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Comment by whoisyc | Hacker News Reader

We are not past peak PC gaming. What we might see soon is the end of big budget AAA game production. It’s not even that AAA games are bad, it’s just they require such a ridiculous amount of production value that they have to be blockbuster after blockbuster to not fail, and when they do fail, they don’t just wipe out the lifetime saving of one guy who quit his job to make an indie game, they wipe out thousands of jobs and entire studios and franchises.

My predictions is by 2030 Xbox will be out of business, PlayStation will be where pretentious auteurs make games that are 80% cutscenes, most savvy gamers play indie PC games, and Nintendo remains the only big name game studio to not collapse.

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We are already seeing the beginning of this as less and less games are made targeting the high end, bleeding edge specs. The Nintendo Switch 2 and a wave of portable devices similar in style to it and the Steam Deck will become the target platform for most developers over the next decade. There will be a proper PS6 but it will be incredibly expensive (perhaps more so than the PS5 Pro) and the audience for that will continue to shrink.

AAA games can provide experiences that indie games can't (this is nothing against indie games -- they're just different). So, there will be a market for them, but perhaps at a higher cost than currently in order to cover the risk of failure. Furthermore, large companies like Microsoft or Valve have enough resources to withstand such failures.

What would that be? I haven't had an AAA game deliver something that an indie game couldn't

Your predictions don’t match any expert analysis I’ve read. Nor my own observations either.

I think Xbox game pass and their streaming services will ensure Xbox will continue to grow.

PlayStation are in a more precarious position because they rely on hardware sales. Xbox doesn’t.

PlayStation is also the hardest platform for amateurs to target.

That said, I don’t expect PlayStation to collapse either.

Your comment also suggest that you think EA would collapse. Which is laughable considering EA make a killing from monthly iterations of sports titles. They could survive on that alone, never mind all their other major cash cows.

People made the same predictions about movie budgets as well. Yet movie studios still make a killing despite the costs.

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