In a 2024 argument about the video game industry’s upheaval, Polygon’s Chris Plante proposed two changes: give independent studios more durable funding and business support, and encourage major publishers to make smaller, more varied games instead of treating every release as a bid for market dominance. These are proposals, not proven fixes—but they offer a useful way to think about how studios might plan differently.
Why Plante says the industry needs to change
Plante’s diagnosis is that game supply has expanded faster than studios’ ability to adapt. Digital distribution made publishing more accessible, but it also crowded the market and made audience attention harder to win. He argues that large publishers responded by competing through greater scale and realism, creating a cycle in which bigger development budgets raise financial risk and sales expectations, which in turn encourage bigger marketing commitments and still higher costs.
That is Plante’s interpretation of the market, not a measured finding that applies uniformly to every studio. The pressure on smaller developers was visible in contemporaneous reporting: WIRED’s July 11, 2024 coverage described independent studios struggling to find funding or work, alongside closures and developers’ concerns that lost opportunities also mean losing the chance to make and learn from future projects. Those accounts document real difficulties, not conditions shared by every team.
First: give independent studios capital and business support
Plante’s first proposal is to make indie development more sustainable through a combination of funding, business knowledge, and mentorship. He points to Outersloth, an initiative from Among Us developer Innersloth, as an example of indie funding, describing its approach as “recoup and share.” That example does not eliminate commercial risk: a recoupment model depends on a game earning enough to repay investment. Current application status and exact terms are not established here, so prospective applicants should consult official information rather than assume eligibility, funding amounts, or revenue-share terms.
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Plante’s broader point is that financing alone may not be enough. He argues for more training and mentorship in business operations, and for game-development degree programs to include business education. These are recommendations, not proven curricular requirements. But they address a practical gap: making a game is only part of running a studio, which also has to plan its costs, manage production, and make decisions about commercial risk.
Second: make AAA portfolios smaller and more diverse
For major publishers, Plante argues against assuming that past dominance can be regained by making each release larger. His alternative is a portfolio with more smaller releases, a greater mix of projects, fresh intellectual property, and games designed for underserved audiences. The proposal is not a universal budget target or a demonstrated formula for higher returns; it is a call to spread risk and compete in a crowded market rather than relying on a few increasingly costly bets.
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When assessing a publisher’s strategy, the useful questions are how its production budgets and schedules compare across projects, how concentrated its portfolio is, how much it relies on established franchises versus new IP, which audiences it serves, and how it balances launch risk with ongoing support. Those are analytical lenses, not metrics Plante quantifies or a claim that one mix will outperform another.
What the 2024 examples do—and do not—show
The article’s layoffs figures belong to its 2024 context: it reported more than 10,000 video-game industry layoffs in 2023 and said the same threshold was reached in less than six months in 2024. The accessible article does not provide the underlying counting method, so these should be understood as figures reported by the article, not audited official totals or current measurements.
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Square Enix provides a separate historical example of market pressure. Bloomberg reported that the company’s shares fell 16% on May 14, 2024, after its president said sales of recent big-budget games had disappointed and that a reorganization would take years to show results. That records a company’s outlook and a market reaction at that time; it does not establish current performance or prove that any particular portfolio strategy caused the result. Plante’s article also described Final Fantasy VII Rebirth as the fourth-best-selling U.S. game of the year as of May 2024, but that ranking was not independently confirmed in the sources cited here.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why these proposals are not a guaranteed rescue
Studios of different sizes face different constraints. A smaller team may need patient capital and operational guidance; a major publisher may have the resources to diversify but still face uncertainty about which projects audiences will support. Funding cannot guarantee that a game will recoup its investment, and smaller releases are not automatically less risky or more successful. Plante’s proposals are best read as directions for experimentation: improve how independent studios are financed and managed, and give large publishers more ways to succeed than betting on ever-bigger releases.
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WIRED quoted Strange Scaffold studio head Xalavier Nelson warning that the industry’s problems may be rooted in how games are made, not simply in a temporary downturn: “Unless we start planting differently, unless we start changing the way we work and think about making games, then we’re going to continue to see the highest highs and the lowest lows that games has ever seen. And it might, in fact, just get worse.” The quote captures the case for planning differently, while leaving open which changes will work for which studios.
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