30 years ago Toy Story chronicled a generational conflict between an old-timey pull-string doll and a fancy new one with buttons. The two toys learned to get along. This week a trailer for Toy Story 5 arrived showing both toys enacting a Butlerian Jihad against tablets. While I agree on the potential detriments of excessive screen-time, it is telling how the creators and intended audience of Toy Story films now identify less with the kid playing with toys and more with the adult who just spent all of dinner hearing about “looksmaxxing.”
If you’re a child who wants to watch a movie for children, or an adult who wants to watch a movie for adults, you thankfully have options beyond Toy Story. Disrupted as it is, the Hollywood entertainment industry has a built-in ecosystem to provide for demographics across all ages. Gaming still doesn’t.
It has been an ominous month for the video gaming industry. AI infrastructure is bodying the consumer technology world. Another multi-million-dollar live-service game failed to meet its mark while Sony appears to be rebuilding themselves entirely in that image. Not only is Microsoft singularly focused on AI integration, but as I wrote this, the heads of Xbox abruptly announced their departure and replacement with reps from the AI wing of the company.
All of these dramatic pivots occur in the shadow of inconvenient player trends. More players are playing fewer games. The games they do play are years old. Landing a “forever game” is obviously lucrative to the company behind it, and why Sony is wagering they’ll nail at least one for themselves, but it’s a formula that can only shrink the industry.
So why, when the population has never been more immersed in gaming, with even a third of octogenarians hitting Candy Crush, is success so sluggish? Taste and preferences differ across demographics and geographies. Impassioned fans from European rail-sim lovers to Latin fighting game communities make do even when the larger industry doesn’t provide. Those hungry for more deck builders, 4X games and turn-based RPGs will find something to eat.
But the biggest gap between cultures is time, not space. There we see devastating stagnation. The youngest players are burning unsupervised hours on Roblox. The oldest are in Odinsleep until a single-player blockbuster catches their eye. The middle of the pack, getting the hang of disposable income, are discovering other ways to spend. The biggest players in the industry are still waiting for this entire bloc to gravitate toward the next Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto, but year after year this just looks more like wishful, harmful thinking.
Through the ‘90s, the video game industry very intentionally tried to narrow its players down to adolescent males, a controlled demographic that made marketing much easier. Movies, music and television did not do this beyond specific programs, because they knew their business relied on having something to sell to everyone.
It’s no coincidence that the video game industry found its biggest successes when the facade slipped. The Sims, Pokémon, and the DVD capabilities of the PlayStation 2 were boomtowns, made up of people who did not previously see themselves as the primary audience for games and gaming hardware. The biggest disruptors of the last decade weren’t fantasy RPGs or open-world shooters but Minecraft and Pokémon Go.
Gaming started to broaden its horizons, even if the dude-focused marketing divisions remained entrenched for years. If there is a crash on the horizon, it’s likely Nintendo will be the ones walking away from it the least scathed (again). Games like Mario, Zelda and Mario Kart truly are widely beloved across generations, demographically pliable. The company has long understood the importance of trying to redefine what the experience of playing a game can be.
“If we continue to coalesce around the four or five genres, then we won’t get the new players because those people have already said we’re not interested in your genres,” former Sony Interactive Entertainment Chairman Shawn Layden said back in 2023. “Don’t kid yourself that someone who’s said ‘no’ to Call of Duty for the last 15 years is going to start suddenly saying ‘yes’ to Call of Duty.”
It is worth mentioning that sales for Call of Duty, one of gaming’s evergreen cash cows, slipped last year.
The current youth, opting for Roblox and Five Nights at Freddy’s lore, are agnostic to the graphics-pushing that once defined industry progress. The people going to concerts, exhausted of being online but still enjoying posting, are compromising with the cruddiest flashcard digicams the 2000s had to offer. The fans who once reliably showed up for every new salvo in the AAA console war are now busy booking colonoscopies.
As gaming rigs return to the $6,000 range, the island of high-performance players will recede to the peninsula of 30,000 or so people who unironically have “XxX” in their username. The biggest gaming companies are placing unsustainable bets that rely on each one of these kinds of players showing up and subscribing to a singular vision of gaming. These are growing pains maturing at the worst possible time. But it’s the result of intentional decisions, not inevitable fate.
If this industry wants a future for itself, it needs an ecosystem that everyone can participate in for the long haul, from first steps to one foot in the grave. That requires an inclusive approach that is very alien to its foundations. Those players will need a way to discover more than the next live-service game, finding the gaming equivalent to Sesame Street, Smiling Friends, and Saturday Night Live all on the same idiot box. Edutainment and courtroom dramas alike. The player base is huge. Bigger than ever. Ever growing. They won’t all fit into the next Fortnite.
