This article is very questionable. > When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it’s been this way for some time

This article is very questionable. > When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it’s been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years... I guess the constantly growing addressable market just doesn't matter? The human cost has nothing to do with price points or gamer expectations and everything to do with supply and demand. Lots of people want to make games. Developers/publishers take advantage. > you’ll get a stark—if unscientific—picture of how each big publisher’s release slate has thinned out in the last five years, relying on recurring cash cows like sports games and annualized franchises and little else. In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions. Yeah, because the big publishers _aren't needed_. The tooling a platform like Steam provides has made it much easier to self-publish, or use a small-time publisher instead - your game doesn't need to be on retail shelves to be successful anymore, there's tons of free marking channels available today, all of which combine to make publishers less necessary. > The foremost takeaway is that while data centers are growing in number, their energy consumption is starting to plateau out of necessity, as the dramatic increase in cloud computing has actually forced tech companies to become more efficient. This has literally nothing to do with gaming or its sustainability. As the computing/electronics industry moves in more efficient or green directions, gaming hardware (not even the game industry) will follow. There's problems with the game industry - gambling mechanics, exploitation of "whales", discovery/marketing/shovelwear, how to handle growing international audiences, and so on, but I don't see any of these mentioned in the article.