Video games: Paris Games Week opens but the sector is in crisis

Paris Games Week, the largest sector fair in France, opens Wednesday with an industry in crisis, marked by restructuring and waves of layoffs.

Growing during the Covid years, video games have suffered for two years from a drop in investments and strong competition between new releases, even if sales are maintained overall. Since the start of 2024, more than 13,000 employees in the sector have been laid off around the world according to the Game Industry Layoffs website.

It is very difficult for the latest releases to compete with the behemoths that are “Fortnite” or “GTA V Online”, even if some highly anticipated productions like “Monster Hunter Wilds” or “Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6” will be playable until ‘until Sunday at the Porte de Versailles. “The offer has never been so important and there is real competition for playing time,” observes Oscar Lemaire, from the Ludostrie website.

If, in France, the market returned to growth in 2023, crossing the six billion euros turnover mark, the country has not been spared from difficulties.

The giant Ubisoft continues its mixed releases and had to postpone its highly anticipated “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” until February, while a strike mobilized a quarter of its 4,000 employees in France on Tuesday, according to the unions. The group is also facing rumors of a takeover by the Chinese tech giant Tencent and the Guillemot family, its main shareholder.

On Wednesday, it was the turn of the Don’t Nod studio to announce that it was considering letting go of 69 employees in France as part of a reorganization project, or more than 20% of its workforce.

Conversely, the publisher Focus (Pullup Entertainment group) announced the same day a record turnover for its second quarter, driven by the success of “Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2”, one of the biggest sales of the year which claims 4.5 million players.

Whether through meetings with publishers or conferences, “we will talk about the reality of the sector,” says Nicolas Vignolles, general delegate of the Union of Leisure Software Publishers (Sell), organizer of the show. “But our primary vocation is really to be this celebration” of video games, he continues, claiming “an increasingly pronounced festival aspect”.

If “the base” of the event remains access to the latest news, it is opening up even more this year to pop culture, devoting more and more space to manga, cosplay and e-sport .

More surprising: a Cybertruck, a vehicle designed by the American group Tesla, will be exhibited in one of the three halls of the show. “We embrace this amusement park aspect,” says Nicolas Vignolles, who hopes to accommodate up to “200,000 people.”

In 2023, it had claimed 187,000 visitors, compared to 300,000 before 2020.

The three major console manufacturers will be there, like major publishers like Ubisoft, Bandai Namco and Capcom.

Nintendo, which must announce the console that will succeed the Switch by March, promises around fifteen games to try, including “Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom” and “Super Mario Party Jamboree”. Sony is preparing the launch of its PS5 Pro, a more powerful version of its current console expected on November 7. On the Xbox side, Microsoft plans eight playable games.