Playtime’s over: how 2023 could reshape video games

A perfect storm of wider cultural and economic forces have been pulling the video games industry apart. Is this the year it remakes itself?

There are, littered throughout the history of video games, certain years of radical, fundamental change. We can look at the major crashes in the US games industry in 1977 and 1983, where bloated software libraries and hardware gluts destroyed confidence in the medium and cleared out dozens of companies. We can also look at the arrival of the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn in 1994, which made 32-bit processors and rendered 3D visuals the entire focus of the industry, expunging a generation of competing products, from the Philips CD-i to the Atari Jaguar. I think 2023 could be one of those years of radical change, not because of some major new technical landmark, but because the structure of the games industry is now dissolving and remaking itself.

First, we're going to see a lot more consolidation this year, as major corporations bet on continued growth in the gaming sector. The big precursors were Microsoft's 2021 purchase of Bethesda and Take-Two's acquisition of Zynga last year, but that was just the beginning. Tech giants Amazon, Alphabet and Meta are circling the industry eyeing up legacy publishers such as Square Enix and Electronic Arts to get a foothold in the industry, and a neat leg up toward what they all think is the next big thing: the metaverse. But it's Microsoft's ongoing attempt to take over Activision, currently being investigated by competition regulators in the US, Europe and the UK, that will be a major focus during 2023.