The video game industry is miserable, but some people are trying to make it fun again

Videogames are making more money than ever, but in 2025, everyone I know whose livelihood depends on the industry in any capacity feels some degree of doomed. YouTubers could lose their audiences at a drop of the hat through a change in the algorithm, bloggers and journalists are slaves to search engine optimization and trend-chasing, AAA game devs are being laid off in droves regardless of how successful their games are, and most indie devs are betting years of their life on projects that could leave them penniless. And that’s not even getting into the underlying drive across the entire world to replace artists, writers, and creatives in general with generative AI. Even the folks I know at relatively people-oriented companies like Nintendo and Valve have to wonder how long they have until industry standards and expectations change in ways that will make their jobs disappear.

Why is it that the most profitable medium in the world has become a wasteland for the human beings working inside it? It comes down to a divide within games that’s getting wider by the second. On one side you have people that see games as a product to be consumed by an audience that just wants to have parts of their brains poked in ways that feel good. Like the guy in The Matrix who betrays his human friends in order to eat delicious virtual steak forever, this side of the industry doesn’t care about people, art, or meaning. Many of them would actually prefer it if games were made by generative AI instead of living people because that way, there’s no potential for human thought or feeling to accidentally get into the game. Instead, everything in the game is designed to satisfy the user. Only their thoughts and feelings matter. It starts with calls to cut politics, diversity, and inclusivity out of games. It ends with games created solely from AI prompts, where players have their own ideas beamed back into their brains, like a toddler that got into a bag of sugar, ate the bag, vomited it up, then ate their own sugar-vomit just because it tasted sweet. 

This anti-people side of gaming doesn’t see a problem with laying off the director of Marvel Rivals despite the game being massively successful. It doesn’t take issue with generative AI news bots replacing real games reporters. This anti-people side of gaming is the reason why the industry is a minefield right now, and if it becomes a dominant power anywhere for any length of time, it could render gaming unrecognizable at best and uninhabitable at worst.

The Humanity

On the other side of the divide, there are people who see games as the best way to get to know another person without actually meeting them. Like a proverbial broadcast of another mind’s dreams, they see games as a way to access the strengths of every other artistic medium and infuse them with a level of interactivity usually reserved for actual person-to-person interactions. What if a painting could talk to you or if dancing to your favorite song added new instruments to the arrangement based on your movements? What if books could laugh with you as you go on silly, unplanned tangents, you and the author finishing each other’s sentences, as new pages based on your conversation suddenly fill the back of the binding before your eyes, right after the “Thank You for Playing!” text spills out on the page in genuine appreciation for your collaboration?

That’s how many of us felt the first time we played EarthBound, or Undertale, or the countless other pro-social “art games” that have been out on the market for the last 50 years or so. But after peaking in the mid-2010s (at least in terms of fame and fortune), the movement behind these progressive, humanistic experiments has grown increasingly splintered. While the anti-human side of games has solidified into a tech-bro-led wall of airbrushed slop, the pro-human side is increasingly distant from headlines, mainstream hits, or other markers of wider relevance. Oftentimes, they are content to stay in their respective bubbles, as far away from big names and harassment campaigns as they can get.

That said, a few faces are still pushing pro-art, pro-people gaming to the forefront. Max Krieger, creator of the turn-of-the-millennium-styled puzzle game Crossniq+, has recently resumed his dreamy Aqualounge.tv streams, curating games that belong in a museum but feel like they’re in an aquarium. His mission statement for the series, which broadcasts every Monday at 7 pm EST, is explicitly for the “post-gaming” age. In other words, gamers may not be dead, but they aren’t the future anymore. Their role in the industry has been cemented, while the future of the medium remains fluid and full of possibility. 

Then there’s Andy Robertson, lead developer of a new app called Ludocene, which aims to gamify the very act of discovering games. Currently on Kickstarter, the plan for the service is to function like a dating app, but to connect you with games you’d be compatible with, as recommended by some of the most empathetic and discerning eyes in the industry. The promise of automating previously organic pursuits like “reading video game reviews” is incredibly appealing to the “take human opinions out of my game criticism” crowd, but the way Ludocene does it, there’s still a semi-secret army of real people powering the relationships behind the project. If it ends up being a hit, it may help gamers maintain their connection to humanity in a future that’s more and more interested in polishing it out of existence.

As for actual games, there are thankfully plenty of titles out there making money that are explicitly for people, by people, and about people, warts and all. Mouthwashing, the existential horror darling of late 2024, recently reported out on selling 500,000 copies. That’s enough to tank your average AAA title, but more than enough to keep a small studio of passionate weirdos in business. 1000xResist, first released in early 2024, also reported that it had its best ever day of sales on New Year’s Day of 2025. Seeing a game about racism, pandemics, and cultural revolution have those kinds of legs amid an ever-growing horde of generative AI fantasy sex-bot games does a body good.  It’s also fantastic to see the kaleidoscope of sexy, soft-but-not-weak hotties in Spirit Swap, the new romantic puzzle game from the aptly named Soft Not Weak LLC game studio, finally make a splash. While sales figures for the game are yet to be posted, the fan base is as passionate as they come, as confirmed by the sudden sale of 75 cheeked-up frog spirit plushes by one sweetheart backer, forcing the big booty amphibians to life.

So, the people who love games because games are made by people are out there, and they are trying to make things better. Now, it’s just a matter of if we can support each other, despite our different niches, and unite around a common goal – to keep gaming human.