Ep 96. "It's In Dire Straits" — 38 Years In Gaming, What's Actually Breaking | Richard Browne
About this episode
Richard Browne discusses the challenges facing the video game industry and critiques the current AAA model.
Richard Browne has spent 38 years in the video game business. He ran production at Universal Interactive, ran external development at THQ for the best part of a decade, and spun up the publishing operation for Digital Extremes alongside Warframe. Now he advises studios on funding and survival, he thinks most of the industry is getting it wrong, and he calls Game Pass "cancer" for the business even as it props parts of it up. This is a straight conversation about why the AAA model has stopped working and why Microsoft has talked itself into a corner with Xbox. We get into the challenges nobody wants to say out loud: you cannot spend $300 million and five years on a brand new IP and expect to survive. Richard makes the case for beachheading an IP at $10 to $20 million, proving the audience, then committing to a ten year, three game plan. The path Naughty Dog, CD Projekt and Larian all actually walked. We also cover the generation gap quietly reshaping everything: why his kids treat a game as one tab in an ecosystem of Discord and YouTube, why Roblox is the modern playground, why photorealism stopped growing the market, and why a 15 hour game you actually finish beats another 400…
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