2024 has been a year of incredible videogames. It's also been bloody: just like 2023 before it, there have been thousands of layoffs, dozens of studio closures, failures from companies that we once assumed were too big to fail. GameStop shut down Game Informer, the only other surviving gaming magazine in the US, as its CEO honed his corporate strategy to tweeting "TRUMP" 700 times in a row. Elon Musk threw in with the "games are too woke" crowd. As I reflect on the year and try to hold those two thoughts in my head—it's been another great year for games, and another terrible year for the games industry—another more nebulous one is floating around the edges, harder to fully grasp.
I've never seen so many people more frequently, loudly express some version of the same core feeling: 'The system is broken.'
