'This year seems shakier than ever,' BioWare veteran Mark Darrah says, and live service games are a big part of the reason—but Grand Theft Auto 6 might force the industry to change
Former BioWare stalwart Mark Darrah began his career at BioWare as a programmer on the original Baldur's Gate, and finished more than 20 years later as executive producer on Dragon Age and Anthem. He's been around, in other words, he's seen some things, and he has some thoughts on the current state of the videogame industry—the most pointed of which is that as bad as 2024 was, 2025 is even worse.
"Last year, it was survive til '25," Darrah said in an interview with MrMattyPlays. "This year has definitely put the lie to that, because it's more brutal than last year from everything I can see.
"Last year it seemed like, inside the business part of it, it seemed like you were starting to see the beginnings of, 'We're bouncing off the bottom.' So you were seeing the small money, like the people that invest in the very early starts of projects and studios and that, starting to come out of the shadows again. But then this year seems shakier than ever."
2024 was indeed awful, and so was 2023, and 2022. PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon wrote at the end of '24 that after thousands of layoffs and dozens of studio closures through the year, it felt like the industry was "poised for a vibe shift—or maybe a reckoning" this year. Instead, somehow, the blood has continued to flow.
It's a mess out there, and Darrah reckons live service games are a big part of the problem, for two reasons: One, because a successful live service game "makes all the money," and two, because major publishers would be happier "if they each had five live services that made all the money and no other games."
"I don't think anyone who plays games really wants the industry to look like that," Darrah said. "But from a business perspective, that'd be awesome. You know that you're going to have five games that you only have to worry about, five games at your publishing organization. And then one will start to slowly decline and then you go and start to hunt for the one that's going to replace it as it eventually dies."
That's a C-suite fantasy no doubt, but reality has demonstrated that pursuing live service gold is a high-risk enterprise: From Anthem to Concord, the landscape is littered with the corpses of games that were going to be the next big thing, until they weren't. But, reinforcing Darrah's point, reality also demonstrates that you can piss away $200 million on a humiliating live service flameout, and immediately turn around and pour even more money down a slightly differently-shaped hole because maybe this time you'll hit a dinger.
Darrah said the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, "a game made pretty cheaply with good but not over-good visuals [that] didn't sell 15 million copies, but it sold great," could signal that gamers are maybe ready for a shift away from the live service deluge. But what it really comes down to is Grand Theft Auto 6, which is what will really set the course for the industry in years to come: Whether it shifts away from the relentless drive for live service success (and the attendant massive budgets), or doubles down.
"Ask me again after GTA 6 ships," Darrah said. "If GTA 6 doesn't sell 70, 80 million copies or whatever GTA 5 sold, then that's going to signal something. But if it's the most successful launch of all time, we'll see."