My former boss, longtime Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada, used to tell me that games were the tip of the spear of technology in consumer software. There was no software so complex sold to the mainstream. Put another way, no other consumer software required you to either purchase a specialized hardware card (GPU) or a dedicated game console in order to use it. Yes, there was professional software (CAD, CG rendering, etc.) that was as complex. But for consumers, games were at the edge. As a result, for decades, the industry required a deep core competency to develop for it, teams were small, and revenue was concentrated from their core audience. Multiple things changed starting in the early 2010s. First, the explosion of browser (Farmville) and then mobile games led to a massive expansion of the audience meaning games revenue expanded out of the need for core tech being driven by graphics and compute innovation. Second, game technology like Unity and Unreal Engine began reducing the deeper technical hurdles needed to participate in the industry. (You did not need to relearn a new engine each time you started at a studio.) Third, other technology company growth became supercharged, and began pulling the best technologists toward them at rates that games could not compete with. VR (see: Carmack), streaming video, AI, etc. We can put aside whether some of these efforts were successful; every company in the magnificent 7's stock has appreciated far more than any game company between 2010 and now, so if you joined Meta for VR in 2014 you probably could have retired long ago. This had a knock-on effect because many game developers in the US were concentrated in California and Washington state, which were also the places where tech was concentrated, and these white collar workers' housing costs went up greatly as tech minted thousands of millionaires a year while the housing market didn't expand inventory at the same rate. As a result, game salaries salaries went up, but not as high as tech companies. Furthermore, the ZIRP investment boom into games between 2018 (post Fortnite) and 2023 led to a lot of the older teams of studios who got acquired getting their retirement bags. Between the lure of tech and the bags, we saw a massive drain of technical talent in games during this period. AI has deeply accelerated this; some of the absolute best technologists today, who would have been working that tip of the spear in games in the 90s or 00s, are paid 10x what they get in games if they work for OpenAI, Meta, etc. Thus they never go into games. And so you have a massive hollowing out of the technology core of games. In fact that which remains is concentrated in only a handful of companies, of which Epic Games is one.