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This is going to shift the pendulum back towards "trusted" "publishers" and stuff, where there is some sort of quality gate. Most of this flood of games is going to be games that nobody wants to play.
This implies that the publishers themselves are trusted and that the trust people place in them is being maintained. That is not the market I observe from the inside. AAA gaming seems like a dumpster fire at the moment, having arrived at a place similar to the film industry where they're actively generating anti-fandoms collectively rooting for their failure, but without the film industry's institutional moat and diversification to protect them from the consequences. There have been a lot of bombs lately, and studios, even major studios, often don't survive them. Major publishers are frequently loathed by the player-base. The studios and publishers with considerable good will are generally in the indie space or increasingly lonely titans like Rockstar, which is so lonely because those titans can and do die: Blizzard and Bungie, two of the most successful companies the space has ever seen, are arguably toast at this point. Most AAA studios appear incapable of controlling costs to anything resembling a reasonable level, so one bomb kills most of them and a second bomb kills most of the rest. Further, both workers and leadership are, from my perspective, pathologically averse to solutions to any of these problems. They'd rather unionize, blame the audience, virtue signal ideology, retreat into a bubble of toxic positivity, anything other than engage with the fact that their whole segment of the industry is a horror show at the moment.
It seems to me that the success stories follow a pattern: keeping costs low, teams small, find an audience and engage with them heavily, make the game they want as simply and quickly and responsively as possible. Alternatively, make something simple and coherent with a very small team and hope to get lucky, offsetting the risk of the gamble with pure passion. I think this latter class is already pretty large and is just going to keep growing as barriers to entry vanish. I think they're going to saturate the market, and that's going to have cascading effects on the far more leveraged-up end of the industry. Quality will rise to the top, and at some point there's so much of it that the audience dilutes and fragments, and the old business patterns become unsustainable.
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People have been saying that since Unity first came out. It won't. We have user reviews, no one needs """trusted""" publishers.
And more than just user reviews, you have the ability to look at Twitch or Youtube and watch someone play the game and get a feel for whether it's good and matches your interests.
For all the back and forth about games journalism, I think this was the real devastation to the industry: if you're interested in a game it's far better to actually look at gameplay than to see a X/10 score or a writeup of someone else's experience, and the barrier to entry is so low that you can pick and choose people who are actually good at the game and are choosing to play interesting games rather than terrible ones.
Sponsored streams can get a game exposure but the gameplay has to pass the gate of looking enjoyable, and a streamer who spends too much of their time on sponsored bad games will likely lose chunks of their audience (or the audience will just skip the sponsored videos/timeslots)
Gaming journalism also had a problem with fairly consistently giving high scores to games audiences didn't like. You see it occasionally in film with divergence between critic and audience scores (The Last Jedi was well received by critics), but games are longer than movies and sometimes it was clear the reviewers hadn't played much of the game at all.
Or, alternatively, they simply don’t like or play the genre well enough to engage with a game, à la the infamous Cuphead review.
Yeah, probably a few things here:
The streamers that replace them have none of these problems: audience-driven financials can do weird things to political streamers but seem to work fine for gaming ones, they can spend as much or as little time as they want on a game, and they're under constant competitive pressure to provide a competent experience and align with their audience. They can be bought, but when they've got a steady stream of content and there's suddenly a sharp divergence in what they're doing, it's pretty easy to tell when they're being bought, and they can't really stop their audience from switching to another creator, either just skipping the bought content or permanently dropping them.
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