After reading the whole thing, I’m tempted to laugh.
Consider how the article compares movie PRODUCTION budgets to vague claims about a game’s ENTIRE budget. (Production, marketing, manufacture, distribution, etc).
Consider that Factor 5 chart. It has no units on the left side. Did you know $17-20m is over twice as much as $12-15m? Are the bars supposed to reflect staff, I’m assuming? The whole thing is less alarmist if you read the numbers rather than looking at the pretty picture.
Consider how Warren Spector is quoted as being aware of the coming problem, but his own game Epic Mickey 2 is listed with one of the largest staff.
Consider that in the giant list of closed studios are places like GRIN, who earned their shutter with back-to-back poorly received titles, or Hudson, which didn’t close, it was simply purchased, and lost its North American distribution centers due to redundancy. All sorts of publishers are listed, rather than just developers. MTV Games closed because it no longer existed once Harmonix was spun off.
Are spiraling production costs going to be a problem? Yes. Absolutely. However, the vast amounts of money being made in places like the mobile space, Facebook gaming, et cetera, show how things will simply change, not die. Might there be fewer enormous-budget games? Sure. But what the industry has learned over the past few years is that the rise of interest in gaming doesn’t simply mean making more shooters.
This article takes a real problem and does a terrible job of representing it. It’s apocalyptic even as it ignores all aspects of gaming except big-budget, “AAA” titles. It engages in dubious, if not disingenuous math. It’s the kind of work that would shutter one of the many above studios.