With regular news of layoffs dominating the headlines while game developers commiserate over anxieties around the future of both the industry and America, it can be easy to succumb to doom and gloom. But things don’t just end. Call it optimism or delusion, but there’s hope to be found in the simple fact that there will be a future. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
This time around, we’re joined by Samantha Kalman, a game developer who’s worked on everything from experimental indies to Apex Legends, to discuss her very cool-looking new game, Verses: Hyper-Kinetic Aerial Joust, and the fraught industry climate surrounding it. What does it mean that even somebody with such a proven track record has been nonetheless unable to secure funding via traditional channels? And can a Patreon, a podcast, and a dream really keep an inventive idea afloat in such choppy waters?
More broadly, what will the games industry—or games industries, considering how many different types of games there are—look like when it rises from the ashes of this increasingly unstable moment? Questions far outnumber answers, but nobody could’ve predicted that games as we know them now would emerge from the industry crash of 1983, so some kind of future awaits us. Also, Samantha tells us about a truly wild Mega Man novelization in which the blue bomber becomes a real boy.
You can find this week’s episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can one day write our own Mega Man novelization in which he turns back into a robot (genre: body horror).
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Samantha: If the video game industry is a popularity industry—of people wanting to make games because it’s cool to make games—we may lose that. But remember that the industry’s also gone through many rebirths. We went from computers to consoles. We went from cartridges to CD-ROMS. We went from offline to online. We went from non-mobile to mobile. All of these tentpoles altered the industry forever—changed everything. This moment of generative AI and tooling is also doing that. If you think that nobody lost their jobs as a result of shifting from cartridges to CDs, you’re wrong. How many people? Probably not as many as are being affected now. So the scale of this moment is severe, and I agree with you that it is not sustainable.
What to say? If you have free time or if you have a creative urge, find a way to scratch that itch, because we should be here to dance and play and flail about. That’s why we’re here; we’re not here to work ourselves to the grave. Finding your own personal peace in your own community and your own answers, I think, is the best thing any of us can do individually. At a macro scale, I have no idea what’s gonna happen to the business or the economy. Everything is so volatile and violent right now. It’s concerning.
This game is definitely my way of pushing back and trying to present a more optimistic world. I’m not really talking about the story yet, but it’s there, and I think you can see it and feel it in the game and the energy that we have. So it’s also in many ways my rebellion against this moment. It’s my way of saying “This is what’s important, and I will not move, I will not budge on that.”
Nathan: I think it’s all you can do, as you were saying. Just make something, because that is within your control. Everything else is gonna happen regardless.
Samantha: We can’t control the outcomes of any of this, but we can control how we spend our time and attention.
Luke: I’m slightly more optimistic on broader future things because when you talk about things like the industry crashing in the wake of Atari, it was an industry crashing; it wasn’t video games crashing. There were other types of video games in other parts of the world that were still prospering and finding their way—that turned into classic series today that came from companies we still love today.
When we talk about the video game industry now, we sort of feel like it’s on the brink of collapse because we see negative factors impacting everywhere we look: the types of games we play and the types of companies that make those games. But there’s not really a video game industry. There’s separate video game industries where circles on the Venn diagram sometimes don’t overlap at all or only very briefly overlap in terms of tools or whatever.
Nathan: You have Steam and Roblox and live-service games and single-player games and indie games and so on.
Luke: But also in terms of funding, you have the remnants of the triple-A industry that have their own financial means… increasingly from Saudi Arabia. You have other studios where they have a loyal fanbase—these dedicated smaller scale publishers where people are like “I will always buy a game from this publisher.” You’ve got studios outside the US that are able to tap into government funding for the arts and for games.
And so when we talk about things collapsing and things being unsustainable, they are. There’s a lot of bad shit already happening, and there’s probably more to come. But the thing I’m slightly optimistic about, just like we saw in the early-to-mid ‘80s, is that as those things happen, the areas that are less affected or more nimble are able to adapt to the new circumstances and environment. And whether that’s governments across the world recognizing a greater need for funding, or whether that’s the people in charge of funding—and this is already happening—recognizing that the means of investment they were looking for in games to fund these high-risk games like Highguard, maybe you need to go back. Maybe you need to adapt a Hollywood studio model. Maybe we need to go back to the PS2 era of having a stable of games and hoping one of them’s a hit because that’s the business and investment is a risk. You can’t guarantee a return on investment, or it’s not a fucking investment. And there are an increasing number of funding companies emerging out there now—some of them as the result of indie games that have hit it big.
Nathan: Outersloth from Among Us.
Luke: Outersloth is a perfect example. But there’s actual dedicated games funds that are new and more nimble and are like “We’re gonna give you X amount of money to make a game. If it’s a success, it’s a success. If it’s not, that’s video games.” I’ll take the idea that I’m gonna fund 100 games; maybe five of them make money, and maybe one of them is the next Among Us. And that’s not great, but it’s [a means of] funding a lot of games. It’s funding some teams to make a second or third game.
There’s new ways to adapt that will look at the wreckage we’re heading towards now—slow motion, Burnout-style—and be like “Alright, that didn’t work. What is going to work for the platforms and the economic realities and the development timescales and costs of the 2020s going forward?” Is that going to mean a dwindling number of triple-A games to the point where we’re only going to see Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto and EA FC? Maybe. But are we also gonna work shit out to get more smaller games underneath that scale funded? I don’t know. I’m not a business guy; I’m not in charge of that kind of money.
I’m a history guy who knows that these cycles don’t just fall off a cliff and end. Things come out of endings, and they’re different, and we don’t know what they look like, because that’s the other thing about history: We can’t see it coming. No one watching the crash of Atari could’ve seen the Super Nintendo ten years later—or seen the Nintendo 64 or the PlayStation being a disc-based console in such a relatively short timeframe. We won’t be able to see that either. But it’ll be there. So it’s not the most optimistic take, but I also feel like it’s gonna happen. There’s gonna be some good and constructive stuff coming out of the last three or four years and the next few going forward.
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