Survive up to 25? We make a difficult start | The Deanbeat

Last year, the saying that gave the game industry was to survive until 25. The hope was that things would improve after a very difficult year for the layoffs of the game and the players’ crisis. Now we could start thinking about surviving until 26.

So far this year, in the first month of 2025, we have had 19 Game Companies Announce closures or layoffs, with a total of at least 500 lost jobs.

Just yesterday, the midnight society closed and canceled its dead fall game. That could have been foreseen, since Dr.’s lack of respect separated from the company that co -founded after accusations of inappropriate conversations with a minor of his time before on Twitch. Dozens of work are affected.

We also saw an unspecified number of works affected by the changes in Electronic Arts’ Bioware, which saw the weakest sales of what was expected for Dragon Age: Vailguard. And Ubisoft had another dismissal that affected 185 people in three studies. It is still a problematic company and still has more than 18,000 employees.

I do not think this means that we are going to have a year as bad as we did in 2024, when there were more than 15,000 jobs lost in the games. This year, the Labor Resources Champion Amir Satvat estimates that we could lose another 9,800 jobs in 2025, but hiring should return to a better balance.

Sony has just transported its management for the entire corporation (Hiroki Totoki is the new CEO) and the PlayStation division (Hideaki Nishino will be the only CEO). In the last group, that means that a financial type is assuming control, with a diminished paper for the creative/developer executive, Hermen Hulst. I do not interpret that as good news for game work.

Microsoft had a star alignment in the last quarter, with games like Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Indiana Jones and the big circle. But he had a fourth fourth, and Indiana Jones only had about four million players, a relatively small percentage of his general game pass subscribers.

Microsoft said that their game income decreases 7% in the fourth quarter (its second fiscal quarter ended on December 31), which is usually the strongest quarter. Xbox content and services grew 2%, driven by growth in the Xbox game pass. Microsoft paid $ 75 billion for Activision Blizzard, acquiring Call of Duty in the agreement. But make that category grow only 2% in the first quarter when Call of Duty was available in Game Pass? That is not so good.

In addition to that, Xbox hardware revenue decreased by 29% in the quarter compared to a year ago. That is a strong decrease that suggests that Microsoft is due to a renewal of the console. But that console is not in sight at this time, and Microsoft’s filtered papers suggested that this day will not reach 2028.

Intel reported a loss for the quarter and lost his CEO Pat Gels. Even so, their replacements said they expect a balance result in the first quarter and expressed their confidence in the company’s manufacturing process soon. Intel’s weakness has been for the benefit of AMD and Nvidia, but it is not good for the United States to have so much weakness in its largest national chip manufacturer.

The positive side?

Are good things happening? Yes. According to Drake Star Partners, some fundamental positive movements are occurring with the restoration of games and financing, according to Drake Star Partners.

Microsoft can still be seen as a hero. In the first half of the year, Obsidian’s will be launched declared in February, the south of midnight compulsion games in April and the fatality of Software in May. Nvidia is launching its graphics cards of the NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 50 series, driving a cycle for an update of PC games.

Switch 2 comes from Nintendo this year, but some players fear that it does not offer much beyond a larger screen and better graphics. And Grand Theft Auto VI will arrive at some point in this year, and could go to $ 100 or less, which increases the price of games so that they can catch up with inflation. If this price is spread in other titles, that would be excellent for the industry.

In the front of the technology industry, we have seen that the technological actions are shaken by the announcement of the Chinese de -Deepseek startup, which, according to the reports, was able to create a competitive AI model to compete with the chatgpt of Ia Open for only $ 6 million (this narrative is being challenged) – while others spend billions in the Nvidia GPUs to create their models.

The announcement placed the shares of Nvidia by 15%, taking few hundred billion dollars of its assessment in the stock market. It is not good if the result will be for investors to become bassists throughout the technological sector. In the games, developers fear that AI will take their jobs.

And Donald Trump announced that he plans to place tariffs on the semiconductors that come not only from China, but also our Taiwan ally. Only 10 days after the new administration, I’m afraid that Trump’s demolition ball will hit the economy and game industry. The Consumer Technology Association fears that a tariff trade war can raise the prices of games consoles by 40%, laptop prices in 46%and smartphones prices by 26%.

I don’t count among the pessimists, but I am being realistic. Even so, I hope that they have some outstanding games this year, starting with the VII civilization that comes to the PC of Taken-Two Interactive’s Firexis Games on February 11. And the fun games are the best way to fight a difficult game economy. We know that games will always have winners and losers. Hopefully good news begins to overcome the bad.

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