With all the layoffs and studio closings/restructuring of the last few years, have there been any changes in higher level decision making? From, say, department leads to executives? Is AAA game making going to stabilize any time soon?

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Game development is cyclical and typically lags behind the overall economic trends by a year or two because of the development time needed to actually take a game from pitch to launch. What this means is that players have primarily been seeing the results of the "boom" expansion era of 2020-2022 finally reaching shelves in the form of games like XDefiant, Concord, Marathon, and the like, and will soon begin seeing the "bust" contraction that started in 2023.

This is because a lot of investment money was pumped into games from 2020-2022, which fueled these games. After the waves of layoffs and the funding drying up, we're almost certainly going to see fewer big game releases from here on out. Most of those will likely be tried-and-true established franchises like Call of Duty, Pokemon, Madden, and so on. This will likely continue for the next few years thanks to the more experimental and risky game projects from 2023 until now have mostly been cancelled.

This has a side effect of pushing a lot of veteran game devs into the indie space. I suspect that we'll see more interesting indie games and a rennaisance of indie darlings over the next couple of years. Once economic headwinds look more favorable, publishers will start investing more into new and experimental games again, leading to more interesting AAA offerings once again - likely built on the core of some of the more successful indie offerings that have sprung up in the meantime.

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