The gaming industry is undergoing a crisis that is leading to many layoffs and studio closures. Game creator Raphael Colantonio uses this as an opportunity to point out that something urgently needs to change.
Who is Raphael Colantonio? Raphael Colantonio is a French video game designer, co-founder and president of Arkane Studios for 18 years. He served as the Creative Director for several Arkane titles and was a key co-creator of the successful role-playing games of Dishonored.
In a post on x.com, he expresses his frustration with the gaming industry and outlines what needs to change for games to be successful again and for the gaming industry to recover.
Here you can see the trailer for Dishonored 2, which is one of his creations:
“For everyone wondering about the crash of the gaming industry”
What reasons does Colantonio give for the crisis? In his post, he mentions that, in recent years, an overwhelming number of games have flooded the market. This is also supported by figures when looking at the statistics from SteamDB.
For example: In 2024 alone, about 18,597 games were released on Steam. That is far more than were released in the entire decade from 2006 to 2016, during which around 11,319 games were launched.
Another reason is that too much budget is being invested in individual AAA games. This makes it necessary to ensure that the game must sell millions of copies to make that investment worthwhile. This has led companies to be tempted to publish more and more “safe bets” and more of the bland offerings that players, in his view, are clearly tired of.
“Players are tired of sequels, spin-offs, and Games as a Service”, he continues in his post. “The market is correcting, we need to adapt.” he demands further and cites oversaturation as a third factor that urgently needs to change: “Players have had enough of a soulless, company-mandated sequel after sequel and microtransaction money-making schemes.”
He calls for relying less on “tried and true” formulas and instead investing more passion in the games produced. Then the gaming industry would slowly but surely rise again out of its crisis. Innovation and closeness to the community are key here.
Arkane Austin, also one of their studios, was closed in 2024. In his statement explaining why this had to happen, Xbox chief Phil Spencer also points out that game studios need to be profitable: Xbox closes 4 studios, fires dozens of employees – The chief explains why this had to be
