It's generally agreed that this is a very bad time for the videogame industry. There's some disagreement on just how bad it is—Tim Cain says it's not as bad as the infamous crash of the early 1980s, Brenda Romero says it's worse—but the bottom line is that if you're comparing your current situation to that very specific moment in time, the situation is definitely not good.

In a new Knowledge newsletter, originally published in Edge magazine, numerous veterans of the game biz shared their thoughts on the industry's troubles, and what might be done to address them. It's a very interesting discussion, but also a bit disheartening to some extent, because several make the point that the real problem goes way beyond just videogames.

"It's impossible for me to look at this as a game industry problem, when really it’s the result of this much bigger, complex system that we’ve allowed to be captured by greedy, rapacious forces," former Arkane Studios creative director Harvey Smith said.

Pointing to Redfall, the game that preceded the closure of Arkane Austin in 2024, Smith continued, "Instead of just being crushed and thrown to the wind, maybe those people would have figured it out and then, another cycle along, they would have had another Dishonored.

"And, even if they just made the occasional hit—one out of every three or whatever—wouldn’t you want to hold onto that? I guess the answer is no. You wouldn’t want to do that, if there’s an opportunity cost where instead you could put that money into AI, and even if it’s a bubble, your share price goes up massively."

Other developers shared similar thoughts. "I don’t think our current financial models are set up for art or entertainment," Kitfox Games co-founder Tanya X. Short said. "I just don’t think art is what capitalism is designed to nurture. But humans are."

Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies vet Raph Koster, whose Playable Words studio recently launched a new MMO called Stars Reach, said "systemic dynamics are what really make this happen," and that "absent regulation, it develops into market concentration, followed by cartels, followed by monopolies. That’s intrinsic in how it works."

Sam Barlow, known for games including Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immorality, put the situation in even starker terms: "Ultimately, to fix what’s broken in the videogame industry, we might have to fix reality."

It's a depressing thought alright, particularly given humanity's seeming drive to do the opposite of 'fixing things,' but it's hard to dispute the point when the mainstream videogame industry is busy swallowing itself via multi-billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that seem to inevitably lead to massive layoffs and increasingly constricted creative decisions. Earlier this year, Devolver Digital, which went public in 2021, announced its intent to get off the stock market because the videogame business is simply not compatible with the market's demands for "predictable, sequential growth"—a stark admission that the system as it stands just isn't working.

Despite the gloominess of the situation, Smith said he's "an optimist," and he believes that "people will keep coming together and keep making cool things."

"The model might be different, the structure of it all might be different, but I’m hopeful there’ll always be a market for that, as long as people are brilliant and creative, and they want to do good work," he said. "That’s what gives me hope. As long as I see that, I’m like, we’re going to come out okay in the end. It may suck for a while, we may have to depose some kings, but it’ll be okay."

The full report covers a lot of ground, and features commentary from other industry veterans including Shawn Layden, Tim Sweeney, Craig Duncan, and Amir Satvat, who was honored at The Game Awards in 2024 for his work assisting laid-off game developers. It's worth a few minutes to read in full—check it out at edge-online.com.

World of Warcraft has been running for 22 years, and even now Blizzard sometimes struggles to keep up with demand. Yesterday, the WoW: Forever beta launched and immediately broke under the weight of everyone trying to get in at once. How is this still happening when Blizzard has decades of experience with launching new MMO content? The devs themselves say they were genuinely taken aback by just how popular the Forever beta has been.

"Man, it was hard to sleep last night, I was so excited," senior game designer Josh Greenfield says on Twitter. "Beta has been... crazy. The craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost 8 years on classic. We've got something really special here."

Maybe that sounds hyperbolic, but senior game producer Tom Ellis has posted a more exhaustive technical breakdown of what went wrong for the opening hours of the Forever beta. "It's not a Production stack by a long, long, long, long, long, long shot," Ellis explains on Twitter. "Betas for WoW aren't usually huge meter movers so this environment just isn't that powerful."

Because "our little BETA environment only uses one REGIONAL realm," Ellis says, math on the servers started getting screwy as this one little connection point was suddenly having to funnel in so many players. This is why people kept getting disconnected after sitting through the lengthy login queues.

It took the devs "around half an hour" to figure out that this was the bottleneck, because the game and Battle.net services both showed very little load. "We all recognized we need more logging and notifications when this system is kicking in, but this is the first time anyone's seen it kick in when [there] wasn't an obvious CPU issue to go along with it," Ellis explains. "20 years, always something new."

Ellis also addresses the long times players were experiencing while looting, accepting quests, and performing similar server-bound actions. "Our intrepid Oracle Database Engineers had to perform a manual analyze on all the tables and setup some automated jobs to periodically keep doing it," but because the servers were being hit so frequently, the typical rate wasn't sufficient. As soon as the devs addressed that, the database performance "cleared up instantly."

There were the restarts. "A few hours in, we noticed our WORLD pools that run, well, the game simulation you play on, were running crazy hot on CPU and almost out of memory," Ellis explains. Empty maps were not being correctly shut down, and those were slowly – or, actually, "not that slowly" – clogging up CPU and memory on the servers. The devs figured out a fix, but that fix needed restarts "to pick it up." Blizzard also took the opportunity to add additional worlds and expand the regional service for further stability.

Back in 2019, we interviewed numerous devs about why big online games always seem to break at launch, and it seems that all the same problems inevitably crop up. We heard one dev say "it's just impossible" to fully solve these kinds of launches, and WoW: Forever demonstrates how new issues crop up every single time. But hey, at least the fixes are coming faster. I'm old enough to remember when people were struggling to play Diablo 3 for weeks after launch…

WoW: Forever doesn't allow GDKP, Blizzard says the new MMO's economy is "something we're taking very seriously."

The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley has apologized for singling out God of War Laufey in a comment about lack of innovation in triple-A games.

"God Of War Laufey, I look at that game, and every pixel is mindblowing," Straley said in a recent Edge magazine feature. "The amount of work and skill that's gone into every single frame… I've made those kinds of games, and I'm still blown away. But when I actually look at what you're doing in the game? I'm not excited. And that's nothing against the God Of War team. Just, across the board in triple-A, it feels like there's no opportunity to inject fresh, innovative ideas."

In his apology, posted on X, Laufey said that his comment is being used for "clickbait."

"I want to apologize to the Laufey team for dragging you all into this uninvited & unnecessary negative attention," the director wrote. "I was trying to illustrate an industry concern & my mistake of naming your game is being used out of context & for clickbait. You don't need this. I'm sorry."

Straley didn't take back the central thrust of his remark, however, expanding on his position in a series of posts which place blame on industry leaders for the triple-A stagnation he perceives.

"The quest for GaaS & wanting to recreate the next Overwatch, Fortnite, Roblox, etc is not a viable strategy & frankly shows these 'industry leaders' don't know their own brand," said Straley.

"Hot take: There's a lack of good leadership, clear direction & conviction from the ppl at the top, in charge of the money. (Money = stability) I believe if they understand their brand, they could have honest, inspiring conversations w creators to steer our medium to innovate."

Straley left the triple-A scene in 2017, and founded a new studio, Wildflower Interactive, in 2021. The indie studio is working on singleplayer adventure Coven of the Chicken Foot.