Would You Pay $70 at a Restaurant Just Because of the Name?
Sounds absurd, right? But that’s exactly how millions of players have been feeling over the past few years, and the market is paying the price for that broken trust.
In 2026, the games industry is going through one of the biggest credibility crises in its history.
The strange part is that this isn’t a crisis of audience — the player base has never been bigger. It’s a crisis of trust.
Trust that a major company, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars, would deliver a product worth the investment: complete, well-made, memorable.
It’s not much to ask from a relationship that’s lasted years, is it?
Wrong. What actually happened is that this trust got chipped away, release after release, broken promise after broken promise. It’s become more and more common to get games that launch broken, rushed out the door after painfully slow development, with none of the care that would’ve been standard just a few years ago.
So how did things get this bad?
To understand how we got here, we need to follow the money.
Wall Street Joined the Game
Imagine you own a bakery. You love making artisanal bread, let the dough ferment for 18 hours, and use locally sourced ingredients. Then a big investment fund buys 40% of your business. In the very first meeting, they ask you: “Why spend 18 hours making bread when you could use chemical leavening and produce 10 times as much?”
That’s more or less what happened to the games industry.
Starting in the 2010s, major publishers like Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Take-Two came under growing pressure from institutional shareholders who see games not as art or entertainment, but as vehicles for recurring revenue. The logic is simple and brutal: a game you launch once earns revenue once. A game with a battle pass, cosmetics, seasons, and virtual currencies earns revenue forever.
The result? Between 2018 and 2024, global microtransaction revenue jumped from $32 billion to over $74 billion — nearly doubling. Meanwhile, player satisfaction with AAA titles plummeted. The average Metacritic score for major releases dropped from 82 points in 2015 to 71 points in 2024, according to research from SuperData.
The numbers tell an unsettling story: the more money that went into production, the less quality came out in the product.
The Eternal Sequel Syndrome
Since 2023, the most anticipated games have almost all been sequels or remakes. Even the games competing for Game of the Year, sometimes with a DLC making the list too.
That’s no coincidence. It’s corporate risk aversion at work.
Let’s step into the boardroom for a second: you’re a games executive who needs to justify a $200 million budget to the board. What’s easier to get approved — a brand-new IP with no track record and no guaranteed fanbase? Or the twelfth entry in a franchise that’s already sold 150 million copies over 20 years?
The obvious answer explains why, in 2025, 68% of the world’s 20 best-selling games were sequels, remakes, or remasters, according to NPD Group data. Franchises like Call of Duty, FIFA/EA FC, Assassin’s Creed, and Grand Theft Auto have dominated shelves for over a decade, often delivering iterations that critics themselves describe as “more of the same with better graphics.”
The issue isn’t sequels themselves. It’s that the chase for financial safety turned sequels into a formula for hedging against the unpredictability of true innovation.
This story isn’t new — the tech industry runs on the exact same logic. It’s easier to ship a small incremental improvement than to build a genuinely new feature. That’s why we get iPhones and Galaxys with slightly better cameras, marginally more efficient processors, and modestly longer-lasting batteries. Incrementalism is the formula for selling the same thing at full price, over and over and over again. While you keep buying, shareholders cash in and executives keep their jobs — plus a fat bonus at year’s end.
The Studio Graveyard
Here’s one of the darkest chapters of this story — and also the most revealing about how big corporations think. Following the same shareholder logic: buying up successful or promising studios is a great way to boost stock prices and dominate headlines. If the stock price goes up, the company profits.
Between 2021 and 2025, Microsoft acquired more than 20 studios, in one of the biggest consolidation waves in gaming history. Sony did the same. EA bought — and then shut down — historic studios like Maxis (creators of The Sims) and Westwood (creators of Command & Conquer). This buy-launch-close cycle has existed forever: acquire the team, put out a few games, try to cash in. But what happens when results fall short of expectations? An early death.
The list of studios Microsoft shut down in 2024 alone included names like Tango Gameworks, the team behind the acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush, and Arkane Austin, creators of Prey.
Let’s sit with that for a second: Microsoft closed a studio that had just made one of the most critically acclaimed games of the previous year. A success by pretty much every measure. So what actually drove the closure?
Hi-Fi Rush likely didn’t hit the sales and/or concurrent-player numbers executives were expecting. The game was an artistic success — beloved, award-winning — but it didn’t bring in the revenue that had been projected. And in the corporate games world of 2026, art without recurring engagement is seen as money wasted. One detail worth noting: the game launched as a surprise, exclusively on Xbox and PC, available day one on Game Pass. The release strategy itself wasn’t built to maximize revenue. Given the full context of how it all played out, it’s hard not to call Hi-Fi Rush an outright success.
But that didn’t stop Tango Gameworks from being shut down at the eleventh hour, while they were still working on a sequel.
The pattern repeats with unsettling precision: a big company buys a creative studio, promising “creative freedom,” then imposes live-service metrics on it. The studio doesn’t hit the unrealistic targets projected for it, and the studio gets shut down. Creativity bought, crushed, and discarded — mission accomplished.
The AAA Paradox
Here’s the twist nobody saw coming: spending more money started to mean delivering less value.
In 2004, Half-Life 2 cost about $40 million to make and is still considered one of the best games ever created. In 2023, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones cost $850 million over nearly a decade of development, and turned out to be a resounding flop, met with harsh reviews and disappointing sales.
The math simply broke.
The average development cost of an AAA game jumped from $30–50 million in 2010 to $150–300 million in 2025. That surge is driven by bigger teams, ultra-realistic graphics, massive marketing campaigns, and development cycles that stretch on for 6 to 8 years. But the price consumers pay stayed practically frozen: a game that cost $60 in 2010 costs $70 today — just a 16% increase over 15 years, far below cumulative inflation.
The result is mathematically perverse: to make the numbers work, companies have to monetize inside the game, after you’ve already paid for it. That’s how we ended up with season passes, $25 cosmetic items, virtual currencies with deliberately confusing conversion rates, and content that used to ship in the base game now sold separately as DLC.
You pay for the movie ticket and still find a popcorn cart waiting inside the theater.
And the popcorn’s cold.
Meanwhile, in a Gamer’s Garage…
In 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 was developed by independent studio Larian Studios, a team of around 400 people. The game didn’t just sell over 10 million copies within a few months — it swept the year’s awards, including Game of the Year.
With an estimated budget of $100 million (modest by AAA standards), it delivered over 100 hours of content, with no microtransactions, no battle pass, no predatory DLC, and one of the most innovative experiences of its time.
In 2024, Palworld, made by a team of fewer than 50 people, sold 25 million copies in under a month and became a global cultural phenomenon.
In 2025, Animal Well, developed by a single person, was one of the most talked-about titles of the year. Meanwhile, Silksong — a game that started out as a planned DLC and shipped for just $19 — outshined every major blockbuster of the year.
The rise of indie gaming isn’t a passing trend — it’s a direct response to the creative and moral bankruptcy of big corporations. Platforms like Steam, itch.io, and even Xbox Game Pass itself have democratized distribution. Engines like Unity and Unreal have let small teams build visually competitive experiences. And players, tired of paying full price for generic, monetized-to-the-bone experiences, discovered that for a fraction of that price, they could get something genuine, creative, fresh — and, most importantly, fair.
This Isn’t a Crisis of Gaming
What we’re living through isn’t a crisis for the games industry — after all, more people start playing every year, and the numbers just keep climbing. It’s a crisis of trust against the corporatization of creativity. The games market is simply the clearest mirror of this phenomenon, because it’s where it’s become most visible, fastest.
When a creative company’s main goal stops being making something worthwhile and becomes squeezing the maximum possible value out of a user base, the trust contract with the audience breaks. And once it’s broken, it doesn’t get rebuilt with a pretty trailer or a $50 million marketing campaign.
Gamers didn’t turn their backs on games. They turned their backs on the lie wrapped in cutting-edge graphics — where their favorite franchises got hijacked with the sole purpose of trapping players in endless purchase loops, without ever delivering anything truly new in return.
The good news is that the market is starting to notice this toxic pattern — and respond to it.
Indie title sales grew 43% between 2022 and 2025, according to GSD.
Players are voting with their wallets, and it seems like they’re choosing creative honesty.
Conclusion
While the immediate future of big game companies looks increasingly murky — shaped by shareholders and their spreadsheets, laying off creative talent, and canceling ambitious projects — another force is gaining ground on the horizon, driven by creativity and innovation, made up of a growing crowd of creative professionals who simply don’t fit into the AAA corporate mold. Indie studios, built by industry veterans and newcomers alike, are bringing to life projects that would’ve been impossible in a corporate environment, and audiences seem ready to lift these games onto the industry’s biggest stages.
As the number of games released keeps growing exponentially, curating which titles are actually worth a player’s time becomes more important than ever — whether that’s a blockbuster that cost over $150 million or a passion project built by a creative person in their spare time.
The beautiful part is that you get to decide which one deserves your money — and your love.