At 50, the video game industry is grappling with her sense of self

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Earlier this month, as Tokyo was distracted by the Olympics, one of the city’s most popular arcades silently announced its final closure. The Sega GiGO, nine floors of entertainment in the Ikebukuro neighborhood for nearly three decades, has disappeared.

A great hiccup of genius pain is, perhaps, not the most auspicious way for the global video game industry to celebrate its 50th year. Commercial video games, unlike the various tinkers going on in universities in the 1950s and 1960s, are now half a century old. Slightly younger than snowboarding and man’s first step on the moon, slightly older than Post-it notes and the answering machine.

The path that led to the industry becoming a leviathan with $ 178 billion in annual revenue and three billion regular players has been a bumpy one. Technological innovation invariably is, although with games this is especially true.

In 1971, Nutting Associates’ Computer Space, an arcade game built in a fiberglass cabinet and marketed with lightly clad models, broke the dam. A flooded industry, almost completely formed and as if it had always belonged. In six years, Atari has released a home console that has sold 30 million units. By 12, Nintendo released one that sold 61 million.

While some aspects of the gaming business seem boldly innovative, some seem rent-seeking and coldly exploitative

When I first visited the Sega GiGO arcade in the mid-90s, as games were reaching their quarter-century, it was to find that branch of technology in a moment of electrifying and absurd security. The games were the supposed heir to global entertainment, looking forward to the formal coronation surely to come. Another quarter century later, what kind of fifty-year-old has the video game industry become?

The “golden ages” have been declared at various times at different times in the game’s history, but while the business has clearly been boosted by the pandemic and the ability to surprise and delight remains endless, it’s not obvious we’re in one now. .

As with other mature creative industries, some parts feel saggy and out of shape. Others look muscular and hyper-flexed. While some aspects of the gaming business seem boldly innovative, others seem rent-seeking and coldly exploitative.

In early August, when an article in Chinese state media accused the gaming industry of becoming a “spiritual opium,” the revelation wasn’t so much Beijing’s thinking or even the immediate impact on some quotes. shares, but the painful shrug with which the 50-year-old seemed to admit: “Yes, maybe.”

The past has a strange way of catching up with the gaming industry, as it did with others who reached a certain age in the early 21st century. Within just two years of Computer Space, and on its way to world fame, Atari released a kissing chase arcade game whose controllers were pink rubber domes meant to represent breasts. A madness of industrial immaturity, perhaps, but 48 years later a separate company, Activision Blizzard, is being sued by the state of California in a lawsuit accusing years of harassment and abuse of female staff.

The lawsuit follows a two-year investigation into the “frat boy” culture at Activision Blizzard by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, and opens with the claim that “sexism has plagued the male-dominated industry. for decades “. Activision Blizzard said it is committed to lasting change and that there is no room in the company for discrimination, harassment or unequal treatment of any kind.

These allegations do not seem isolated: a year earlier, in France, Ubisoft had been forced to an executive eviction amid allegations of “toxic behavior”. Female executives of several Japanese gaming companies describe relentless sexism, but they don’t expect such redress. Even highly decorated independent studios, the industry’s petty authors, are not immune to toxic work cultures.

Closing Sega’s GiGO arcade and admitting changing times is a good thing, once the tears of nostalgia have dried. Sega today manages 80% fewer Japanese arcades than when it opened the Ikebukuro flagship because the industry, at 50, remains the one that knows both how its customers change and how to get rich. If governments decide they don’t like what they see and if staff decide they don’t like who’s working, the next question might be what the midlife crisis of a $ 178 billion industry looks like.

Leo Lewis is FT’s business editor for Asia

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