At DevGAMM Lisbon in November, Alexandre Amancio gave a presentation entitled ‘From AAA to Ashes: Why the Future Belongs to the Bold’. He didn’t mince his words in the talk’s description: “After a decade of over-expansion, studio bloat, and risk-averse thinking, we’re now living through the fallout: mass layoffs, creative stagnation, and a growing disconnect between developers and the games they make. Somewhere along the way, we stopped chasing greatness and started chasing metrics. We prioritized politics over craft, comfort over challenge, and content pipelines over originality. In sum: the Western games industry is in crisis.”
