Consider This from NPR - The video game industry at a crossroads

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

The video game industry is huge. Last year alone it generated an estimated $187 billion dollars in revenue. But it's also facing a host of serious issues: massive layoffs, the advent of A.I., games that take years to be released, and a schism between big and small developers.This week's Reporter's Notebook takes us inside this evolving industry with NPR's Vincent Acovino, who recently covered the annual Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're walking down a city street, you turn a corner, and you're swarmed by zombies. You fight them off with a folding chair, explosions rattle the street around you. You're basically beating up enemies in a dystopian version of New York City, and there's all this kind of like ooze spilling out onto the street.

That's Vincent Accovino, all things considered, producer who covers video games for the show. This game is called Beat Down City Survivors and it'll be released later this year. So it's like a really old school looking game. It's all like pixel art that's reminiscent of retro kind of video games and arcade games. The game might look retro, but it says a lot about this current moment in video game development. The video game industry is massive, probably way bigger than most people think.

It brought in around $187 billion in revenue last year, which is more than the film and music industries combined. Much of that money was made by big developers creating big games, but more and more small independent studios are disrupting the space. Studios like New Challenger, which is making beatdown city survivors. Some of the biggest hits in the industry are coming from developers that are, you know, a team of one person.

It kind of goes to show the power dynamics right now in the industry where small independent developers do have the power and potential to make big video games without the risk that comes with making a giant multi-million dollar project as a big studio. Consider this, the video game industry is facing a host of issues. Massive layoffs, the advent of AI, games that take years to be released, and that schism between big and small developers. Today for our Weekly Reporter's Notebook series, Vincent Accovino takes us inside this evolving world. For NPR, I'm Asma Khalid. Shortwave thinks of science as an invisible force showing up in your everyday life, powering

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of the World podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. Every year, tens of thousands of video game insiders gather in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. New games are demoed, programmers hold tutorials, awards are given, and the big existential questions about the industry are debated. In other words, paradise for a video game journalist like Vincent Accovino, who recently covered the conference for NPR. He sat down with All Things Considered co-host Scott Detro to unpack some of those big existential questions starting with the tension between the huge game developers and the small independent

studios like the one that made Beatdown City Survivors. Why is this the game that you flagged that you wanted to start this conversation talking about? So I find the creator of this game and his story, Sean Allen Alexander, absolutely fascinating. Years ago, he worked for a major video game company. So he was on the other side of the industry, big budget games. Now he's making his own games and he sees the industry right now at a crossroads. He looks around and says, why are we seeing so much volatility in this industry?

Why are we seeing the mass layoffs that we're seeing? Right now, it takes an incredibly long time for big budget games to be released, games people are waiting for a long time for. He worked for Rockstar 13 years ago. Rockstar Games is the creator of Grand Theft Auto. It's been that same amount of time since a Grand Theft Auto game came out.

It's been that long? Yeah. So there's been more than a decade of this most recent one being, is that just because it's so ambitious or because it's ballooned or what's the clear answer? That is kind of the question. If you ask someone like him, he says it's a combination of these ballooning budgets and also bad management strategies and everyone just wanting it to be, needing it to be a billion dollar game. He says why not make 10 games in the span of like however many years it

takes to make one large giant game. Like we're all taught not to put all your eggs in one basket. I don't know you look at indie games and we're putting out a lot of good stuff and it's like you can make 10 games in the span that you make these one game why don't you make 10 games and make different games? Boring. So you've got all of these people like that creating these really interesting games, but at the same time, you have a handful of massive companies spending what, like hundreds of millions of dollars developing the big 10 games?

Yeah, so video game budgets are kind of like this closely guarded secret, but we know that, for example, The Last of Us Part 2, The Last of Us has been adapted to like an HBO series. So a lot of people are now familiar with that game. The second game in the series cost around $200 million to make. And that's fine. It's like movie level budgets. Oh, beyond, beyond, because these people have often literally thousands of people who work on them.

That's fine if your game makes $500 million in return, but it doesn't always do that, and that's where the problems start. Like, for example, last year there was a game that came out called Concord, and that game had a big budget, a lot of expectation, and it absolutely flopped. And in one month they shut that game down. A multi-hundred million dollar project, most likely. They just shut it down. If you bought it, you can't play it. They refunded it.

This is all interactive online playing mostly now. It's not like you, to go back to that 16-bit era, you get the cartridge, you put it in, you've got the game forever. Exactly. And I think also because these games require constant development, if the projects shrink in size or if they're not successful, then they have to let people go. I think that all gets to AI in this industry. What's the best way to frame how developers are using AI right now? And I imagine it's two very different answers when you talk about those two sides of the industry.

So I talked to a lot of developers at the conference as well who have very different opinions about AI. One demo I saw showed off a Call of Duty kind of game. And this was a demo that was given to me by Elvis Liu at Tencent, which is the biggest video game company in the world. They're a Chinese company. And basically the demo shows you interacting with your squad mates. So you speak to your squad mates and they will

listen to you and interact with the environment in very specific ways. So if you say like go behind the red car or the rust colored car, they'll know exactly what you're talking about and they'll do it. This is interesting for the player, but Elvis Liu at Tencent says it's also helpful for the development of these video games. In our case, we have more than 17,000 In-Gain objects in just one map and numerous locations. So it would be infeasible to use the traditional methods to issue a command with all these targets. So voice control or voice command becomes the only efficient way to communicate with an AI. So that's one example of a thing that kind of made sense

to me. Then you hear from independent developers, and they are largely not excited about this. Many of them are kind of skeptical of what it means for their own creativity in this industry. And so like when I speak to like people in narrative or art departments, they're like, well, this is a part of the job that I like to do.

Like, I don't want to automate the part of my job. They're like, maybe if like it's sent emails for me, but not like if it writes my stories. One person I talked to was Keita Takahashi. He developed a game that people of my age love very much called Katamari Damashi. And it's like this absolutely ridiculous game. It has a great sense of humor.

It's basically you're rolling up a bunch of small objects on the world into a giant ball and then they become planets in the sky. That sounds relaxing. Yeah, it's absurd, but on purpose, and it has a great sense of humor. But Takahashi was very blunt about the AI thing, and actually he brought this up unprompted in a different interview I was doing, and here's what he said. Who cares about the AI?

I mean, AI is just the business stuff, because they just want to make more money. So that's an example of someone who is just very purely an artist who is completely not interested in generative AI stuff. Alright, so you're at this massive conference, tens of thousands of people. Two different similar questions. What are your favorite things about video games right now as somebody who plays them? And what are the most interesting storylines that you're paying attention to as somebody who reports on them?

Yeah. I mean, the conference really hit this home for me. The industry right now is just filled with so many video games that are great, especially because we've had this explosion of smaller teams making games like there are just too many video games to play that are great. So that's like a great problem to have for the industry and for someone like me who like loves playing games. But so I would say just the sheer number of great games is it's never been better.

I think when it comes to the most interesting question facing the video game industry right now, to me, it is the AI question because it's partially this thing of like, you know, five to 10 years ago, we saw meta go all in on VR and everyone was like, Oh, maybe this is the next big thing. And it's not, it's really not. And I think you need broad enthusiasm from both video game players and the industry to be able for something like that to really happen and that's I don't know yet what's gonna

happen because it feels like the big tech companies like Nvidia and stuff are pushing it hard and want AI to be the future of games but I haven't seen the same sort of excitement on the other end. That was NPR's Vincent Accovino chatting with all things considered co-host Scott Detro. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Adam Rainey and Courtney Dornan. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. Amas Mahalit. I'm Asma Khalid.

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