This will certainly be a rough year for indie devs, if they were counting on getting a game signed by a publisher any time soon.
It’s likely every publisher is going through the same exercise right now: how can we lower costs to weather this? And reducing biz dev expenses will be one of the first ways (in addition to limiting travel, cutting marketing spend, and bailing on events).
Why would publishers need to ‘weather this?’ What about Covid 19 is going to lower their revenues or market share? I would have guessed the opposite – people are going to be spending a lot more time indoors than usual, watching Netflix and playing videogames.
If it leads to an economic downturn then everything gets tightened. That’s what they’re bracing for.
If nothing else, cutting all these events reduces exposure and thus will reduce revenue.
But I suspect that spending across a lot of industries will go down, including games. If people are spending more on stocking up on hand sanitizer and toilet paper, they have less to spend on everything else.
Not to mention that the vast majority of games (on console) are still sold at retail, and fewer people will be going out in general, so sales will slump. Some of that will be moved to digital purchases, of course, but not all.
So yeah, I think it’d be safe to assume games will suffer less than other industries, but they won’t be immune.
When I was at Blizzard we braced for the 2007 economic downturn to hit World of Warcraft subscribers hard. It didn’t - in fact $15 a month for a game you could play all the time was seen as quite the value compared to other forms of entertainment.
May well be the case that games do well if everyone stays home for fear of the virus.
Until we get COVID-22 that spreads over the Internet…
That’s fascinating! I had never heard of that before.
Games - and many entertainment outlets - tend to do well during economic slumps, as people look for easy escape.
50% of full game sales are digital these days, and trending higher all the time.
I think they’ll all do fine, long term.
The real issue is if E3 and a bunch of other shows this year get canned in the lead up to a new generation release. It’ll be harder to generate buzz around new titles accompanying new platforms. So it’s a bit of an odd spot, but I think it’ll come out in the wash.
Travel is dropping like a rock. You can still stay home and play games while taking time off though.
Everyone who thinks that game publisher CEOs are just going to keep doing what they’ve planned, spend the same amount they had planned, and make few changes is crazy.
It may or may not hit the gaming industry as hard, but this shit is going to hurt, and these execs are not going to settle for the status quo when it comes to spending.
In the coming months we’re going to see a number of indie devs go out of business.
I have no idea what these CEOs plan to do, but indie developers going out of business isn’t new. Isn’t that why we have a dozen different store fronts and some flailing streaming services and various other schemes all trying to get attention for them, supposedly?
If that happens, I think it’ll be due to market forces, not anything specific to a downturn in spending by gamers themselves. Meaning - shrinkage in the stock market, less available cash or lines of credit, or downturns that devalue the cash that is spent by consumers.
I don’t think you’ll see significantly fewer games sold.
Whataboutism.
The point isn’t that closures don’t occur normally, but rather that trends will be worse than normal.
It’s not whataboutism.
If indie developers close shop soon it would be idiotic to assume it’s due to the virus. That’s just a convenient scapegoat. JCP will love to use that one too. I’ll be sure to let them know. What aboutsism about that?
1: Indie developers will be affected by COVID19 closing their major industry conference of the year.
2: What about how indie developers close all the time anyway?
You know why you couldn’t quote me, because I literally didn’t say that. Nice try though.
Here is this…
Retail will be affected by people not going out and shopping this year.
JCP could close down this year… and it has nothing to do with the virus.
See how that works? Correlation does not equal causality.
As you wish…
That did not read like a wish.
There’s an oversupply of indie games. That’s the fundamental issue.