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2021, a gloomy year for video games

2021-12-30T16:34:17.240Z


The release schedule has been turned upside down by the difficulties caused by the switch to telecommuting in production studios.


In 2020, video games took full advantage of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Locked in their homes, the families turned to gaming for entertainment, to meet their friends online, and to take a break.

A year later, the Covid-19 continues to have an impact on this industry.

But this time it is negative.

The stock market prices of the giants of the sector illustrate this gloomy year: -50% in 2021 for Ubisoft, -25% for Activision-Blizzard, -20% for Nintendo, -10% for Take-Two, -5% for EA. The same recorded stock market growth of 20 to 50% in 2020.

Deconfined players have not put their consoles in the attic. But they had far fewer big games to eat. And for good reason: the massive switch to teleworking, imposed by the health situation, represented a real challenge in production studios used to collaborative work on site. Less fluid communications, more complex integration of new recruits ... these obstacles have slowed down the work processes of these companies. They had no choice but to postpone the release of their games.

The producer of the role-playing game

Final Fantasy XVI

(Square-Enix) has thus revealed that the development of this highly anticipated title had taken six months of delay because of teleworking.

This hampered the communication of the Tokyo teams and, in turn, led to delays or even cancellations of work carried out by our external partners,

” explains Naoki Yoshida.

It is also difficult not to see the trace of these difficulties in the games

Battlefield 2042

(EA) and

GTA The Trilogy

(Take-Two).

They were able to go out on the market ... but crippled by bugs that aroused the anger of buyers.

Blockbusters with absent subscribers

The video game release schedule has been so messed up that blockbusters have become scarce in 2021. Of the ten best-selling video games this year in the UK, only four were released in 2021 ... (

Fifa 22, Super Mario World 3D

, and the latest

Call of Duty

and

Pokémon

).

This sparse landscape has made it possible for much smaller budget games to gain

attention

:

It Takes Two

,

Returnal

and Valheim are among the surprises of the year.

Read alsoVideo game: Valheim, the surprise success of the start of the year

However, this slump did not affect publishers' revenues too much. New products are no longer the central pillar of their economic model. The commercial lifespan of video games has greatly increased over the past five years thanks to digitization. Online games, like

Fortnite

(Epic Games),

Overwatch

(Activision-Blizzard),

Rainbow Six Siege

(Ubisoft) or

GTA Online

(Take-Two), captivate their fans with the regular addition of new content and push them to buy options.

And thanks to shopping platforms like PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store or Steam, publishers can continue to sell their games from previous years at reduced prices.

What we call the “back catalog” today represents more than half of the revenues of major publishers.

Resumption of major releases in 2022

The gaming market has also suffered from insufficient stocks of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. These latest generation platforms, released in November 2020, are hit hard by the global semiconductor shortage. While copies regularly leave Asian factories, their volumes do not meet consumer demand. It is almost impossible to find these consoles in stores. And the restockings of e-commerce sites are exhausted just a few minutes after they go online.

This situation dragged down the American market. While the month of November, driven by Black Friday, the prospect of Christmas and the release of blockbusters, is usually flourishing, this year it posted a decline of -10% compared to November 2020. This decrease is due to shortages of new generation consoles, sales of which fell by 38%. Over the whole of 2021, the American gaming market grew by 9%, against 22% a year earlier. We will have to wait until the first quarter of 2022 to know the figures for the French market.

While the console shortage isn't expected to improve anytime soon, the outlook for 2022 looks brighter on the game release front.

Many projects shifted to 2021 will see the light of day in the coming months:

Elden Ring

(Bandai Namco),

Horizons Forbidden West

(Sony),

God of War Ragnarok

(Sony),

Starfield

(Microsoft), the sequel to

Zelda Breath of the Wild

( Nintendo), the PlayStation 5 version of

GTA V

... But, as long as the health situation has not returned to normal, players will not be immune to further postponements.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-12-30

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