In 1983 the video game industry was almost destroyed. When according to Wikipedia, the rising popularity of personal computers, market over-saturation and poor quality games like E.T the Extra Terrestrial. Saw video games revenue drop by nearly 97%.
While the industry did eventually recover at least in the United States. Here in the UK, because consoles and game cartridges became too expensive to import. Home computers like the ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64 were left to fill the gaps.
That was until the mid 1990’s and the era of the PlayStation and Xbox. Which saw the rise of the video games industry into something that is now bigger than both the music and movie industries combined. However since the end of the pandemic, we are seeing some worrying trends that hint at the possibility that the video game industry might once again be in trouble.
Console Christmas sales in 2025.
At the beginning of January, Microsoft announced that in 2025 it had suffered its worst year on record, with regard to the sale of its Xbox consoles. Something that according to Forbes, was a decline in sales of 70% year on year.
Things were not much better for Microsofts main rivals Sony and Nintendo. With Sony seeing PlayStation 5 console sales decline by 40% And while Nintendo announce that the Switch 2 was its fastest selling console at launch in June 2025. By Christmas, Switch 2 sales were down 10%.
Consoles and games are starting to become unaffordable.
Perhaps one of the main reasons why console sales have been so poor. Is that both Sony and Microsoft decided to increased the price of their consoles just before Christmas. Something that is highly unusual for any console in the 5th year of its life cycle.
While tariffs and higher RAM prices have been attributed to these price rises. Normally by the time a console has hit its 5th year, it’s usually around half its launch price. Something that is achieved by the manufacturer, using economies of scale and the fact that a percentage of every game sold on a console, will go to the console maker.
Gaming has gotten to expensive.
While this pricing model has worked for decades. The reason why the games industry might be in trouble. Is that not only has the cost of consoles increased, but so have the games. If we use last year’s best selling game as an example.
On launch, Battlefield 6 had a starting price of £70 for the standard edition and £100 for the premium edition. So to give you an idea just how much of an increase that is. Battlefield 4, released in 2013 was £40 for the standard edition and £54.99 for the Deluxe Edition.
Sure three months later, the standard edition of Battlefield 6 dropped to around £50. But as gamers have started to notice game prices creep up, so too have they been buying fewer games. In fact it looks like 60 percent of (US) gamers are only buying two games a year. Which would be in line with a trend being observed in the UK, where there has been a steady decline in boxed video games sales, and a general flattening of digital sales.
Things are looking bad if game studios close or make cut backs.
The problem with gamers cutting back on the number of games they buy a year. Is that because video game production can be very expensive. If sales decline, video games makers get nervous and start to cancel projects and make redundancies.
Something that we can see in a number of reports, including one in Variety which states that a third of US video Games Industry workers, were layed off over the last two years. Then according to another report, last year the industry sharply contracted with layoffs being reported by 100 companies around the world.
To compound this situation, recently in a LeMonde article, Ubisoft announced on 21st January, that it was canceling the development of six games and postponing the release of seven others. With another 200 jobs to be axed at their French headquarters.
So is the gaming industry in trouble?
Things are not looking good, and this could be the start of a death spiral. In that because both consoles and their video games have become too expensive. Gamers are delaying the purchase of new consoles, and buying fewer games.
Then because gamers are buying fewer games, game developers are starting to fail, which then leads to fewer games being created for gamers to buy. However, as buying new games helps to subsidise the price of consoles. Fewer game sales will mean that console prices can’t come down, and the whole cycle is repeated.
While the situation is looking bad, it’s probably no different to other entertainment industries, like for example music and movies. So what we are currently seeing is an industry trying to weather the storm. Which will mean more game release delays, redundancies, cut backs, mergers and price increases.
We will also probably see a delay in the release of any next generation consoles until around 2030. Which hopefully should be enough time for the price of RAM and solid state storage to return to more sensible prices.
In the meantime, I’m going to continue to use Steam and GOG to buy only games on sale, and look to buy older games that work really well on very modest and cheap hardware like the Steam Deck.
The Doomsday clock is 85 seconds to midnight!
In other news the Science and Security Board (SASB) who manage the Doomsday clock. Released there 2026 Doomsday Clock Statement, and placed us closer to global disaster then we have ever been before.
What’s interesting from a technology perspective, is that SASB has highlighted Artificial Intelligence as one of the reasons why the clock is closer to midnight. With their concerns stemming not from killer robots, but AI’s ability to aid in the design of new pathogens to which humans will have no defence, and “lingering concerns” about AI’s accuracy and tendency to hallucinate. Something that when combined with AI’s:
potential to accelerate the existing chaos and dysfunction in the world’s information ecosystem, supercharging mis- and disinformation campaigns and undermining the fact-based public discussions required to address urgent major threats like nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change.
Feels like a statement, that to me at least, should be ringing alarm bells with everyone across the world, but I guess the world just has other things to worry about.
BlueSky continues to grow
While I personally find social media to be toxic, and generally bad for one’s mental health. I do have a BlueSky account. So I was interested to see that in a recent transparency report, BlueSky grew from 25 Million to 42 million users in 2025.
However what gives me hope, is that BlueSky in 2025 was able to actively decrease user reports of anti-social behaviour by 79%. So let’s see if we cant get more people to switch to BlueSky, and maybe then we can make the world a little less toxic and a little safer.
Site structural redesign and new content delays for February
One of the problems with designing and building a website. Is that over time the scale, structure and scope of what you originally intended to do changes, leading to issues that eventually become critical to fix. So as the Mydoodads website is now 10 years old, some of its foundations are starting to look a little shaky.
So at the end of January we discovered a structural issue that is going to require a lot of reworking. Something that will be very time consuming to fix, which will mean that for this month we won’t be concentrating on new content creation.
However if all goes well with the restructure. At the end of the month you should see a redesigned home page, and a site that is easier to navigate for mobile users. So apologies to anyone waiting for the BeePhotos video from our Synology BeeStation series, or any of the other series that you may be viewing.
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