I posted an article nearly five years ago now that I was burnt out on Western gaming. My primary complaints were over the lack of innovation, rampant political correctness, and the industry’s insatiable avarice. So from that point forward, I resolved to stick with Eastern games. So far it’s been great. I discovered the Xenoblade Chronicles series, which has since become a bit of an obsession, I kept up with Yakuza, got hooked on the Warriors games, and recently picked up Fire Emblem. It’s allowed me to enjoy gaming again. The last non-indie Western game I bought up was Cyberpunk 2077 way back in 2022. I don’t know what I was thinking either. The move to Asia was an easy transition as there hasn’t been much to miss on this side of the Pacific.
You won’t find many who disagree: 2024 was an absolute bloodbath for the Western video game industry. Pretty much every major release either bombed or underperformed. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost. Hundreds of developers were laid off. One of the largest publishing houses is now teetering on the edge of collapse. It’s a mess. Nobody in the industry, from the coding room floor right up to the board, seems willing, let alone able, to address the problems that led up to this. Most of them don’t even want to admit what the problems are.
We know DEI had a big part of it. I had originally planned to write an article about why it kills games. It’s simple. Rigid ideologies, and the chilling effect that comes from rigid ideologues, are not conducive to a creative environment. When nothing can be questioned or challenged, and everything is treated as peachy keen, even when it’s not, that’s how you end up with mediocrity.
A lot of GamerGate 2.0 supporters think that you can just sack the dead weight and that’ll fix everything. They often cite how Elon Musk purged Twitter following his takeover a couple years back. The problem is this toxic culture runs right to the industry’s core. All the good people are long gone. Even if you do fire the bad ones, the colleges are just churning out more ideologues to take their places. Not to mention the fact that laid-off developers seem to keep failing upwards. Like how Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s lead ended up getting hired at Wizards of the Coast. Sweet Baby meanwhile keeps getting work. I honestly don’t think the problem can be fixed at this point. At least not without the total implosion of the industry.
The suits meanwhile…. well, suits are dumb. Through my years of working in corporate environments, I find most at the executive level aren’t that bright. They’re just good at networking. As Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams once observed, there’s a reason why heart surgeons and computer programmers, your smart people, aren’t in management. Most C-suite folks are easily dazzled by honeyed words and shiny objects. You jingle your keys in front of them enough times, they’ll agree to anything. Which is how DEI crept into the industry in the first place. They saw fat ESG loans combined with getting the media off their backs and took the bait. Now they’re overrrun with bourgoise communists who couldn’t make a good game if the NKVD had a gun to their head.
It’s the same reason they all went balls-deep on live services, even though they were warned that the market for such games was already very saturated. They couldn’t separate the dollar signs they were seeing from mobile and games like Fortnite. People like Hermen Hulst and Jim Ryan began greenlighting everything under the sun, no matter how stupid. What did that get them? A fat $400 million flushed down the drain. If they wanted to burn through the annual GDP of Pakistan, they should have just given it to me. At least I would have made some sound investments with it, instead of another lame arena shooter co-produced by “The Professor”.
Of course, Hulst got demoted after his Concord fiasco, and the Daimyo are now back in charge. Though Hideaki Nishino certainly has his work cut out for him. Since their move to California, PlayStation hasn’t been having the greatest of times. Sure, the PS5 has sold well, but you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who are completely happy with their purchase. Xbox meanwhile is still sitting in the corner huffing glue. There’s a very good chance that the only Western console might not exist after this generation.
We’re only just into February of 2025 and it’s already been a downward spiral this year. Western studios are now so broke, they’re screaming for someone to release the first $100 game. Nobody wants $100 games, excpet a handful of morons on Reddit who don’t understand how old-school cartriges worked. People are also starting to wise up to the subscription scam. Yet they still refuse to change up their business strategy even by one iota.
I think it’s time to call it: Western gaming is officially dead.
Now I can hear the contrarians screaming “you’re wrong, a ton of new games are still coming out, 2025 is going to be amazing, Doom, GTA6!” and such. Yes, dead is a bit of a strong term. It’s not like the Western games industry is going to go away. They’ll still make games and there will still be people who buy them. However, it will continue to collapse into a shadow of its former shelf compared to the heyday of the PS360 era. Some bands still make disco albums. Some of those albums might even be enjoyable. However, nobody’s still boogieing like it’s 1977. At least not unironically. That’s not where the scene is anymore.
Western video games are now deeply uncool, made for a minuscule audience, by lame wads without talent or even two brain cells to rub together. All the best video games in the last few years have come out of East Asia. Japan, and now increasingly China and South Korea. Even the Game Awards had to begrudgingly admit this, with only a single Western indie game being nominated for GOTY. Of course, Western journalists are doing everything they can to discredit these games as only being for “gooners”, due to them often featuring sexy characters. They to do to the East what they did to the West. They want it so badly. Yet so far these critiques are only being screamed into the void. Eastern developers don’t care, and Western gamers simply mock them for it.
They used to say “go west, young man”, but for us gamers, the future lies in the Orient. Just like where it all began.
