#400: Graveyard shift

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So, #400 eh? I admit this milestone has weighed rather heavily. In the five-and-a-bit years I’ve been writing this newsletter I have received lots of feedback from readers. The vast majority of it has been positive, lovely and encouraging — but as a writer, and a British one at that, it is naturally the handful of negative comments that I tend to carry around with me. A recurring theme of late in the ol' inbox is that I am simply too downbeat, and while part of me bristles at that — I mean, have you seen the news? It’s not my fault! — I certainly get the argument. I even agree with it a bit.

Hit Points was originally conceived as an extension of my old Edge column, Big Picture Mode, which used print’s distance from the news cycle to take a more measured, zoomed-out look at the issues of the day. Partly by accident and partly by design, we've drifted away from that a bit over the years. I know that many of you appreciate the cathartic venom Hit Points provides you with whenever some dreadful company or C-suite goon drives another nail into the game industry’s coffin. But over the years I have been ground down by the relentless swirl of bad news, which has been so cyclical and repetitive that in my darker moments I have worried that I, too, am getting a bit one-note. At times I have wondered whether I even have anything left to say.

And so as #400 loomed, I started to think about how to change that. There’s definitely stuff I think about — things I learn from my consulting work, from my research, and just from talking to industry chums — that I thought needed saying at some point. That might give us a better understanding of Where We Are, and how we can get out of it, than a 200-slide Matthew Ball deck or whatever. Perhaps it was time to get it down on paper. Two weeks and lots of wailing and hair-pulling later, here it is. Whether it's of any use — whether it will make any of you feel any better about things — I don't know. Hopefully there's something in here worth thinking about. I hope, if nothing else, you find it well written. There's always that, isn't there.

Oh wait, stats! We normally do those when we hit a round number. As I type, Hit Points has a total readership of 9,626, a mere uptick of 1.5% since the publication in February 2025 of HP #300. (This is fine, and largely what I expected after I walked away from Substack’s fun fashy recommendation engine at the beginning of last year.) Paid subscribers, however, are up 16% to 412, which is much more like it. With the industry downturn taking an inevitable bite out of my consulting income, however, things are a bit tight these days chez Hit Points. In my darker moments I have started looking at jobs on LinkedIn. Save me from going to meetings etc again by hitting one of the subscribe buttons sprinkled throughout this mammoth essay. If we can get to 500 subs somehow, I’ll sleep a good deal better at night.

Right! On with it. Here’s what I think is really going on out there, and some thoughts on how the industry might dig itself out of it. Thanks so much for reading.

The western triple-A scene is dying before our eyes. It has boxed itself into a corner, and much of the blame for that lies with its dominant platform holders, Microsoft and Sony. (PlayStation may technically be part of a Japanese company, but it moved its HQ from Tokyo to California in the Jim Ryan era, and its studio line-up, creative philosophy and general business strategy these days are American through and through.) Together they ignored Satoru Iwata’s old warnings about the pursuit of technology being a dead end, and built console generations around step changes in processing power, rather than new features or possibilities for play. In doing so they forced that philosophy onto game developers: each new game must be a bigger, more beautiful, more expensive version of the last. Thus studios and platform holders embarked in lock step on the holy journey towards photorealism. Team sizes ballooned to the stratosphere, and budgets and production timelines inevitably followed suit.

This might have felt sustainable for a while — back before 1080p became 4K, before baked lighting became path-traced global illumination, before 60fps became 120fps and a cottage industry of tech obsessives taught players that dodgy LOD transitions, wonky frame-pacing and poorly reflective puddles were crimes against the artform, and that when faced with anything less than perfection at technology’s bleeding edge they should reach promptly for their pitchforks. Before console generations began with games getting more expensive, and ended with their host hardware costing 50% more than it did at launch. Before the platform holders shut down or sold off the smaller, cheaper, more artful studios that once gave breadth and texture to their software catalogues, and kept the coffers topped up between Q4 tentpoles. Before blockbuster games took so long and cost so much money to make that innovation was effectively taken off the table at a project’s first production meeting, the need to sell 20m copies to justify a developer's continued existence meaning creative risk was something to be avoided at all costs.

None of this goes back in the bottle. That old Sonic meme about wanting smaller games with worse graphics used to be an ideology. These days it is an existential imperative, and while I know several smaller, smarter studios out there who are adjusting accordingly — not building games to leverage future gains in processing power, but on the assumption the current status quo will hold true for the next decade because players can’t afford to upgrade — our triple-A titans cannot retreat to it now. Asian upstarts are hitting equivalent production values at a fraction of the cost. With access to the same tools, and judicious use of outsourcing, double-A developers the world over are rapidly reaching blockbuster levels of visual fidelity and production scope — again, at far less expense. And we are merely weeks away from Rockstar Games redefining the meaning of the world ‘blockbuster’, grabbing the cutting edge with both hands and cavorting bloodily over the horizon with it. There is nowhere for these big studios, or their big games, to go. They are condemned to do the same thing over and over, bracing for their clockwork quarterly layoffs, innovation and creative risk becoming increasingly hazy memories until, inevitably, they are forgotten about entirely.

The platform holders are similarly hosed, and the more they talk about competing with TikTok or PolyMarket, the more they fiddle in the margins with new structures or fun policies, the more nakedly aware of it they appear. They cannot make a catalogue play, go looking for the next Tokyo Jungle, Parappa or Keeper, because they’ve burned all their bridges and the indie scene has that stuff on lock regardless. They have tried to diversify over the years — Sony by mixing up its cinematic sad-dad line-up with a dozen live-service hamster wheels; Microsoft by buying everything in sight in the hope of locking us all into an industry-devouring subscription service — but players in both instances voted with their wallets and thumbs. Now we see the flogged corpse of Halo thrown desperately over the wall at Activision while Satya Nadella calls ten thousand layoffs “great to see”. We have whispers of a new Uncharted game from Naughty Dog that I will be lucky to play before I retire. We have, above all, two companies gearing up for a new generation of consoles that no one wants, or needs, or can even afford. If the rumour mill is right, and next-gen kicks off in 2028, I am increasingly convinced that the next PlayStation and Xbox will be the last of their line. Their spec sheets will read like suicide notes.

It is easy, and tempting, and in many ways correct to think that this is the beginning of the end of everything. For the workers involved — for anyone in North America or Western Europe who built a career on these sorts of jobs, on these sorts of projects, in these sorts of places — it may well be, and I’m afraid I have little in the way of comfort to offer. And while I firmly believe that the brunt of our current chaos will mostly be borne by western triple-A developers and platform holders, there is clearly plenty of other pain to go around. Smaller studios are in a funding squeeze, with platform holders tightening their purse strings, the big publishers retreating to their comfort zone of annual-ish franchises and established IP, venture capital distracted by the AI squirrel, and previously spendthrift Asian investors like Tencent and NetEase pulling out of the west while they wait to see how the whole Trump thing shakes out. The well-documented discovery struggles of the indie scene are only going to worsen as genAI shysters look to flood download stores, and Roblox moves to let creators export their wares as standalone apps. But there is cause for optimism out there, I think — a few secluded little avenues that might, if properly navigated, give us some kind of route out of all this.

One of the vanishingly few positive industry trends from the last few years is the resurgence of double-A. It’s not so long ago that the term was a sort of fond pejorative, used to describe games that were janky and roughshod but had some good ideas; these days it is really just a measure of a game's budget and marketing muscle. One of the many ironies of the platform holders’ quest for graphical supremacy and planet-sized scope is that, to the naked eye, there is little to distinguish the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which Sandfall Interactive unfathomably made for less than $10m, or the $40m Kingdom Come Deliverance II, from the stuff that Sony et al are spending $300m on. These are outliers, sure, but they prove what is possible. That you can still do the fancy-schmancy graphical stuff on a very large scale without spending a small nation’s GDP on it. That by spending less money you can take more risks, do more weird stuff, get better reviews and win more awards than the focus-tested, reheated, will-this-do guff the triple-A scene seems doomed to serve up forever.

Those two games, it should also be noted, are European — an important point given all the stuff I just wrote about the death of the west. That game companies on the continent have found themselves caught up in the current muddle is in large part a consequence of them being downstream from the US titans: they are either owned by them, funded by them, or somehow reliant on them for a platform deal. A few have been undone by their own hands — Dontnod and Devolver went public at the wrong time, for example — but most can pin their woes on the bad decisions of others. It is a recurring frustration of mine, for instance, that we have allowed UK game development to become the fun little cousin of the North American industry, flogging off the crown jewels without a second’s thought then watching through the gaps in our fingers when a Criterion, Codemasters or Rare is ravaged from across the Atlantic. There are stories like this all over Europe, but the success stories are legion too. We are every bit as talented, have access to the same tools, and work to a fraction of the budgets. There is an opportunity here for sure. If I was an investor or fund manager right now I’d be ignoring all those dimbulbs talking up live-service guff, UGC nonsense and AI god-knows-what, and going all-in on European double-A. There be unicorns in them hills.

Then there’s Japan, the simple continuing presence of which puts all this talk of a crash in perspective. Japan is fine. Japan is better than ever, in fact. Nintendo puts out a Switch 2 exclusive every month. Capcom pretty much rattles out a GOTY contender every quarter. There’s an increasingly thriving indie scene and, in Pocketpair, a true modern success story. Even fuckin’ Konami is back! I imagine many in Japan’s industry look at the travails of their western colleagues with a sort of benign befuddlement. How on earth are you making such a mess of this, old fruit? We are absolutely loving life over here. But many will understand what has happened, and why, because it’s happened to them before.

Japan struggled terribly with the transition to HD. It lacked the knowledge, the budgets and the sheer number of people that were needed to pump out the vast quantities of high-resolution assets required by the games of the day. One of its most successful solutions to this problem was outsourcing — roping in assistance from other studios, or even farming out entire projects. Central to Nintendo’s remarkable release cadence on Switch 2 is its decision years ago to spread game development beyond its own walls, be that giving the Yoshi's reins to Arzest or Good-Feel, sending Metroid to Texas or Spain, or roping in Mistwalker to help with Breath Of The Wild. The similarly prolific Capcom outsources liberally, keeping a relatively tight core creative team in-house, then getting external production companies to handle the heavy lifting of asset creation. The most remarkable and instructive thing about Konami’s resurgence is that it has done it all without making a single game in-house. It has seconded Silent Hill to postings in Hong Kong, Kraków and Glasgow, dispatched the Belmonts to Bordeaux for some sun and a very different kind of claret. (One day soon it will do likewise with Metal Gear, and I await Kojima’s Twitter meltdown with interest.)

There is definitely a lesson here in how to responsibly steward IP in the 4K era. You are never going to build a lifelong fanbase for a series when you need a decade to make a new game, and while remakes and remasters have helped plug the yawning gaps between mainline releases in recent years, it is not a viable strategy in the long term. (Even Sony, in its darkest and most self-reflective hour, will acknowledge it cannot remaster The Last Of Us again for a while.) But not for the first time in videogame history, Japan has valuable intel on a potential path forward for the west. Does anyone really think this new Activision team is going to do a better job with Halo, in a more reasonable timeframe, than, I dunno, the folks behind Selaco? Is there no other studio on the planet with the talent and the ideas to produce a new Uncharted in less than the 240 years Naughty Dog will need for it? There are signs, albeit small, of this idea taking hold in the west — Sony’s rumoured to have got the Sonic Mania gang working on an Ape Escape reboot, for instance — but if it is to have any meaningful legs it will need to be bigger, and a good deal bolder, than that. The western titans are sitting on a treasure trove spanning gaming’s entire history. They might as well use it for something.

As for that hybrid sort of outsourcing, where an internal team turns to external providers for skillsets they don’t have — a facial rigging, cutscene or mocap specialist, say — or simply for more pairs of hands to speed up asset pipelines, I’m not sure what’s going on. If you're as much of a sicko for videogame credits sequences as I am, you know that we are long past the point where more people work on the core elements of a game from outside its notional developer’s walls than inside them. But how come Capcom can knock out Resident Evil Requiem in half the time (and presumably a fraction of the budget) that The Coalition needed to make Gears Of War E-Day — despite both teams using an equivalent proportion of outsourcing — and end up with near-identical Metacritic averages? Are Japanese firms quicker? Cheaper? More experienced? I’m afraid this is rather beyond my understanding, but there is clearly something going on here. Perhaps some hungry reporter with the bandwidth and budget for such a task could look into it for us. 

A final note on outsourcing. If some young hopeful asked me today for tips on becoming a game developer, I would tell them to run as fast as they could from all the big established game studios and go work for an outsourcer instead. (Unless they love the idea of going to work every morning wondering if today’s the day they get laid off, I suppose.) A fun game for you: the next time you watch some credits, pick a name at random from an external firm and look them up on MobyGames. You will shit. If you just glanced at one of these CVs you’d assume they’d been around since the 1990s. I found one who’d got ten credits since 2020! Meanwhile I know people in the west who’ve been at it for a decade and are still hunting for their first. External co-dev might not be as sexy as being on a core team, but I can think of no finer way to get a career up and running.

The last thing I want to talk about — yes, there is an ending to this thing, nearly there, sorry — is players. It might seem a bit odd, when grasping for things that might save the game industry from its darkest chapter, to point to a populace most readily associated these days with hate campaigns, death threats, and a general oversupply of spittle-flecked, too-online invective. But if you hang out in the right places, and talk to the right people, you will find that players these days are more informed, more engaged, and more understanding of and sympathetic to the travails of game developers and the industry at large than ever before. They know games deeply; they have an ever-growing understanding of how they are made. They want the people that make them to succeed. (Most of the time anyway.)

The treatment of players by the triple-A industry in particular over the last decade-and-a-half has been a pattern of disrespect. For years the big companies designed their games as if players wanted nothing more than to simply be busy; that they would tolerate any old shite as long as there was an icon for it on a wearyingly sprawling map, and a line to cross out in a questlog. The live-service era stripped us of our humanity, reducing us to repeatedly harvestable economic units, rats in a box, numbers on a spreadsheet. And now we have developers seemingly working to the assumption that each and every one of us is an utter fucking simpleton. Triple-A games are too often focus-tested to a bland sheen, their overeager NPCs barking solutions to puzzles after 4.2 seconds, their game worlds slathered with over-here-dingus signage lest we dare veer off course for a nanosecond. I get that you need your $300m back, gang, I really do, but Jesus. You’re not going to do it like this.

It is no coincidence that one of the great success stories throughout this period has been FromSoftware — a studio whose work puts perhaps more trust in the player than any other. It is also why games like Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Dragon’s Dogma II, Hollow Knight and masocore stuff like Getting Over It have grown such devout audiences. Friction is good! It’s what we’re here for! I’m not saying the next $300m blockbuster from Sony or Microsoft should have a one-line tutorial and kill the player five times a minute, like. But I’m definitely saying that the balance of things should be tipped a little back towards that core audience of people who buy games on the regular and actually know one thumb from the other. By all means keep all the handholdy ultra-helpful stuff in there for the mythical Joe Public who has never held a controller but buys your game on a whim. Tie it to difficulty levels, or offer it through toggles at the start of the game; I dunno, you're the experts, but please do something. (If you’re struggling with it, for god’s sake take some of that focus-testing budget and spend it on consultants instead. We’re pretty cheap in the scheme of things, and can save you so much money and pain.)

To players I will say only this: think about how you can help. We have allowed the internet, in all walks of life but in games in particular, to be overrun by negativity, by hate and outrage — by assholes, basically. Drown them out, by finding a way to advocate for the things you like. Shout about them on socials, and tell your offline friends about them. Send their developers a nice email. Rate and write about them on the platforms you purchased them from! I know from my consulting work that companies are increasingly preoccupied with user reviews, and I dream of a world where a game's pages on Steam and Metacritic play host to useful information and thoughtful criticism, rather than serving as vehicles for hate campaigns or vessels for vapid snark. We might not be able to fix the industry from over here, but we can certainly make it a nicer place to be, and that would certainly be a start. We are all of us — players, media, industry, whatever — in this thing because we love it. Perhaps it’s time we started acting like it.

There you go. Was that any good? I’ve been staring at it for so long I no longer know. I need a lie down. If you read this far, firstly, thanks and well done, you deserve a lie down also. Secondly, if you’re not already on board, how about that paid subscription? Just £4/$5 a month gets you more newsletters, the full archive, access to the excellent Hit Points Discord server, and my eternal love and admiration. If you're not into the whole subscription thing, you can always buy me a pint through the Tip Jar below, if you like. And if you ever want to email me, about today's edition or anything else, you can do so here.

Paid subs, I’ll see you soon for the latest edition of The Playlist. Everyone else, I’ll see you this time next week. Have a great weekend!