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The DeanBeat: How should the game industry deal with the recession?

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 9 min

As the second quarter earnings results come in, it seems likely that the broader economy is swinging into a recession. The question remains how long it will last. And my question is: how should the game industry deal with this turn of events?

We’ve seen two quarters of negative growth in the U.S., fueled by factors such as inflation, high interest rates, the war in Ukraine, rising fuel prices, the supply chain snarl, China’s logistics problems, the return of COVID variants, whiplash in the stock market, and the cryptocurrency and NFT price crashes. That’s a crapload of things that are dragging things down, and gaming cannot defy gravity.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.