Those making entertainment products aimed at the mass market can either avoid making political and social statements or they can accept being a niche market product. It’s about making enough money that people don’t have to be laid off. The people running these companies for the last 10 years have failed to accomplish that.

The free to play listen to player feedback and incorporate related design or development features in a timely manner. If there’s a bug they fix it. If they want a new feature, they strongly consider it. The AAA gaming industry has been inwardly focused for about 10 years now. Watch The Game Awards and you see its just like the Oscars. Awards going to a lot of very obscure titles for checking some box on the social justice agendas. Some games like CS2 stay at the top by simply not making major changes for the worse when they already have a winning formula for their market that nobody wants to see changes.

Aside from the California-western europe developer culture, I think a lot of it has to do with the people above AAA gaming who make the major decisions are not themselves in the industry but in enterprise services or the business community. Microsoft top people may know how to squeeze profits out of enterprise customers but they’ve been clueless on gaming.

The Xbox is a dead platform and PS is right behind it. Look at active player counts for the info on who matters. It’s not Microsoft, EA or the others. It’s indie studios and free to play studios on the PC and Steam. Until those guys decide they need to comply, none of these laws are going to matter. Any country telling some indie dev somewhere else that they need to set up software to verify ID cards is going to be ignored. Then, the people who want to play those games are going to ignore them too. If you walk around in any major city in Australia today, you see people ignore the law routinely. This is just one more law they will ignore.

AAA gaming is full of execs who have not grasped how their industry has already begun imploding. The survivors in the all digital potato PC world will be the indie devs and Steam since Steam sells their games. The indie game devs write their games to run on anything. The other survivor will be the free to play studios who have already won every market they’ve entered. If they don’t own a gaming market yet its because they haven’t bothered winning it. Look at active player counts. Franchises like Battlefield and Call of Duty are way down the charts from the free to play shooter games.

They’ve not had a lot of success in the 2020s except for sports games they obviously pay a lot of money in licensing fees for.