The October 2026 edition of Steam Next Fest started on October 19, allowing users to explore Steam’s massive catalog of games with free playable demos. Millions of PC gamers logged on but on…
I remember going to the Radio Shack in the early 80s and seeing dozens of different Atari carts, priced at like $4.99 (which was a lot more then, ofc, but it still felt cheap), pretty much all of which were garbage.
It pulled down the price that good games could charge and killed the industry for a bit. I feel like peer communication is for now easier, so games like BG3 can still command a price premium given their quality, but the slop cannon is not a good thing for the industry generally or Valve in particular.
It does feel like we are barrelling headfirst into another gaming industry collapse, doesn’t it?
Between the whole soulless, overpriced, MTX-riddled “AAAA” crap crowding out the top, tonnes of AI-slip flooding the bottom-end, and the antagonism towards physical media - it seems like it’ll only be a matter of time.
Especially given how there is a literal lifetime’s backlog of quality titles from half a dozen console generations - gamers could survive an ice-age. Developers and publishers can’t.
I remember going to the Radio Shack in the early 80s and seeing dozens of different Atari carts, priced at like $4.99 (which was a lot more then, ofc, but it still felt cheap), pretty much all of which were garbage.
It pulled down the price that good games could charge and killed the industry for a bit. I feel like peer communication is for now easier, so games like BG3 can still command a price premium given their quality, but the slop cannon is not a good thing for the industry generally or Valve in particular.
It does feel like we are barrelling headfirst into another gaming industry collapse, doesn’t it?
Between the whole soulless, overpriced, MTX-riddled “AAAA” crap crowding out the top, tonnes of AI-slip flooding the bottom-end, and the antagonism towards physical media - it seems like it’ll only be a matter of time.
Especially given how there is a literal lifetime’s backlog of quality titles from half a dozen console generations - gamers could survive an ice-age. Developers and publishers can’t.