What is the future of Video Games?

I feel there is a bit of a cycle to video games. A lot of people in this thread are talking about the late 90s/early 2000s as though it was a period of unrivalled creativity, but the videogame market grew so rapidly in its early years that it actually crashed in the mid-1980s. The industry that emerged from that spent the following decade or two rebuilding and maturing. By the late 90s and early 2000s, you had established companies, rapidly improving technology and new platforms, but still enough room for developers to take fairly strange creative risks. A lot of the memorable games from that period came out of that environment.

Nowadays, like you say, a lot of the long-established videogame giants have become enormous organisations making games that cost hundreds of millions, with responsibility for the livelihoods of huge numbers of employees. There is a lot riding on a AAA game, so changing direction or taking a risk is incredibly difficult.

Meanwhile, the barrier to actually making a game has fallen enormously. Small teams and individuals can make something largely as a passion project. Most of those games will never be commercially successful, but they don't all need to be. Every so often one hits an audience and becomes enormous, despite coming from somewhere the traditional industry would probably never have looked.

Roblox is a really good example of what can happen when you give people accessible development tools alongside hosting, distribution and an existing audience. Dress to Impress, if you're aware of it, is a Roblox game that absolutely took off a couple of years ago. Its creator started developing it at 14 and was only 17 when it became a huge phenomenon. That's a fashion game made by a teenage girl becoming one of the biggest games on an enormous platform.

If making and distributing a game becomes accessible enough, successful games don't necessarily have to originate from somebody who has spent twenty years working their way through the traditional games industry. You can get ideas from people whose interests might normally be considered too niche or unmarketable to justify a AAA budget, or from people who might never have been given an opportunity within the traditional industry at all. Most of those projects won't become successful, but the ones that break through can end up influencing the whole industry.

Well, my feeling is that the future is indie - or at least, that a lot of new creative ideas going forward are going to come from outside the traditional AAA structure. That doesn't mean there isn't still a place for AAA games.

It's a bit like the reputation Apple developed once Android became established. When Apple was newer, it had to take a lot of risks itself. Later, it could let a much broader ecosystem experiment with different ideas, see which ones actually worked, and then adopt the successful ones a few years later. At least, that was the reputation anyway.

I could see something similar happening with games, where indie developers and smaller creators do much of the experimentation and AAA studios pick up ideas once they've already demonstrated that there's an audience for them. And honestly, given that some major publishers have also patented gameplay systems in ways that restrict other developers from using similar ideas, I'd probably prefer a lot of that invention to happen outside the AAA ecosystem in the first place.

... hmmm ... I think there's also something to be said about indie developers being able to appeal to audiences that tend to be considered as not the typical gamers too... Even when more representation is present in AAA games studios, the audiences they typically try to appeal to don't tend to take kindly to... different representations of women, or race, for example. To give a basic example, typically, a man won't want to play as a woman or be interested in women's stories. Although ... if you consider the Asian video games market, there is believed to be a huge market for women's games. So I think there is also something to be said about globalisation here as well as indie development...