2023's great games were a backdrop for industry failure | Opinion

15.12.2023 - 13:25 / gamesindustry.biz / Tim Sweeney

It feels somewhat appropriate that probably the last big news story of 2023 is the final death knell of an industry institution. E3 is no more.

After limping on in various forms for the past five years, before finally seeing its latest incarnation cancelled outright in May, the decision of the ESA to walk away from the show it created will come as no shock to anyone – but as is tradition at any wake, most commemoration of E3 has been about the good times, rather than about the distinctly rough later years.

It was unquestionably time for the event to die – there is a strong argument to be made that the very format of the show itself echoed the industry's roots in consumer electronics rather than its present status as an important media and entertainment industry, for one thing, and advances in video streaming and digital distribution made the cost of the show to all parties involved increasingly hard to justify.

Still, it was an institution of the industry for decades; its fall is the end of an era.

It's been the year for that, though, hasn't it? There's been a somewhat cataclysmic feeling in the air as week after week after week, companies across the spectrum of the industry – from the largest to the smallest, from the most successful to the most troubled – announced layoffs that in some cases amounted to a double-digit percentage of their staff being made unemployed.

This is by far the most important story of 2023 – not Microsoft's deep pockets or Tim Sweeney finally getting a court to agree with him on something, but the layoffs that have by conservative estimates now impacted well over 6,000 people across the industry. Other estimates are even higher (over 10,000), and at some companies it's clear that the bloodletting hasn't yet finished.

While we all hope that 2024 will be better on this front, it's unlikely that the ringing in of a new year will bring down the curtain on the spectacle of mass layoffs.

To add insult to injury, these layoffs were happening against the backdrop of one of the most extraordinary years for high-quality game launches. Almost every highly-anticipated title this year hit its mark (with some unfortunate exceptions, granted), and many of them exceeded it, both critically and commercially.

Much of that quality can probably be attributed to the fact that 2023 was the year in which games that had been held back by the pandemic finally arrived – fairly compelling evidence for the case that modern development cycles have become over-pressured, with the external pressures of the COVID era effectively creating some breathing room in that process that has been reflected in a year of really great games.

It's worrying, to say the least, that companies whose entire future