Tim Sweeney: This Is the Worst Game Industry Crash Since the 1980s
The game industry is broken – can we fix it?
Nearly 60,000 game industry jobs have vanished since 2022, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney calls it the worst disruption since Atari's fall. In Edge magazine, nine experts diagnose the crisis: triple-A budgets that double every few years, flat retail prices, and an audience that has stopped growing. Their fixes include leaner Japanese-style teams, smaller games, and realistic executive pay.
What happened in the '80s was that Atari just made a lot of really bad games, and their hardware platform died. Now, though, it's multi-causal. And no patient going to their doctor wants to hear the problem is multi-causal.