Author @ Marvel | Titan | Disney | Dark Horse | Abrams | Scholastic
North London
Joined April 2013
- Tweets12.8K
- Following731
- Followers899
- Likes31.4K
Paul Davies retweeted
It’s hot in London this week. Try to be as cool as you can whatever the weather and wherever you are.
#HotWeather #Weather #London
Paul Davies retweeted
My neighborhood would have been better off if they were a band.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Paul Davies retweeted
quick thesis: "kids today aren't even playing videogames the way we were, millennial relationship to gaming is now a cultural relic, like listening to the radio or drive-in movies"
TL;DR -- Millennials are the new boomers, Halo is Woodstock, WoW is the iPod, Dad gamers are the only "gamers" left by their own definition (& they don't have time to play anymore), the kids are all cracked out on Live Service Slop platforms that they can't escape and don't want to, competition is dead, E-Sports is dead, creative content is dead, screaming down the mic is dead, couch co-op with your friends is dead, couch co-op with your Dad is dead, AAA games are dead, consoles are dead, Game Pass is dead.
And at the end of the day it's all because, if you squint, the kids don't play games anymore.
long thesis:
supporting industry stuff:
- industry publications say average gamer is now ~37, up from 29 in 2004
- they also note that kids <12 have seen the largest drop in videogame engagement post-pandemic of all age ranges (-6%)
- Pew's 2008 report says "Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games", whereas their 2024 report says "the vast majority of U.S. teens (85%) say they play them. Just 15% say they never do"
- Gen Z's favorite games are Minecraft, CoD, GTA, Fortnite, and Roblox
- PC gaming has a notably larger share of the overall market now vs. console gaming
- Console game sales were 4x-6x PC game sales back in 2004
- PC game sales were 1:1 with Console game sales last year
- Everyone being stuck at home in 2020 seemed to permanently inflect things here, with PC game sales stagnant from 2015-2019 but then becoming the dominant source of industry growth since
- Roblox (2006), Minecraft (2011), & Fortnite (2017) are top 5 gaming IPs for Gen Z....
- ....these are more live-service game-hosting platforms that actual games themselves
- Newzoo has a 2026 report saying only ~13% of gametime went to new releases!
- 2/3rds of gametime went to >6 year old games!
- That same report did an analysis comparing playtime concentration across PC/PS/Xbox platforms and their Top 20 Games vs. the long tail of their library (it's a really good report)
Note on the recent restructuring: for Xbox it was called out specifically that Game Pass caused a redistribution of playtime away from top titles and towards the long tail, without any actual expansion of the total audience/playtime.....basically, Game Pass nukes Xbox's ability to monetize it's big blow out titles without any offsetting gains from expanding the market.
oops.
supporting game stuff:
- let's call it the "Roblox" problem -- all the kids exist within a massively multiplayer online gaming ecosystem, with play, creation, socialization, and monetization all embedded in one platform
- the creation angle and the monetization angle also i think encourage parents to view these games as "educational" more so than, say, Call of Duty, and are therefore more willing to encourage their kids to play with time and/or money
- there is no clear off-ramp from this platform
- you can have totally new gameplay experiences within it, with low friction adoption
- as this platform captures a larger and larger share of player attention, it sucks the available playtime & monetization out of the rest of the industry
- this process naturally changes the incentives around making games, including what kind of games get made, for what audience, and targeted at what price point
- we got legions of "WoW killers" and "Halo/CoD clones" in the early 2000s because those games were platform beasts of their own...
- ...and so now we're years-deep into every financially motivated major game studio trying to figure out how to build a "Roblox" of their own, aka Live Service Slop 24/7, 365
- the fans might hate it but there's a giant pile of money labeled "Live Service Slop" in the middle of the room and it's clear to publishers & studios that the prize is there, if only they can be good enough to claim it
- [of course, all millennials know that WoW and Halo both killed themselves, nobody ever steals the crown by copying it]
- and so while all this is happening, it's opened up a previously under-served niche in the "lower-mid price point indie-to-double-A targeted niche game"
- Palworld, Enshrouded, Schedule I, Silksong, and so on, were all in the very top % of revenue-earners for newly released PC games in the year they dropped
- In console land, Space Marine 2 just blasted a quarter of a billion dollars in revenues of a budget way smaller than a typical AAA release
- If AAA studios had been dropping Halo/CoD/Gears-style games every other year chasing success, the niche for Space Marine 2 wouldn't have really been there, not at the same scale
- I think there's a similar effect even with BG3, whose awesome success likely would've been a little lower (though still great) if fans had gotten genre-adjacent Skyrim & Witcher sequels already
- but instead, we have the "Roblox problem" (Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, GTA), where cross-platform self-contained game-related live service platforms have monopolized huge chunks of (younger) gamer time and money......and warped the kinds of content big studios try to make in the process
supporting adjacent stuff:
- there's also a whole cloud of adjacent areas that are impacted as a result of the above
- picture everything as a big web and these nodes as farther out on the web
- but you see a related decline of "E Sports" and the rise instead of "Influencers", as community figures with large audiences they can monetize become higher status than ultra sweaty competitive pros
- the decline of competitive online culture has also coupled with intentional pushes by studios and their hardware platform partners to reduce online toxicity, changing the culture of online spaces
- the decline of forums & reddit and the rise of ig/tiktok/youtube has turned third-party game-content-ecosystems into more pyramidal "one mega influencer" structures
- chasing the Live Service dragon has led to a massive decline in couch co-op ("local splitscreen") titles, which reduces a certain KIND of gaming experience that, while not the norm from a playtime POV, was nonetheless an integral part of millennial gaming
- the above also makes Family Gaming a lot harder with kids, as what was once an expected default across most games has moved into a separate genre reserved for "Girlfriend Games"
- game-related content has been nearly totally evaporated by Twitch (which is itself in the process of being evaporated), short form video, and "creator talks at the camera" long form video
- "Machinima" and "Parody Game Songs" and "Montages" are both bizarre millennial cultural content that seems egregiously lacking in disaffected irony to the younger audience
- it's covered extensively elsewhere so wasn't worth jamming in here too much, but the explosion of MTX means in-game "status" derived from earned rewards & achievement, such as it is, has been nearly totally replaced with purchased status...and in so doing, game studios have *totally* devalued the actual status that playing their game used to convey
- we're already dealing with a young generation who is hyper-cynical, hyper-financially oriented, ""crypto-native"" and spammed with ""prediction"" markets 24/7...so to have yet another part of their lives see its earned status replaced with dollar-signs and a casino logo likely seems totally normal to them
Paul Davies retweeted
My dad basically only listened to soul and jazz music most of his life. one random day, he read an article about the 50 best rock albums and just started buying them and listening to them. he'd be playing black sabbath doing a jigsaw puzzle. stay curious, weirdos.
Paul Davies retweeted
Looking for a pixel artist with availability for an “Amiga Demoscene” piece in the magazine
Paul Davies retweeted
1)
Back in a time when the term “game center” didn’t even exist yet, a dimly lit coffee shop run by my father’s older sister received one of the early Space Invaders cocktail arcade cabinets—long before the game exploded into a nationwide phenomenon.
Inside that dark café, I can still remember the glowing CRT pixels floating beneath the glass tabletop, the mysterious low-frequency background music, and the unforgettable sound effects each time an invader was shot.
2)
When I was an elementary school student in the 1970s, video games were surrounded by prejudice and social stigma. Teachers and PTA members would patrol arcades looking for students. If you were caught, you could be forced to stand before all 600 students during the school’s morning assembly and publicly apologize in the schoolyard.
3)
There were classmates in college—people who happened to share classes with me, though they were never really my friends—who had already secured positions at major corporations. With smug smiles, they would say things like, “Turning your hobby into your job is foolish,” or “You were even captain of an athletic club at such a prestigious university, and you still want to work for a video game company? (laughs)”
More than the games themselves, it was the environment surrounding them that shaped who I became.
Living in that environment, I refused to be looked down upon by people who dismissed games—adults who judged students only by academic credentials or athletic achievements. So I proved myself by excelling in both. I made sure that those who looked down on games had nothing left to say, whether the measure was grades or sports.
People may not expect it, but I started yacht racing at fifteen. I reached the podium at Japan’s National Sports Festival, consistently ranked among the top five in the All Japan Championships, and even raced at the front of Japan–U.S. international competitions.
The desire to silence people who insisted that pursuing what you truly love as a career is somehow wrong—or who made bizarre claims such as, “Once you get your dream job, that’s the finish line, so you’ll stop trying”—became one of the fundamental inspirations behind the very theme of conflict itself.
As a matter of fact, I once had a manager who genuinely believed exactly that. He said, “If you put someone in the position they want most, they’ve already reached their goal, so they won’t grow anymore.” What nonsense.
Isn’t the real reason simply that you never truly loved what you were doing? Then again, for people who never genuinely loved games in the first place and only wanted promotions and social status, a job title really is the finish line.
Looking back, I can honestly say that today’s version of myself was forged through fighting against people who never grew, who suppressed what others genuinely loved, and who always chose to stand on the side that condemned video games.
I only wanted one thing: to be somewhere I could play games without anyone getting angry at me, and to live my own life by creating the games I loved. That was all I ever thought about.
And I can proudly say this: I have never once lost to the people who tried to pull me away from games by dressing up their arguments with one excuse after another.
Paul Davies retweeted
From my perspective, Miyazaki is a rather unique, yet extremely serious game developer.
His career did not begin in the game industry. In fact, he didn’t become a game developer until he was almost thirty years old.
Even among developers of my generation (those of us born in the 1970s), I think it’s remarkable that someone who wasn’t even a game developer during the dawn of the polygon era eventually became one of Japan’s most representative game creators. (In other words, compared to the rest of us from the same generation—including myself—his career path is exceptionally unusual. Most notably, unlike many of us, he was not working at one of the major development studios that held a significant technological advantage during the early polygon era. That, more than anything else, is what makes his path so unique.)
Next, regarding my impression of Dark Souls.
People often focus on its difficulty as a game, but I believe Miyazaki’s true creativity shines through in the world he created. (By the way, I personally think Dark Souls has fairly simple action mechanics, and I don’t actually consider it to be an especially difficult game.)
If you look into my own career, you’ll see that I was personally involved with the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring as the General Manager overseeing both production and marketing (Just to clarify, I wasn't part of the development team itself. My involvement was simply as the General Manager of the publisher-side department overseeing production and marketing). From that perspective, I can say that Dark Souls didn’t suddenly become a massive success overnight. It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles.
Today, he receives offers from all over the world, but when I think back to the days when he and his team were struggling the most, many of those offers seem like they’re coming from people who only know who they are today. Some of them almost feel like complete reversals in attitude. Well, that’s just my personal perspective.
Personally, I had grown tired of people who would simply compare games by saying things like, “That title cost X billion yen to make and sold Y million copies,” and then use nothing but those numbers to judge them against other games. There were so many people who couldn’t appreciate the journey or the growth of the developers themselves. Anyone can look at the current numbers—they’re available to everyone. Whenever I heard those kinds of opinions, I always thought, “That’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s never actually developed games.”
What surprised me even more was that, even if people couldn’t properly evaluate that journey, almost nobody even seemed interested in trying to understand the process of how those developers gradually reached where they are today.
(I'm NOT talking about the fan community).
Now, going back to Miyazaki, there are two things about him that have always stayed with me.
The first was back when I was developing Summer Lesson for VR, around the time it was generating a lot of buzz.
One day, he came to try an early build of Summer Lesson along with people from several other game companies.
While everyone else was laughing, chatting, and having fun with it, Miyazaki alone played it with incredible seriousness. Then, after everyone had finished and started discussing their impressions, he remained completely silent, staring intently at the preview monitor, deep in thought.
Everyone became curious and finally asked him, “Miyazaki, what are you thinking about?”
He suddenly smiled and said,
“Oh… I got completely absorbed in thinking about what I would do if I were making this, and what kind of game I’d create.”
What he talked about after that was, in the best possible sense, completely insane.
It was one of those rare moments when I caught a glimpse of what I’d call his “mad scientist” side—his deeply serious, obsessive approach to creativity.
The other thing that left a strong impression on me was that he generally dislikes video interviews (including live streaming).
I once asked him about it by email, and he replied with quite a long explanation. After reading it, I completely understood where he was coming from.
Simply put, he doesn’t like watching himself moving around on video. (Psychologically speaking, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that.)
But there was another reason.
According to him, there are naturally many people in this industry who know games far better than he does. Whenever he listens to those people speak, he realizes that his own understanding is still shallow, and it makes him feel that he’s not yet in a position to be the one talking about games.
I mean… it’s common for well-known developers to say, “I still have a long way to go.”
But whenever someone like him says that, my reaction is always,
“Come on… if you say you’re still not there yet, then the rest of us won’t feel qualified to talk about games at all.” (laugh)
Anyway, that’s one of the reasons why video interviews with Miyazaki are extremely rare. And conversations with him on camera—especially long-form discussions with another developer—are even rarer. They almost don’t exist at all.
By the way, the other game developer in that photo is Masahiro Sakurai.
If you ask me, he’s basically:
“A Saiyan who genuinely believes he’s just another ordinary human.”
Every now and then, when the rest of us are struggling with some problem, he’ll say something that sounds exactly like Goku saying,
“Well… why don’t you just fly?”
And I’ll reply,
“Because we humans can’t use Flight Technique.”
Then he just stares at me with a completely puzzled look.
To put it in terms of Demon Slayer, I’d describe him as:
"Like Muzan Kibutsuji casually showing up at a drinking party where all the Hashira have gathered, genuinely believing he's just another ordinary guest".
That’s the kind of person he is.
@Harada_TEKKEN Harada-san, I always wondered your impressions of Miyazaki-san and his Souls series? Both total icons and inspirations I’d be super eager to hear 🥋⚔️
#Tekken #DarkSouls #EldenRing
Paul Davies retweeted
A computer store window, West Germany, 1984.
Tandy TRS-80 machines lined the display, reflecting a time when personal computers were still new enough to be admired from the street.
Paul Davies retweeted
Check out the awesome @allyhumphreys VGM show, even a few words from me!
If you missed episode 1 of Game Tracks, you can catch up here 👇
bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002yjn…
Paul Davies retweeted
One of the most interesting retro gaming videos I've seen in quite a while.
First time I've seen anyone cover thus subject too
This quoted post is unavailable.
Paul Davies retweeted
Well would you believe it, the Yooka Re-Playee OST is up for a World Soundtrack Award! If you fancy chucking me a vote I’ll be your best mate forever
worldsoundtrackawards.com/ne…
Paul Davies retweeted
There was no livestream. No phones in the air. No social media.
Just nearly 75,000 fans packed into Donington Park for one of the most stacked heavy metal lineups ever assembled.
Monsters of Rock 1991 brought together AC/DC, Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Queensrÿche, and The Black Crowes for a day that has become the stuff of rock legend.
Paul Davies retweeted
🆕️ @SEGAGuys video 🎞
As NiGHTS into Dreams turns 30 years old I dig into it's origins, my own personal journey and what makes it so special.
Underrated gem? One of the greatest games of all time?
Let's discuss...
youtu.be/t9lVqNVRuUU
