Gaming in 2026 is no longer the exclusive dwelling of nerd characters in movies, or the loser clique inextricably involved in any high school. Video games are our most profitable entertainment medium; Pokémon is our highest-grossing intellectual property of all time; and gaming as a culture has become something totally globalised. It’s generalisable, and just about anyone can find a way to play, something to devote 100s of hours to, or a life-changing narrative experience — or all of those simultaneously, as that works, too.
But with this comes a grave cost: gaming has become the hive for large-scale venture capitalism. The reward is high, franchise-spawning and far-reaching, but the risk of failure in such an attention economy as this is astronomical. With such failures, we see the clearest picture of the gaming industry’s current plight.
With every substantial flop, the industry suffers a great ripple effect, like an earthquake devastating multiple cities after its magnitude was only predicted to hit one. Catastrophes like Sony’s live-service shooter Concord — widely believed to be the medium’s biggest financial mishanter — still send a omnipresent wave through the industry. Sony has just (with minimal given reason, by the way) cancelled their revered studio Bluepoint Games: the team helming some of the industry’s greatest remakes, and who was speculated, even through merely wishful thinking, to be developing a recreation of Bloodborne in the shadows.
This team was recently in development of a live-service God of War game: not quite something that needs to exist, but what they were doing nonetheless. The ‘Concord incident’ led Sony to sick the dogs on all of their slated live-action titles, believing they’d follow in the footsteps of patterned, calamitous failure. Without Bluepoint having anything to make, they were disavowed, and gaming has just lost one of its most respected, if under-sung, studios of the modern day.
What’s seen here isn’t an anomalous result or some shoddy rounding error — it’s a cultural endemic. The innately high-risk, high-reward way that this medium now operates, with so much possibility for fortune in the air, has made it an all-too-common practice to purge innocent industry favourites, simply because somebody has to shoulder the burden. A desperate drive to have every release move impossible mountains is ironically severing the potential of cultivating those future releases to begin with, not with half of them having their studios disembodied.
It isn’t just Sony, either: Xbox has famously announced the closure of Tango Gameworks in 2024 after previously stating they were in need of more AA titles, aka the exact thing this studio put out. Being there to hear that the developers of one of this decade’s greatest games, Hi-Fi Rush, were executed so soon after striking gold was depressing, but certainly not an irregular feeling given the state of things. Ubisoft has also cancelled six upcoming titles this year, and delaying many others, following some disastrous recent releases. This volatile process is unfortunately habitual.
Two things can be true, and every one of these endemic chain-reactions is just as dismal as it is expected. The quite literal product of a regular Tuesday on gaming’s economic side. It makes for such an upsetting dissonance that we’re simultaneously in the era of the indie, with small-budget but ingenious ideas like Lethal Company or Vampire Survivors managing to find market gaps and conquer the industry giants, yet the executives still feel the need to funnel hundreds of millions of pounds into the next homogenous appendage of the live-service machine.
So, what is there to be done to change these tides? It’s simple: shrink down the cost, and pump up the brains behind it. What the players want isn’t more of the same, another obfuscated slot machine of a game ready to thieve our wallets away, but something unique, boundary-pushing, narratively exhilarating, or just fun.
In a time where only a fraction of us even buy half-a-dozen games a year, we want memorable experiences, not facsimilous open worlds. Clearly, conglomerates like Xbox and Sony don’t grasp that the studios they’re cancelling are the exact bastions of hope we anticipate in their production of new titles, and a world without them is a future gaming landscape that is noticeably less capable of outputting something great.