GTA 6's delay doesn't mean the games industry's in trouble - it's already dead

I saw someone, somewhere, saying something like this recently: it's always easier to play the role of doomsayer than the optimist, because far fewer people seem to care if you're wrong when you're predicting something will fail.

I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but in writing this one it is undoubtedly at the back of my mind. This is because I think the video games industry - that is, the established order of massive, western developer-publishers, each making multiple games that cost hundreds of millions and employing developers in the thousands - isn't just in big trouble, now that GTA 6 has been unsurprisingly delayed to mid-2026. I think it's finished. The games industry as we know it is dead; it just doesn't know it yet.

The past week has been another brutal reminder. EA has joined in the fun of major layoffs, in obliterating the positions of more than 300 people and cancelling yet another project in the brilliant, dreadfully cursed Titanfall franchise, as well as parking the beloved WRC series at Codemasters. At the same time, Fandom, the wiki farm owner of games media icon Giant Bomb, has seen major staff departures over feckless ownership meddling. And Polygon, which housed many of our friends and peers (including Eurogamer alumni Matt Reynolds and Oli Welsh), has just been sold by Vox and immediately gutted by Valnet, in a scandalous exchange. All of this senseless bloodletting continues, either implicitly or explicitly, in the name of yet more sacrifices upon the great altar of eternal growth.

It's tempting to label these latest casualties as just another case of this industry's continuing penchant for idiotic, MBA-fuelled foot-shooting, but there is also more going on here. As former games journalist Alanah Pierce pointed out in a recent, widely shared video, they are happening, yes, because video games have stopped rapidly expanding their audiences and instead become, in investor terms, a "mature" industry.

But also more astutely because of two other reasons: first, that those investors are taking their money to other, more speculative realms such as AI (which adds to the claims we reported that Muse is at least partially a shareholder play for more investment in Xbox). And second, that video games aren't just capping out their audience because there are no more people in the world to play them, but because those people are now spending extraordinary amounts of time watching short, exceptionally addictive videos on social media.