Libra

welcome to 2017, gaming companies are killing themselves without realizing it

Bad day for gaming.

It is an interesting time to be in the industry.

Games have rapidly moved to being movies - high paid VAs and expensively pre-rendered scenes which ever better game engines eat ever better hardware resources in order to present the same predictable gameplay as last time... just prettier.  But that's expensive, and people won't pay hundreds of dollars, up front, for a game with a hollywood style budget but not a hollywood scale audience - hence nickel-and-diming consumers with an incremental hit of a few dollars or so at a time, until either they have fully paid up or have gotten bored with it and moved onto the next big game.

At the same time, the technology used FOR movies is moving on; natural sounding computer-generated speech can now fool even close friends of the "speaker" in realtime, and video synth to the same level (at least for webcam/online chat level resolutions) is nearly at the same point. 

The consequence of both is that the major studios (both in games and movies) that can't adapt to a world where some teen can write an original script, spend a few hundred dollars on amazon cloud compute time to render, and release a movie or game not much different in quality to the studio output, will perish.  We aren't in that world yet, but I can't imagine a decade from now we won't be looking back and trying to work out exactly where that tipping point was - and it will be closer to now than then.