What is happening in the game Industry? In the past few weeks, Hellblade 2, Starwars Outlaws, and Concord disappointed terribly when it comes to sale. These games should have been blockbusters but instead they turned out to be lackluster in sales.

I'm incline to believe that the game industry has reached a point of saturation. A lot of current gen games are graphically the same as last gen ones and so PS5/XS games hasn't distinguished themselves.

The move from consoles to PC has killed gamer interest of buying games for their favorite consoles.

What was wrong with these games that couldn't make them sell?

Hellblade 2 launched nearly 4 months ago.

Helldivers, Palword, College Football, Wukong, Elden Ring (upon receiving the expansion). These are five games which have sold over five million this year, with some even blasting past 10 or 20mil. Hard to say the industry has hit a point of saturation, though it certainly is in a bit of a lull atm. Not sure why this is…but I suspect it’s coming from consumers needing a break following the manic year of 2023.

I mean from an overall software sales perspective, there will certainly be calmer years than others depending on the slate of releases.

Currently, 5 or so games have beaten the expectations put upon them while many others failed drastically or other were whelmed at least.

Definitely feels like a lul year in between the bigger years. It's felt by the consumer mass too I'd say, but a few releases for this upcoming holidays will surprise us nonetheless.

Also there's the discussion about certain games and their critics, lack of marketing or simply put lack of general interest. Games are not privy from these impacting factors.

Concord was met with general apathy, Star Wars Outlaws is suffering from the same fate Avatar Pandora's Frontier had from samey open-world not so much than just decent games at best.and Hellblade 2 was exclusive to an ecosystem that wasn't even receptive to its first game in the first place.

So much to be said, but anyway, saturation will inevitably be a more important factor as time goes on, but those examples ain't totally it.

Those games all failed for good reason.

Hellblade received essentially zero marketing, was on Gamepass day 1, and was a console exclusive to a failing platform.

Outlaws suffered from people tiring of Ubisoft's open world formula and Disney Star Wars alienating a lot of the IP's fanbase.

Concord had fugly characters, was $40 when its competitors are F2P, and offered nothing new or appealing.

As others have pointed out, plenty of recent games have achieved success; it's just that in an increasingly crowded market with so many options, people are less inclined to give unappealing games the time of day. Why buy Concord when you already have Overwatch? Why buy Outlaws when there are so many better games on the market? 

The solution is simply for devs to do a better job at appealing to what gamers want.

Stagnation is a factor, but it began a while ago. The PS style consoles peaked with the PS2, and hardware has been in decline ever since. The PS3 generation was still mainly the PS2 generation for a few years, so the stagnation didn’t really begin until about 2010 or so.

Another factor is cannibalization. New games on those platforms are getting released for free with a subscription. Players don’t really need to buy as many games anymore. This kills off sales.

A third factor is that we’re in the late generation, and the PS5 style consoles have been mostly lacklustre without many exciting experiences, which (speaking from experience as a lifelong Nintendo fan) seems to always result in low late gen software sales (like Wii U, GC, and N64) rather than high late gen sales as we saw on NES, SNES, Wii, and Switch. Granted, PS5 isn’t going to be as extreme as that, but relative to the PS systems, it’s enough to see the lowness of the late gen.

I feel like we're more or less saturated in hardware. Video game consoles peaked with the seventh generation in the number of hardware units sold, hitting over 500 million units. The eighth generation was more like the sixth, getting close but not reaching 300 million units. If you include Switch as eighth generation (and all of its sales), then that would put the eighth generation at over 400 million hardware units sold.
The industry seems to have limitless potential for market share on mobile and PC. Consoles? Not as much.
And yes, diminishing returns on visuals seem to be a thing. Compare PS4 and PS4 Pro performance to a PS5 and it doesn't seem as big of a leap as previous generations. SSD is mostly a gamechanger for load times, but not the graphical fidelity. I suppose I'm cool with that though. I'd rather have games on an SSD with rock solid 60 FPS even if the graphical details and resolution aren't ideal.

I mostly agree, except on ugly characters and blaming the dev teams.

I don't think ugly characters matter. Look at all the Bethesda games with hideous characters and environments, and yet still sell great. But I agree that the uncompetitive monetization structure is a factor.

Zero marketing and brand fatigue are reasons, while I agree that these are factors aren't anything devs have control over.

I don't think we need to sound the alarms just yet, but yes... the game industry is pretty stale now. At least with regards to innovation. Back in the NES-PS2 era, you couldn't go more than a few months without something coming along that blew your mind and did things that you thought were impossible. Now? Not so much. They need to find away to get that sort of innovative, risk-taking, originality back in the industry, imo. That's what it needs.

Appealing characters are pretty important to a hero shooter; a lot of Overwatch's appeal is in its charismatic cast.

The horrid character design wasn't the only factor in Concord's failure, but it was definitely one of them.

Most people wanna play as this

Not this