In the last piece I argued that intentional design produces dimensionality, and that Soul Reaver and Shadow of the Colossus were proof of that in opposite directions. Part Two is what happens when the people running the industry stop believing in the principle.

A full quarter century has passed since Soul Reaver, and the medium has changed in ways its developers couldn't have imagined. We've gone from low-poly meshes to photorealism, from local multiplayer to global servers, from sprawling worlds we had to imagine to sprawling worlds rendered in microscopic detail. Along the way, the industry built itself into something massive, profitable, and structurally incapable of slowing down.

That's where we are now. The companies leading the industry have spent the last decade chasing data instead of trusting craft, and the financial collapse we're watching unfold is downstream of a creative collapse that came first. When you stop making intentional decisions, you stop making things people actually want, and eventually the spreadsheets catch up.

Let me show you what I mean.

In October of 2024, Nintendo released a smart alarm clock called the Alarmo. It plays sounds from their games when you wake up, and it costs $99.99. The following summer, the Switch 2 launched at $449.99, and Mario Kart World launched alongside it for $79.99, marking the first eighty-dollar first-party game from any major publisher.

There is no craft argument for any of this pricing. The Alarmo is, by every review I've read, a fine little gadget priced at three to four times what a comparable smart clock would cost. Mario Kart World is, by all reports, a perfectly good Mario Kart, priced twenty dollars above the franchise norm because Nintendo has decided their goodwill can absorb the increase. The pricing isn't tied to what the products are. It's tied to what Nintendo thinks they can extract.

This is what greed without craft looks like. The decisions don't follow from the work. They follow from a model that says fans will pay anything, so charge anything. The company has been loud about losing market share and missing expectations, while seemingly unable to connect those facts to its own pricing strategy.

In roughly the same window, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Both got strong reviews. Both sold millions. Both, according to the company's own May 2024 financial briefing, missed Square's profit expectations. The Square Enix president attributed this in part to "cannibalization" between their own titles, which is a polite corporate way of saying they shipped two enormous Final Fantasy games eight months apart on a single console and were surprised that some buyers picked one over the other.

That same window saw Square ship Foamstars, a live-service shooter no one asked for, and pursue a much-mocked NFT strategy that aged about as well as anything in tech could age. The flagship work continues to be excellent. The company strategy has been to bet on whatever the industry told them was hot next, and the industry was wrong about most of it.

Chasing trends is its own form of abandoning craft. It's the assumption that the next thing is more important than the thing you actually know how to make. It's how a publisher with one of the most beloved catalogues in gaming ends up apologizing to investors for shipping good games.

Ubisoft is the most painful of the three to write about, because they used to be a studio I respected. Assassin's Creed Unity remains my favorite in the franchise, even with its catastrophic launch, because somewhere underneath the bugs was a real attempt at a city. The studio that made that game does not exist in the same form anymore.

In May 2025, Ubisoft reported a 159-million-euro loss on the fiscal year, with net bookings down 20.5%. Their stock has lost roughly 60% of its value over twelve months. Star Wars Outlaws underperformed, XDefiant was canceled, and the company delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows twice before betting the year on its launch. Shadows posted the second-best day-one sales in franchise history when it finally arrived, and it still wasn't enough to save the books. There's now a Tencent deal in motion to address the debt.

The pattern at Ubisoft has been scope without intention. Bigger maps, longer campaigns, more towers to climb, more icons to clear. Odyssey and Valhalla each pushing past 100 hours of content because the metric was hours-played rather than experience-delivered. None of that scale was answering a design question. It was answering a spreadsheet question. When the spreadsheet question changed, there was no design question to fall back on.

There's one more thread worth naming, because it cuts across all three of these stories. The industry has spent the last several years listening, with increasing attentiveness, to the loudest and most reactive voices in its audience. Some of that listening goes through focus groups. Some of it goes through whichever YouTube or Reddit comment section gets the most clicks that week. Either way, the result is the same: companies trying to make games that won't offend anyone instead of games that intend something.

This is how you end up with a generation of gamers who genuinely believe that turn-based combat is antithetical to fun, that anything with an anime aesthetic is suspect, that "woke" is a meaningful design critique. None of those positions are interesting. All of them get repeated because the people who hold them are loud, and the people listening at the top of these companies have lost the nerve to ignore them.

Trusting craft means making decisions some people will hate. Chasing data means making decisions no one will love.

Put it all together and you get an industry that's been creatively bankrupt for years and is now becoming financially bankrupt to match. Painting by numbers, chasing trends, automating development through compartmentalization, treating worlds as content delivery systems instead of designed spaces. Each of these is a way of refusing to make a decision, and the result is a wave of products that took enormous time and money to produce and somehow still feel like nothing in particular.

This was always going to happen. You can't run an art form on metrics for two decades and act surprised when the work stops resonating. Audiences can tell when a thing has been weighed against an intention and when it's just been assembled. They might not articulate it that way, but they'll vote with their wallets either way, and they have been.

Not all of it is collapse. While the major studios have been busy losing the plot, a generation of indie and AA developers have been making the games their employers wouldn't let them make. Balatro, a single-developer card game built around one elegant mechanical idea, became one of 2024's defining hits. Sandfall Interactive, founded by a developer who left Ubisoft to chase a project he couldn't make there, released a turn-based RPG in April of 2025 that has now sold more than eight million copies and swept Game of the Year at every awards ceremony that gives one out.

The principles are just not where the money used to be. They're where the money is going. Audiences can still tell the difference between a thing made on purpose and a thing made by committee.

That's where we'll pick up next, with the game that proved it.