A preview of things to come. Strauss Zelnick shows Mike Vorhaus his NFT art work.
A preview of things to come. Strauss Zelnick shows Mike Vorhaus his NFT art work.
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The resilience of games and entrepeneurs in 2023 | The DeanBeat

As GamesBeat Summit 2023, our biggest gaming event of the year, arrives on Monday, I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of gaming. Or, rather, I’ve been listening to some of our smart speakers talk during prep calls about the games industry’s future.

One of the takeaways is that gaming isn’t invulnerable when it comes to the state of the world economy and megatrends like the desire for people to travel and do other things with their time besides playing games. Gaming grabbed a lot of time from outdoor things during the pandemic, causing user numbers to skyrocket in 2020 and 2021. And now those outdoor things are grabbing a lot of that time back, as the industry shrank in 2022 and suffered the slings and arrows of a weakening global economy.

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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.