The video game industry likes to praise the figures: record sales numbers, amazing income growth, dazzling quantities of simultaneous players. It is logical that people who do and play games like numbers: they are proof that someone wins.
We have an incredible new issue in the world of video games: Despite an alarming priceIt only took Nintendo Switch 2 to become four days to become The best -selling domestic video game console of all timeWith 3.5 million units sold this weekend after its release on June 5. It’s a huge affair, Enough for investors to note and consider Nintendo as a safe refuge in a moment of extreme economic volatility. This type of success is generally a point of pride for supporters of the video game industry, hard data proving the importance of the medium for all skeptics. The problem is that the success of the Nintendo Switch 2 is probably not an indication of more years to come, but the last piece of road open before a steep cliff.
The occasional observer has no way of knowing it, but the video game industry as we know effectively on. It may seem confusing – after all, don’t the games yet make huge sums of money? Yes, they do it. But the nature of this money, or how it is done, has never been so different. The old model – the genre illustrated by the Nintendo Switch 2, where someone buys a console while waiting to be able to buy and play a stable rate of interesting and varied games for the best decade – evaporates. Instead, something more amorphous and extractive has taken its place.
The new standard of the game is now shaped by the who loves Fortnite Or RobloxOnline offers that are fewer games than platforms for users to make their own content or for other companies to announce their goods. For each successful film like James Gunn Superman,, There is a correspondent Fortnite promotionAnd it is not always clear that pays for it, and how much. Epic games, the manufacturer of Fortnitedoes not disclose the terms of its brand transactions, but the ceiling for them seems to be astronomical. In 2024, Disney has acquired a $ 1.5 billion participation In Epic to deepen a partnership that has already seen Marvel, Star Wars and other Disney characters appear in the game. It’s enough money to finance several Disney video games, and it is said that Disney found Fortnite A better place to spend your money.
Indeed Mario Kart World. These are free games, based on additional subscriptions or saving game machine games (colloquially called “gacha games” after ATMs of Japanese capsule toys) to keep the players hung indefinitely – and spend money all the time. They are also agnostic, just as playable on phones and tablets as these are expensive game consoles such as PlayStation or Xbox.
The perspective is hard and difficult to get in any arena. Hollywood, for example, is just beginning to recognize that the streaming wars that have defined end business are not carried out between networks or rival studios, but with youtube. The game industry is found in a similar situation: the paradigm has changed, and new types of games fueled by the logic of play or the adjacent appearance of endless content streaming allowed new mass actors, by separating them from their large -scale money. Holding under the old model of construction of new expensive materials and support for flagship titles is almost impossible due to the economic realities of the industry. It is expensive and takes time to produce the type of work that has defined the industry. Show games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2Posted by Sony for PlayStation 5 in 2023, would have reached more than $ 300 million And five years of development to do – an exorbitant amount which means that brands like Sony and Microsoft, respectively the two and third largest playing companies after Nintendo, cannot offer a regular rate of versions to compete with free cash cows. Other game publishers can only fill the shortcomings, that is to say, of course, after having explained The waves of studios closings While investors’ capital has dried up and business owners ruthlessly pursue an increase in the constantly beneficiary margins.
In short, the video game industry is in the same kind of problems in which each industry is, as Investment capital And Inadequate regulations Leave each sector of the American economy in ruins. There is still enough gas in the tank so that Sony and Microsoft continue to make large flashy games, but the ecosystem around them is dead. This creates enormous pressure to make sure that the few games that are released are nothing less than massive successes – or to become something else. This is how we get Microsoft’s investment to become the Netflix of Games – which, while businesses in competition with Netflix learn, is only a race to become The biggest losses leader—Abanting its Xbox of $ 599 and trying to remake It in a lifestyle brand, creating a service to play video games on the Internet on the devices you watch to broadcast a video, supported by a subscription catalog. Meanwhile, Sony adopts a different approach: his ambitions are to become the version of HBO of Gaming, as evidenced by the acclaimed television adaptation of its most acclaimed franchise, The last of us.
However, Nintendo, against all odds, remains resilient. The company has long zigned where competitors have zagged, avoiding advanced equipment in favor of more affordable technology, the manufacture of more regularly games and marketing around new gameplay ideas instead of expensive photorealist graphics. This shows the company and its products to play criticisms, which can take advantage of Nintendo games without having to deal with the ideological project to make games comparable to HBO emissions. Others asynchronicity has indicated that the company can always release a product like Switch 2 and operate as if it were in a business state as usual.
But, like the acceleration of Nintendo Themed parks And cinema efforts Indicate, business as usual may not be enough, even for this 135 -year -old company. Even without a volatile American trade policy that makes things difficult for the company based in Kyoto and its partners, Nintendo, as The threadMarlo Stanfield, said clearly The price of the brick increases. In 2023, Nintendo joined his peers Increase the standard price of games From $ 60 to $ 70, losing a standard that has been in place since 2005. With Switch 2, Nintendo has increased again, charging $ 79.99 for Mario Kart World and reserve the right to do so for other games to find “The right price for the value of this entertainment. “Although even more affordable than many hobbies that require regular supplies and raw materials purchased in specialized stores, games of the Nintendo genre quickly do luxury good, in competition for a portion of tart in constant evolution. Each company increases prices on everythingSpending money on games with free equivalents there does not make much sense. Even if they are supposed to be traps to play.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is a beautiful machine, a significant upgrade to the very popular console which was quite user-friendly to cause mass of people to pick up the hobby During locking days of the cocovide-19 pandemic. It was marketed with confidence-that is to say, without, without real launching title bursting beyond Mario Kart WorldA game that each owner of Nintendo was still going to buy. (His predecessor, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe On the original switch, it is this console High seller by a large margin.) The only other Nintendo offer is the strange $ 9.99 Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome TourAn infotainment experience where the player crosses a museum in the form of Nintendo Switch 2 to find out why they made a good investment. He is equally thoughtful, fun and insulting, which is also to be the cycle of emotions that we regularly experience as an adult that plays video games.
Video game consoles manufacturers often do not only sell the gadget you order in the store. Instead, they sell an idea: you buy a ticket for several years of entertainment, you will be happy to have the privilege of buying. The Nintendo Switch 2 has made this argument – in a few weeks, it will house a strange and wonderful Donkey Kong gameWhile subsequent months will bring the usual suspects: a Pokémon game, a Metroid Science fiction adventure and other unexpected surprises. People who buy a switch 2 at the moment can taste the most complicated types of games that the new console can manage – Dynamics Street Fighter 6Smooth and cerebral Hitmanand fantastic agriculture influencing anime of Factory rune– In addition to almost all the games that have been published on the nintendo original switch. It’s really a bonus. But in video games, nothing is as attractive as the potential, and the potential that the game player now sells is the same matter in which she has been for decades now.
Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company, reinforced by the penchant that gangsters had for card salons as one of the many shortcomings in Japan End of 19 yearsth-century Prohibition of game. When the Nintendo entertainment system arrived in the United States in 1985, almost a century after the foundation of society, it marked a new start for video games after A Disastrous Industry accident of 1983. Forty years later, the game industry we know is no longer. Competitors have bicycle and outside; The Amers rivals are now wishing partners. It is normal that Nintendo has released what could very well be the last video game console of the genre at the moment. It is made for a small, neat a book for this time of video games: a big opening and a large fence.
