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The story
A thread titled “Isn’t the gaming industry already dead?” on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board sparked a wide-ranging debate over the growth of mobile gaming versus the struggles of the console and PC markets. Posters pointed to the “memory shock” — the surge in DRAM prices driving up PC component costs — and noted that in Japan the Switch 2 is selling only about 20,000 units a week and the PS5 around 10,000, while others pushed back by citing the Famitsu Game White Paper to argue the mobile market is still growing. Opinion split over whether the industry as a whole is declining, or just certain hardware platforms.
What people said
Nintendo bought it some extra life with the DS, but even that's hit its limit now.
That whole "better hardware specs = more customers" idea…
Apparently it's the same trend overseas, not just in Japan.
Console gaming is probably going to fade out the way TV did.
A guy in his 20s at my company said smartphones or the Switch are good enough for him too.
Same with PC gaming — he said he just doesn't feel like playing something that takes that much time anymore.
AAA titles still have their place, but developing quick, low-budget games might actually fit the times better now.
The more complex games get, the higher the barrier gets for beginners.
Honestly, I think a cheap, lower-spec console would sell just fine.
They should've just kept milking the PS4/Switch generation.
Graphics have barely evolved anyway.
Even calling it "surviving" — that's not new hardware selling, and it's not the industry growing,
it's just existing devices holding steady, right? I'll say it again:
there's no standout hit game or anything, it's just people killing time with some random no-name puzzle game.
Steam games on PC are doing perfectly fine too.
In Japan specifically, Switch 2 sells about 20,000 a week and PS5 about 10,000 — neither is selling well.
As for PC, with the double whammy of the strong yen and the memory shock, I'd bet there are basically zero new gaming-PC buyers right now.
Are home consoles (mockingly nicknamed "house trash" online) even still alive?
Story-driven games are losing their reason to exist as games too — one by one, games are running out of selling points.
It's not that games don't need a story — it's that these people were never interested in story to begin with, were they?
Manga and other media aren't exactly thriving either, and these dopamine-brained brats have gotten so used to skipping ahead on the seek bar even for videos, all in the name of "tapa" (time efficiency/"time performance").
It's basically the same as saying "I'm not really interested, but I'll pretend to watch it anyway."
In short, people are getting dumber and dumber, and there's a whole culture now that validates being dumb.
Of course the industry withers away when that's the crowd it's catering to.
Kids are a lost cause thanks to the falling birth rate and dopamine-brained kids.
Old folks are a lost cause physically.
Not cool how you're ignoring the fact that Yuzo Kayama and a former TBS announcer, both over 70, made news for playing Resident Evil ("Bio").
Koichi Sugiyama (the Dragon Quest composer) was still at it right up until he passed away too — I don't get why people just assume old folks can't do it.
Citing a few exceptions doesn't really prove anything.
As a general trend, older people deal with declining motivation and physical decline like presbyopia (age-related farsightedness).
So what percentage of that generation is actually on the same level as those old guys you mentioned?
The Switch 2 price hike that tanked the console market only happened this year, so the real results won't show up until next year.
It's not over, but sales figures have definitely been dropping lately — especially in Japan.
Nintendo hardware isn't actually declining once you include digital downloads, per Re: #13 — so are you saying it's everything else that's bad?
Once their parts break down or go obsolete and they need to replace them, there's going to be a huge surge of people who can't afford it because parts have gotten too expensive.
Yeah, it's a hobby you can jump into easily just to kill time.
There's no other explanation for why Ubisoft went under.
If you're as big as Disney, you can take any amount of damage and still stay standing, but…
that's only because it's Disney.
If you just look at the famous names, it's easy to think "see, everything's fine!"
but nobody actually knows the real scale of the damage.
RPGs went through the same selection process, and in the end only Pokémon survived.
Jump-action games too — only Mario survived.
At the end of the day, it's only the strongest that survive.
Isn't that not "selection" so much as people just leaving?
If games lose their appeal and political correctness has taken up permanent residence, nobody's going to want to play.
Globally, the Chinese market is barely propping up PC gaming, but if we're talking Japan specifically, the gaming PC market has already been wiped out since the memory shock.
If parts prices keep climbing like this, it's easy to see the PC market shrinking as American and European users become unable to afford upgrades or replacement parts.
That graph doesn't really make sense.
It's hard to tell which side is growing by how much, and it's easy to misread.
It's labeled as console packaged sales, but that means console digital downloads are missing entirely.
Is this some manufacturer's cooked-up PR data too?
What do you mean? I don't get the cause-and-effect here at all.
I just don't think healthy competition is happening in the game industry right now.
Even if you call that "selection," I don't think there's much of a future in it.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
In recent years, the gaming industry’s profit environment has been affected by the “memory shock” — the surge in DRAM prices — and the thread repeatedly brought up the rising cost of PC components as a result. At the same time, the Famitsu Game White Paper data cited in the thread represents the combined market size of mobile, PC, and home consoles — a different metric from the rise and fall of individual hardware sales figures, a distinction that’s easy to overlook. The real divide in the thread wasn’t “is the overall market shrinking” but rather “can hardware other than smartphones survive,” with differing interpretations of the Switch 2’s and PS5’s weekly sales figures at the core of the debate. Claims that the industry is shrinking and claims that it’s merely undergoing natural selection coexist side by side, and it’s worth noting that both sides are backing their arguments with only partial data.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [“Geha”]) thread “Isn’t the gaming industry already dead?.”
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