that would be twisted to be a negative with comments such as "they are making all the games into what they would want, not what we as players want"

(2) Gaming budgets have skyrocketed.
-Of course, but why have they skyrocketed? I keep seeing longer and longer lists of demands from players on what their games need to have to be good and if there are mistakes they get crucified for them. Do you think they are going to put less money towards a Mass Effect game when that would mean they wouldn't give players the illusion of 4K graphics that they have been demanding from consoles?

(3) Publishers are skewing the reviews.
-That hasn't brought other media type industries to their knees. Aside from rumors you don't see too much about how EA is trying to censor YouTube videos, that is purely in the hands of indies who do not know how to handle criticism. Bethesda seems to have removed or scaled back their moronic review policy as well. So I don't think that is happening nearly as much as people want to believe. Its more of the "we need it out now" mentality of review sites that will rush a review out without spending more then a couple of hours with some games. That has also been changing for there are now more provisional style reviews to give a more comprehensive look too.

(4) Gamers are in the dark when buying a game.
-Only if they choose to be by pre-ordering. I rarely pre-order a game and I will not pre-order a game I have question about. If you cannot wait for a couple of days after release to make a judgement call its the fault of the player and not the publisher.

(5) Exploitative game industry
-I understand the concern about lootboxes and such, but at the same time I don't think it will cause things to crash. If anything I think this behavior has become normalized due to people and the free to play acceptance on cellphone games.

As much as people keep claiming there is going to be a crash, I just don't see it. The industry is constantly adapting to different models and successes. If something isn't working they don't keep trying to force they move on. Its why I think we don't see a lot of RTS games or Click-Adventure games from the bigger developers because they were costing more money then they were making. Its the same with fads like open world or now shooter-looters type games because that is what players are buying and wanting. There might be hicups along the way, but as we saw with Battlefront 2 things change as well. To have a crash I think games would need to stop selling. Now a recession might be a better thing to be concerned about, but when I hear crash I think of what happened when only Atari really existed and when they made a mistake there wasn't alternatives to the problem to correct itself. Nowadays if EA or Activision makes a mistake there is an alternative for players so gaming doesn't really leave the mindset. I know plenty of people that were upset at Destiny 2 and they just moved to The Division, which I think is more likely to happen then a full blown crash.

(3) Publishers are skewing the reviews.

Gamers are even worse on this. STEAM reviews are steaming pile of dung and metacritic user scores are beyond redemption.

Crash? Nah. Some bigger publishers may finally have their mistakes catch up with them, but good, even excellent titles still exist that don't nickel and dime players, and thus far some of the biggest ones of recent memory have been decently rewarded for the devs' efforts. It's a powerful medium that retains a great deal of its potential and that's not going to change anytime soon, and demand will probably not falter much at all. Maybe some genres might suffer, but not die off.

Crash can happen if lootboxes will be declared illegal. EA and Activision as of today make more than half of their profits from microtransactions. All it takes is just China or US to rule them out as what they are - gambling - and those corporations will take a hit, from which they will never heal. And they would have noone to blame but themselves.

Hahahahaha.

Yeah that is not going to happen. The industry is in a position where it quite literally will weather any sort of crash and burn or downturn of business at this point. The reasons given are trite at best; the only one that is a legitimate concern in 2018 is the budget issue. Publishers don't skew reviews  thats the general gaming public for one, often without any filter or justification other than to follow into their own "identity" of what they see gaming culture should be. In other words, its political for them first and practical second. The issue of outsiders in CEO game jobs is actually kind of flimsy...especially considering how most CEO's in positions right now, bar perhaps Kotick, have come from tech and gaming backgrounds. Also if the gaming populace is really in the dark then message boards and online reviews wouldn't be used as a bomb against them, along with the punditry of doom and gloom on youtube for even the slightest condemnation over a look or feel or perceived "culture" of a game, or focusing on a misguided thesis of what they consider a game to be. Lastly, the industries "exploitative" nature has changed a lot since the mid 2000s...and once we get unionization it will get better. Plus, as ive argued before, lootboxes are only exploitative when they are poorly utilized, and not utilizing them will dictate the behavior of companies. 

The only ones who would suffer from any form of crash are mid tier developers, franchises and a ton of good indie games. Put it simply; the big budget blockbuster titles will be made still, while the smaller games in the catalogue will not.

Id rather not see that happen. I prefer variety. 

Please lets not go discussing this route...
Unless we can strike an unbiased balance between them the Console vs PC war is not needed here.

That is true, but how many people would buy a game, leave the clock running for tens or hundreds of hours only so they can give their bitching a bit more weight?

I have had that happen too once or twice every few weeks or, but it's a problem easily detected (your avatar's border remains green for "in game" instead of turning blue for "online") and easily fixed (open task manager, stop appropriate process). Not saying that it's impossible that Steam racks up some extra hours on your games, but I don't think it's very likely. When there's hundreds or thousands of reviews, the few reviews submitted by people who have this problem will likely be irrelevant.

Of course, reader's discretion is advised when it comes to any sort of review. Personally I just check the first page of the "discussions" forum of a game I'm interested in. If half or less of the first page topics are bitching about something, it may still be a fun game and I won't be put off from checking it out. If almost ALL of the first page is made up of complaints, chances are that I won't enjoy the title very much. So far that worked pretty well for me.