I would argue the market for every kind of game is expanding. There’s a bigger market for Tetris now than there was in 1987, in terms of actual economic resources that could go into making Tetris profitably.

The Tetris market is a smaller percentage share of the overall gaming market, but in absolute terms it’s more money than it was in 1987.

That’s my suspicion at least.

Then the challenge is connecting that market slice with the dev shop that wants to serve that market slice. Which isn’t trivial. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind.

Every market is getting bigger, based on at least these four factors:

More cultural acceptance of gaming
Higher percentage of humanity achieving economic status where leisure becomes relevant
Proliferation of technology to greater portion of humanity
Expansion of human population

All markets are growing.

Heck, the market for COBOL programmers is larger today than ever before. That’s really interesting if you think about it.

[–] setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

“What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.

Season passes, microtransactions, and DLCs. Additionally creating brand recognition among the masses along with flashy trailers. These are all reasons that AAA behemoths are still banked on to make huge net profits.

Sometimes these massive games fail and lose money in spectacular ways, but it happens a lot less than us enlightened good taste gamers would like to imagine. Money gets shoveled into creatively safe massive games because they usually make a huge profit. I love say, Wasteland 2, but that game probably has made less money in its entire life than the newest Fifa game made in a week.