No, it’s a combo of a post-covid slump in spend, western markets becoming saturated and an assumption from the majority of industry that wouldn’t happen. Essentially games revenue has grown incredibly over the past twenty years and it’s now crunched to a halt.

Then layer in some incredibly bad bets like Game Pass for XBox and audience tastes shifting away from splashy big budget releases making them an “inevitable” success. It’s left middle aged execs heads in a twist.

In a broader view discoverability is the big problem for everyone. People are hoping in the short term that reducing budgets and scope will save things but all that will do is make the discoverability problem worse. So everyone’s hot under the collar for codev, offshoring, “the Hollywood model*” and so on without looking at the downstream effects of everyone doing that.

AI has largely impacted games by sucking all the available money away and the discoverability problem has made what little is left extremely conservative.

* - This has been a thing for at least three decades now in games despite the obvious collapse of this model and Hollywood.