Reality, Console Industry has become Stagnated.

[Shadow1980]

"Shareholder satisfaction" as the standard capitalist dogma is a relatively new phenomenon. It only became the norm back in the 80s. The idea that a company, market, etc., can grow forever is nonsense, because nothing can grow forever in a finite world. There are always limits to growth.

For example, there are only so many households in the developed world that are willing and financially able to buy a video game console. Every console exhibits the same growth-peak-decline behavior to their sales (a couple of them even skipped the "growth" part, peaking at the dawn of their lives). Sales may grow for a while, but eventually sales will reach a peak and start to decline as the number of people that want a particular system but don't have one yet shrinks. Expand that to the whole market across multiple generations and you can see the full implications of this phenomenon. Once you've gotten to a point where everybody in a given market that wants a console has one and are still repeat buyers in subsequent generations, the only way for the console market to grow is to expand to other markets. But so far consoles haven't gained any significant traction outside the main three markets.

In the 8-bit & 16-bit eras, there were actually only two markets, with North American and Japan accounting for about 85% of the worldwide sales. Widespread adoption of consoles in Europe didn't happen until the latter half of the 90s because A) they were able to because they were an affluent region, and B) the collapse of the home computer market combined with PCs still being an incredibly expensive alternative at the time made consoles (esp. the PlayStation) the most appealing way of playing video games. But those conditions don't really seem to exist elsewhere, with low per capita uptake for consoles. All other markets outside the US+Canada, Europe, and Japan amount to somewhere between 10-20% of the global console market, something that hasn't really changed at all in the past 25 years.

Even if the rest of the world started to adopt consoles at similar rates to the main three markets, you'd still eventually reach a saturation point. There's only so many households on the planet. That would leave growth-obsessed corporations to once again push for new growth opportunities like subscriptions and microtransactions, but even those run into the same problems. Once everyone in the world that wants Game Pass or whatever has it, once everybody has their desire for live service titles sated, then what? Buy out the competition? Okay, so what happens when you have a de facto monopoly on a given market and still eventually reach the inevitable end of growth? Seems like every publicly-traded company that can't grow anymore finds that the best way to pad those profits and increase shareholder value right before the bitter end is to fire as many people as possible, butcher the very economic beast you've been feeding and sell it off to hedge fund managers. Or just sell it to someone else.

If the goal of capitalism is perpetual growth at any cost, then it's a system doomed to failure. Anything predicated on unlimited growth is effectively a Ponzi scheme. But even a dirty pinko socialist like me understands that capitalism doesn't necessarily have to involve unlimited growth. It's merely the private ownership of the means of production, operated on a for-profit basis. Plenty of unincorporated local mom-and-pop businesses have thrived for decades without having to expand beyond one or several locations and consume everything around them. You probably frequent them or at least know of them. They continually made enough profit to stay in business for a very long time.

If the video game industry can't figure out how to make a game profitable even if it's selling over 10 million copies, then that sounds like a "they" problem, not an "us" problem. But corporations always want to make it an us problem. They always seek to privatize gains and socialize losses, so they just do things like axe a bunch of employees. Or they do other questionable things like make deliberately manipulative monetization schemes to nickel-and-dime their customers. Here's an idea. How about they stop making every single-player game a massive 60-hour open-world sprawl filled with hours of advanced mo-cap cutscenes? We could deal with fewer ambitious games. Maybe that would help keep their budgets in check. "Linear" needs to stop being a dirty word. Maybe "short" games should become more acceptable. Some of my favorite games since this past generation have included Metroid Dread, the RE2 remake, and the Ori games, titles that are nowhere near as ambitious in scale as your typical open-world game, and they all did very well for themselves. Not every major title needs to be the next GTA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value
https://hbr.org/2012/08/hows-that-shareholdery-valuey
https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism
https://prospect.org/economy/shareholder-capitalism-came-town/
https://stevedutch.blogspot.com/2014/02/growth-is-ponzi-scheme.html