쉐도잉 연습: WTF Is Happening To The Video Game Industry? - 영상으로 영어 말하기 배우기

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Depending on what you actually count as a video game, the industry is now generating somewhere between $200 and $350 billion a year in annual revenue,

making it, by far, the largest entertainment sector in the world regardless of whatever your exact definitions may be.

More people are playing video games than ever before, they are playing them for longer, and the not-so-secret reality is

that video game companies have gotten a lot better at getting money out of them while they are.

The vast, vast majority of revenue in this industry now comes from in-game purchases and advertising,

even amongst games that already have an upfront purchase cost or a recurring subscription.

Now obviously this hasn't been great for gamers, but at least a growing user base of people playing longer,

spending more, and getting advertised to all across more platforms has been good for the shareholders, right?

Wrong.

Some of the largest companies in the industry have experienced huge

stock declines multiple rounds of restructuring narrowly avoided bankruptcy mass layoffs

and divestitures over what should have been the best half decade

in the history of the industry the overall market is down

by as much as 30 from its peak in the same time

that the broader market has more than doubled so how is it possible

that even with record sales record new revenue streams record numbers of new players

and record new opportunities to monetize that new audience video game companies have still managed to screw this up so badly. So, like every

good shameless business video essayist, I am going to try

and make what should be a pretty basic industry analysis into something bigger and more grandiose than it probably actually is, including the standard issue commentary on society itself.

So you've been warned, I guess.

But in this case there genuinely are a few factors beyond

just a handful of companies making a long list of dumb

decisions to create the worst of times in what should be the best of times.

So uh… The logical place to start is… That long list of dumb decisions.

Video game companies have seen that their product involves software, people coding, and development cycles and concluded that they are basically just tech companies.

They have also seen that they have IP, storylines, and fans and have concluded that they are media companies.

Conveniently, tech companies are worth lots of money, so a lot of the businesses in this space were happy

to go in this direction thinking it would translate into tech-level valuations, and for a while, it did.

But in the end, what they actually ended up doing was combining the worst lessons

of the tech industry with the worst lessons of the media industry.

The first was that they over-hired in 2020 and 2021 during lockdowns, assuming that the pandemic boom in new gamers would go on forever.

Examples like Epic Games swelled to around 5,000 employees along the way.

This led to the current wave of layoffs, especially since layoffs are contagious in tech.

Nobody's stock gets punished for cutting staff in the same quarter that everybody else is cutting staff.

Industry trackers count around 45,000 gaming jobs cut between 2022 and the middle of last year, 14,600 of them in 2024 alone,

and the rounds have kept coming through this year.

The second problem with trying to emulate tech companies was the obsession with making acquisitions.

Microsoft in particular has gone on a massive spending spree acquiring studios to create the Netflix of gaming.

They spent $7.5 billion for ZeniMax and then $68.7 billion for Activision Blizzard, the largest acquisition in the history of the industry,

alongside a bunch of smaller studios to build out their Game Pass offering.

Now even regular streaming services outside of Netflix have struggled with financial viability,

and the same kind of model applied to video games struggled particularly hard for reasons we will get into soon.

The point for now is that by time When this shopping spree wrapped up, Microsoft's gaming division alone stood at 22,000 people.

As they started struggling with returns and questions from their corporate overlords, they also followed the same model of product and shitification, especially amongst games with a locked-in audience.

Game Pass Ultimate got a 50% price hike in a single announcement late last year, and Xbox itself has now announced three separate console price rises in 15 months,

which I am told will be devastating for the three people still looking to buy one.

Beyond just Microsoft, the whole industry is playing a game of eat or be eaten.

With 189 M&A deals in the industry in 2025 alone, according to the investment bank DrakeStar,

worth a record $161 billion, around 14 times the deal value of the year before.

To be fair, this was pushed up considerably by the $55 billion electronic arts buyout led by the Saudi Public Investment Fund,

which is the largest all-cash leverage buyout ever recorded, in any industry.

Assuming regulators actually let it close, which, well, they probably will.

More acquisitions have also furthered the trend of layoffs as a

lot of the time these companies are just interested in the IP, not the development teams themselves.

Embracer Group, an investment and holding company, rolled up more than 130 studios before their money ran out.

The resulting unwind involved cutting around 4,500 employees and closing 44 studios.

Around 80 projects just got cancelled outright, while the surviving franchises got packaged into a new company for a fresh stock listing.

In such a rapidly growing space, they assumed the Silicon Valley Spend Money and They Will Come mindset would work here as well.

In hindsight it clearly hasn't worked out, but well, why were they wrong?

Well a few reasons.

The first is that a lot of gamers aren't actually gamers, they are just people who happen to play A video game, which might sound like the world's sweatiest gatekeeping,

but I am certainly in this category as well.

In the early 2000s gaming was still a fairly niche hobby, particularly focused on younger people, primarily men, on gaming consoles,

and an even more niche group that played on their PCs.

During this time online gaming was still in its infancy, and most people had a drawer full of titles they would play through depending on what they felt like.

The primary content of these games was a campaign or a simple gameplay loop.

That has obviously changed.

Over the past 20 years even though the number of titles and players kept going up, the number of games people actually spend their time in went down.

While making this video I looked back through my old binder

and there were at least 20 games that I would play on any given year in rotation.

Today I play two games, and while I would like to make an excuse like I am getting old and just have more responsibility these days,

the truth is I probably spend longer playing these games in any given week than I did playing all of these.

Beyond the personal anecdote, this is a documented trend across the wider industry.

Unlike other media like music or movies, people can commit far far more time to consuming a video game,

and live service games and a multiplayer focus can extend that time commitment to basically infinite.

The only real limitation is the number of hours people have in a day, and an increasing share of those hours are being spent on forever games.

Despite recent trends and understandable complaints, video gaming is still largely a very cost effective form of entertainment.

But the limit new games are running into is not that their customers are running out of money to spend, it's that they are running out of time to spend, as most of their hours are already accounted for.

According to Newzoo's Playtime Tracking, in 2024 57% of total playtime was spent on games six

or more years old a further 32 percent on games one to five years old

and only 12 on games released

that year back in 2021 those older games were only taking 39 of playtime

that share has climbed 18 points in three years for pc

this trend is even more concentrated amongst older gamers with 67

of playtime going to six-year-old games even though they theoretically have

a wider selection of independent new releases at significantly lower prices than console games

An extreme example of this is that one of the writers here at Works Media, not pointing any fingers, has over 10,000 hours playing League of Legends,

and an otherwise totally neglected library full of Steam games.

The top 5 titles on PC accounted for 30.4% of all hours on their own,

and Fortnite by itself was 9.3% of all track playtime across PC and console combined.

So while in theory the total addressable market is better than ever, most of these studios are actually just fighting over a shrinking pile of scraps.

Industry analyst Matthew Ball estimated that outside of annualized franchises, thousands of games backed by tens of billions of dollars were competing for around 5.6% of total player hours

and four titles won half of it. So yeah.

The industry has basically broken into studios that have managed to create a hit game and they are just milking it, and studios taking huge risks on the hope that they can produce the next one.

It's just simply much much harder to sell a casual $70 game these days which has created some much more serious downstream problems.

So it's time to learn how many works to find out

how the gaming industry is imploding under the weight of its best years ever.

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Okay, so gamers are basically barricaded inside the same five games they have been playing for a decade, which has led many studios to conclude

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that the only logical move is to create the next big live service game or die trying.

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This has created a trend of massive games with limitless features put together by huge teams with enormous budgets.

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The problem is that if these games fail to break through, they become extremely expensive dead weights.

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This also means that even at full price, a lot of these titles can't make their money back on unit sales alone, so they are leaning more on in-game purchases and in-game advertising.

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If these never eventuate, because nobody ends up spending that much time in the game, losses can be devastating even with decent upfront sales.

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And of course, it's a lot worse without them.

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Sony spent eight years and reported $200 million on developing Concord, their big hero shooter answer to Overwatch.

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It sold an estimated 25,000 copies, and the servers were switched off two weeks after launch with full refunds all around.

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Warner Brothers did the same thing with their Suicide Squad game, which missed so badly that the company disclosed a $200 million hit to earnings.

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And then they did it again a few months later with a $100 million write-down, mostly pinned on multiverses.

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Now, I know it's fun to point and laugh, but it's going to keep happening.

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Because of the network effect of these games, the results are increasingly polarized.

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They are either a smash hit or a monumental failure.

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People want to play games with their friends, so they play the games their friends are playing.

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And if their friends aren't playing a given game, they probably won't either.

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Helldivers 2 or our Marvel rivals, or even something like Among Us and Mecha Chameleon have broken through

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and they are printing money from people who want something to play with their friends, but that self-reinforcing concentration means everything else is running a greater risk of becoming another Concord.

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But the problem is now, even if they do find a cash cow, there is an incentive to milk it until it curdles to find the next mega development.

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Sony paid $3.6 billion for Bungie in 2022, then tapped Destiny as hard as they could to fund the development of Marathon, and then Marathon flopped as well.

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Sony has now written down around $766 million dollars on

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that studio in a single fiscal year destiny 2 got its final content update last month

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and about half of bungie has been laid off even the

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biggest winner of them all is slowing down fortnite engagement has

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been falling since 2025 epic laid off over 1 000 people this year saying

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that they were spending significantly more than they were making

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and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded this heavy push towards live service games

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that dominate people's time and drive recurring spending also means

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that people are increasingly treating games as a social outlet potentially

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you might even say some modern version of a third place as such

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and hot take alert a lot of people don't really want

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something new they want something familiar friends like to hang out in common environments

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and especially as the average gamer gets older now 36 years old in america

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that becomes even stronger this trend of playing fewer games

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but playing them for much longer also explains the challenges that came with the subscription services like Game Pass.

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In theory, a modest monthly subscription for access to a massive library of games was a great deal, and probably more cost-effective than getting a similar selection of content through something like Steam.

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The problem was that people were only playing a small selection of games anyway,

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so having access to hundreds of titles didn't really mean much when they were only actually playing two of them.

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Microsoft reportedly set itself an internal target of 77 million Game past subscribers by this year.

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Again, assuming that this was just another streaming service or tech offering, this wasn't completely unreasonable.

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In reality, it got to 34 million.

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Tried that 50% price hike from earlier to squeeze more out of the subscribers it did have

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and promptly lost around 4 million of them.

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Now of course, this is a generalization.

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Everybody spends their time differently.

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And if you are personally someone that likes to try a new title every month, congratulations, you are probably having a lot more fun than everybody else.

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But, for everybody else, there is one place left to actually find extra hours in people's day.

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Mobile.

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People just spend more time on their phones than sitting down at a dedicated PC or console to do gaming.

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This becomes particularly true for the filthy washed masses of more casual gamers.

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The share of direct mobile game revenue is now bigger than PC

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and console combined, $103 billion last year against $86 billion for the other two put together.

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Now you probably already knew all this, but the point is that this can be a lot more lucrative,

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because mobile games are generally much simpler in design and development and also have a system more naturally conducive to microtransactions.

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Often payment can be handled through the same phone that people are playing on, which strips out the transaction friction that games on other platforms have to fight through.

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Again, this is well documented. But

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if studios are going to choose a proper game for real

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gamers there needs to be a very good commercial reason why

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they wouldn't spend the same resources on building dozens of games

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for a much larger more lucrative market the only real justification

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is the chance at making the next big live services game

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on the other end of the development spectrum it's never been easier for independent studios

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or even individual people to create their own game

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and publish it thanks to robust game engines and platforms like steam

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or even roblox but this means that basic indie games games were released on Steam last year alone,

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and nearly half of them got fewer than 10 user reviews.

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To differentiate themselves, game companies have felt the need to create significantly higher-end titles

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that wouldn't be possible for smaller teams to put together.

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This has created a missing middle of games that are a cut above the indie selection in terms of features, but aren't monster AAA titles that cost more than Avatar to make.

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Court documents filed by Activision revealed that Black Ops Cold War cost around $700 million to develop before marketing, despite, well, let's be honest,

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not really being that much different from any other COD games released in the last 10 years.

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In the past, studios could try to create a consistent roster of decent games.

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If one of them did well, that was great.

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If one of them flopped, that wasn't ideal, but it wasn't crippling. To date, even the biggest studios are kind of going all in on

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the success of their next release with very little margin of error if it doesn't work out.

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Now, to play devil's advocate a bit here, betting big is not totally irrational when one Fortnite can pay for 20 flops, but the problem is that everybody is making

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that same bet at the same time into the same fixed pool of player hours.

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The frustrating part is that when anybody actually funds the middle, it can still work.

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Expedition 33 was made by a core team of around 30 people for under $10 million, sold 5 million copies in its first six months, and swept the game awards.

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It obviously can work, but I guess you also need to actually make a good game, which capital investment alone can't guarantee.

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And even if it does, it's probably going to get ripped off anyway.

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So yeah, the third big issue is clearly one that is not unique to gaming.

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If you ever see a YouTube video that does well, you can be pretty sure that there will be 20 other videos that copy it in the coming months, because making an original YouTube video normally takes a fair amount of time and effort.

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And if it doesn't do well, it can cause serious problems.

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Copying a video is easy.

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It comes with some guarantee of success.

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That's the exact reason why I've decided to mix things up

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and steal the Smoothie King's talking points and thumbnail for this video.

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Now hopefully it goes without saying that I am joking.

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I will always leave a link in the description below, and we mostly discuss different things.

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But the point is, this clearly happens everywhere on YouTube as people just naturally follow basic consent devs.

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The same is true ten times over for video games.

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Any game that does well is going to be copied by dozens of people with tools

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that make basic game design relatively simple.

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This is especially the case with people porting paid indie games into Roblox for free with inbuilt microtransactions.

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Last summer, Peak, one of Steam's best-selling games of the month, got cloned on Roblox almost immediately.

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The copy pulled in 6 million visits in about two weeks, monetized with Roblox's own microtransaction system while the studio that actually made the game got nothing.

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The game developers said that they would rather you pirate their game than play the microtransaction riddled Roblox slop ripoff,

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which is a sentence an actual game studio felt the need to post in 2025.

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Roblox is running 132 million daily users and 31 billion hours of engagement every quarter, which the same Matthew Ball from earlier estimates is about the same engagement as Steam,

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PlayStation, and Fortnite combined.

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Now obviously this is bad.

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But, the point is for large studios, it further means that they need to make games with some kind of mode around them to defend against obvious ripoffs.

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And the easiest one is to make something too complex to copy, and then integrate recognizable IP in addition to some guarantee of players being around for consistent online multiplayer.

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Now it sounds bad, but it gets worse because this has literally already happened before.

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The last time this industry drowned itself in cheap copies of whatever it was selling it was 1983, and the American home video game market fell by around 97% in two years.

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So yeah, I am not exactly going to feel bad for the big gaming companies, they have made plenty of their own mistakes and have leaned into anti-consumer practices to compensate for their own feeling,

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but it's not been an easy time to be a game studio either.

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Now if you want to see this whole dynamic play out on a wider scale, go and watch this video next to unpack the, uh, financial reasons we keep on making so much junk.

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And don't forget to like and subscribe to keep on learning how money works.

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이 레슨의 어휘와 말하기 포인트

이 영상에는 섀도잉할 문장 223개와 단어 3656개가 있습니다. 말하는 구간의 길이는 19:27입니다. 화자는 분당 약 188단어로 빠르게 말하므로 연음과 약하게 발음되는 소리가 많습니다. 단어의 84%가 영어에서 가장 많이 쓰이는 3,000단어에 속합니다. 나머지는 연습 전에 미리 확인해 두세요.

이 영상의 핵심 어휘

영상에 나오는 덜 흔한 단어 15개를 발음, 뜻과 함께 정리했습니다.

gamer /ˈɡeɪ̯mə/ (명사) — 게이머. A person who plays any kind of game.
guarantee /ˌɡæɹ.ənˈtiː/ (명사) — 보증. Anything that assures a certain outcome.
amongst /əˈmʌŋst/ — 가운데, 사이. Denotes a mingling or intermixing with distinct or separable objects. See usage note at amidst.
acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/ (명사) — 획득. The act or process of acquiring.
subscription /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/ (명사) — 구독. Access to a resource for a period of time, generally for payment.
vast /væst/ (형용사) — 광대하다, 거대하다. Very large or wide (literally or figuratively).
lesson /ˈlɛs.ən/ (명사) — 수업, 과. A section of learning or teaching into which a wider learning content is divided.
badly /ˈbæd.li/ (부사) — 나쁘게, 서투르게. In a bad manner.
epic /ˈɛp.ɪk/ (명사) — 서사시, 에픽. An extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, celebrating the feats of a deity, demigod (heroic epic), other legend or traditional hero.
transaction /tɹænˈzækʃən/ (명사) — 처리. The act of conducting or carrying out (business, negotiations, plans).
hike /haɪk/ (명사) — 등산, 하이킹. A long walk, usually for pleasure or exercise.
subscriber /səbˈskɹaɪbɚ/ (명사) — 구독자, 가입자. A person who subscribes to a publication or a service.
defend /dɪˈfɪnd/ (동사) — 방어하다. To ward off attacks against (something or someone).
server /ˈsɝvɚ/ (명사) — 서버, 봉사기. A program that provides services to other programs or devices, either in the same computer or over a computer network.
wash /wɑʃ/ (동사) — 씻다. To clean with water.

영상에 나오는 구동사

put together (동사) — 조립하다. To assemble, construct, build, or formulate.
go up (동사) — 올라가다. To move upwards.
look back (동사) — 돌아보다. To think of (past events) in retrospect (in hindsight).

주의할 발음

화자는 aren't, wasn't, can't 같은 축약형과 약화된 형태를 20번 사용합니다. 들리는 대로 짧게 발음하세요.

“sh”와 “zh” 소리: acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/, subscription /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/, casual /ˈkæʒ(u)əl/, transaction /tɹænˈzækʃən/, wash /wɑʃ/
긴 단어 — 강세 위치에 주의: acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, multiplayer /ˌmʌl.tiˈpleɪ.əɹ/, primarily /ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/

이 영상으로 연습하는 방법

먼저 말하지 않고 영상을 끝까지 듣고 모르는 단어를 적어 둡니다.
0.75배속으로 한 문장씩 섀도잉을 시작하고, 익숙해지면 보통 속도로 돌아갑니다.
자신의 목소리를 녹음해 원본과 비교하고, gamer, guarantee, amongst 같은 단어에 특히 주의합니다.

이 영상의 문법

화자가 가장 많이 쓰는 문형을 영상 속 실제 표현과 함께 정리했습니다.

문형	영상 속 표현
현재완료 have/has + 과거분사 — 과거의 일이 지금도 관련이 있을 때	have gotten · hasn't been · has been
수동태 be + 과거분사 — 누가 하는지보다 무슨 일이 일어나는지에 초점	you've been warned · be eaten · was pushed
관계절 who / which + 절 — 사람이나 사물에 대한 추가 정보	people who happen · days which has · decade, which has

쉐도잉이란? 영어 실력을 빠르게 키우는 과학적 방법

쉐도잉(Shadowing)은 원래 전문 통역사 훈련을 위해 개발된 언어 학습 기법으로, 다언어 학자인 Dr. Alexander Arguelles에 의해 대중화된 방법입니다. 핵심 원리는 간단하지만 매우 강력합니다: 원어민의 영어를 들으면서 1~2초의 짧은 지연으로 즉시 소리 내어 따라 말하는 것——마치 '그림자(shadow)'처럼 화자를 따라가는 것입니다. 문법 공부나 수동적인 청취와 달리, 쉐도잉은 뇌와 입 근육이 동시에 실시간으로 영어를 처리하고 재현하도록 훈련합니다. 연구에 따르면 이 방법은 발음 정확도, 억양, 리듬, 연음, 청취력, 말하기 유창성을 크게 향상시킵니다. IELTS 스피킹 준비와 자연스러운 영어 소통을 원하는 분들에게 특히 효과적입니다.

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