Back in the 80’s, Atari had a monopoly of games and charged absurd amounts of money for titles that pretty much had no quality control. The cost of each cartridge would easily go over $100 in today’s money and gamers began to pull back on purchasing anything. This eventually culminated in the infamous E.T. movie tie in that led to pallets of its unsold cartridges ending up in a landfill and crashing the industry.
Now that Nintendo’s signaled to the rest of the industry it’s okay to sell digital titles at $80 each, how soon do you see gamers collectively hold back on their purchases that will eventually collapse the AAA market? Will the current trade war play a role in the hardware side of things with the collapse? Will all major companies save Nintendo suffer the downturn?
Just a correction, AAA games aren’t less common. We are getting more and more indies, but we are also getting more AAA games than ever. It’s possible that percentage of AAA games compared to indie games has changed, but that is because of increased indie output.
Don’t have any official stats, but as someone who keeps an eye on upcoming games, there are tons of AAA games coming out pretty much every year.
What I mean is that they are trending towards being a smaller part of the overall market year over year.