Breaking news! A publisher discover what a saturated market is!

“There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up,” Clerc says.

This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it’s coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.

The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don’t make them any better or more marketable, and they’re designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It’s no wonder it can’t sustain the current trajectory.