The executive says that long development times, the rise of Asian developers, and the advent of new tech like AI make predicting the future hard, but indies are well positioned for success

The CEO of Helldivers 2 maker Arrowhead Game Studios, Shams Jorjani, has said that the games industry is in a "transitional phase at the moment".

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom, the executive said the strategies that worked for developers and publishers through the 2010s are not "working anymore".

"Sometimes there's been doom and gloom, but overall the games industry is doing well," he says. "It's just that the things that we based our assumptions on have changed fundamentally. The playbooks used from 2010 to 2020 no longer work. The bottom has fallen out of every business case that you had. No one knew how well a game would sell, but they assumed it would sell at least this much. Whatever that number was, take a zero away. And that's the reality."

There are a few reasons for the shift in the games industry. In part, there's the continued rise of developers in the Asia-Pacific region; this year's Gamescom Opening Night Live was a showcase of what studios from China and South Korea are capable of.

"There's always been a general rise of Asian games and companies into the West," Jorjani says. "That's been ongoing for the last 10 years, but now it's reached a point where it's game after game after game that's really making it."

China, in particular, has reached something of a tipping point in the quality of games that its developers are producing.

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