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Something isn’t adding up in the video game industry. In 2025, global video game sales hit $195.6 billion, growing 5% year-on-year. That’s great news – except when you look at the larger picture. In that same time, 10 major studios including Monolith Productions and The Initiative were shuttered in addition to over 25 studios slashing their staff numbers. These were studios working on huge AAA titles including the Perfect Dark remake, a brand-new entry in the Titanfall universe, and superhero titles like Wonder Woman and Black Panther. How is it possible that an industry beating its previous peak year-on-year is also one where one third of its workers were laid off in the last two years? The industry is deeply unwell, with no singular cause to identify but a myriad of symptoms creating a slow-spreading, but severe threat.
It used to be that if players had any free time, they were gaming. Now, the call of video games is being drowned out by many other, immediately accessible distractions. Installations of A.I. assistant apps like ChatGPT and Grok rose to 1 billion in Q4 2025, a statistic that initially seems unrelated to video games until you read industry analyst Matthew Ball’s
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