The following story is spun out of an episode of the Hit The Limit Break podcast. The interview has been edited for concise reading. For the full conversation, check out the video below.
You can also find the interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Pocket Casts.
It isn’t the end of video games, but it sometimes can feel like it is because the stakes have never been higher. This was a sentiment expressed by Obsidian Entertainment studio head Feargus Urquhart in Hit The Limit Break’s very first interview, and it’s one echoed by Circana’s gaming industry analyst Mat Piscatella.
“What we're seeing now is impacting so many more people than it did way, way back in the early 80s,” says Piscatella. “You have just about three out of every four people in the US play video games of some kind. We have far more developers than we've ever had before, we have far more games coming out than we ever have before.”
While these last few years, industry wide, have been devastating, Piscatella has his fingers crossed that 2025 will turn a corner thanks to two key factors: the releases of Grand Theft Auto VI and the Nintendo Switch console. The former will, in theory, boost console sales, with many gamers finally making the jump to the latest generation of consoles, while the latter could potentially boost sales of third party software thanks to it seemingly being a far more capable machine than Nintendo’s current hybrid device.
“If those two things do happen this year, and they do meet the expectations going into this year, I think you're looking at low to mid single digit percentage growth in overall market spending on video game products,” says Piscatella. “Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it would result in record spending on the consumer side. It would get the industry back to growth over that 2021 peak that we'd previously seen. And most importantly, I think, and a little bit of a thing not a lot of folks may be thinking about, is it gets investment flowing back into the game space.”
The original Nintendo Switch kickstarted a handheld boom, with more players looking to game on the go now that the technology had, relatively, caught up to home consoles. Numerous PC hardware developers are in an arms race to see which can design the portable handheld to rule them all, and the two other major console manufacturers are both rumored to be working on similar devices.
While many suspect that if Sony were to build a handheld PlayStation, it would be a companion piece to the company’s console that lives on your TV stand, Piscatella envisions a world that, like with Nintendo, they’re one and the same. “I think it would. I know nothing about it, I have no idea, but I think that you have to look at that hybrid model,” says Piscatella. “I'd be surprised if we had a box for the TV and a portable version, but hey, who knows? We could.”
Circling back to GTA VI, Piscatella speculates on the success of the highly anticipated game, and whether it can live up to such lofty expectations. Can the title carve out a huge enough chunk for itself in a very crowded market? Piscatella believes that the biggest hurdle in the way of GTA VI is Grand Theft Auto V. “I think the biggest challenge is that very embedded and dedicated Grand Theft Auto V player base; how do you transition them over into GTA VI? And I'm sure they have spent a considerable time working out this problem and have it figured out,” says Piscatella.
The impacts of GTA VI and the Nintendo Switch on the marketplace, the future of handheld consoles. These are questions that many have already considered. So Mat shared what he felt was an area that most people are overlooking when it comes to industry analysis. “I think what we're missing is the opportunity in areas of the world that have not had as developed a gaming market leading up to now,” says Piscatella.
“There's only a couple of folks tracking some of these territories. But there are significant opportunities in other parts of the world that we generally don't think about. We don't think about it on the publisher side as much as we should. We don't think about it on the research side. We don't think about it on the media side.
“China, Brazil, India; some of these territories that are big and continue to grow, that's where the real global opportunity for growth lies. And that's what's going to help continue to fuel development in parts of the world that have a more developed video game market.”
For more from our conversation with Mat Piscatella, please watch the full episode of Hit the Limit Break. Also, consider donating to help build the Limit Break Network into a video game outlet for the future (more details in our FAQ)!
Comments