Let the First Party Die: Is It that Bad if Game Consoles Really Are Dying?

By Moises Taveras | July 8, 2025 | 2:17pm

Nintendo’s latest console, the Switch 2, has been heralded as an omen of what’s to come. Or rather, what’s not to come. Its lack of the kind of innovation found in the Nintendo DS or Wii has been likened to a grim sign, one that portends the “death of consoles.” Ignore, first of all, that these arguments are rooted in a glaring bout of ignorance: each of these systems was followed by lesser iterations—stopgaps, if you will—that expanded on a previously established gimmick to mixed success. The 3DS was a smash. The Wii U? Arguably less than a blip. The Switch 2 is a safe bet in the same way that PlayStations and Xboxes have been for the last decade, and many view this as an alarming stagnancy.

I think a lot of these kinds of arguments, made largely by armchair experts from fandoms prone to hyperbole, are overblown. Obviously. And we know they are, considering we’ve already heard news of the next generation of consoles from both PlayStation and Xbox. And while I’ve made the leap to PC, and believe most should, it’s hard to ignore the high cost of it. Consoles are getting there, but they aren’t yet, and as long as that’s true, there’ll continue to be a market for them, especially as we descend into yet another period of economic uncertainty. Consoles might be cooked, but they’re not utterly fried just yet.

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But a voice has been growing in the back of my head. One that isn’t quite a certified analyst nor entirely unprepared to prognosticate the industry which it observes. One that doesn’t necessarily lend credence to such far-flung notions, but is definitely interested in their logical endpoint. So if people really believe that the Switch 2 is ushering in the death of consoles, this voice wonders aloud, “Why not let the first party die?”

On an unreleased song, Kendrick Lamar opens by declaring war on the status quo: “I think it’s time to watch the party die,” he chokes out. Over the course of the next five minutes, Lamar takes the music industry, his fellow rappers, and the wider culture surrounding both to task. The track, which serves as a eulogy to the “authentic” rap game that molded Lamar, as well as a humble brag of his own status as its de facto torchbearer, has been bouncing around my head ever since I first heard it. Part of it is the song’s own merits—like its hypnotic production and Lamar’s reserved, but nonetheless scorching, delivery—but what’s really drawn me to it is how relevant the song’s message feels to the games industry as I watch it get dismantled with every passing day, in large part due to the damage the console race has wrought on it.

I feel Lamar’s dissatisfaction towards the rap game and industry in my bones, as I’m sure many others in a similar position to myself do. That’s because it largely feels analogous to any other subculture that’s felt some kind of squeeze of late. Whether it’s leadership in the field that continues to fail upwards, management that abuses and tosses aside its workforce and talent, or faux-saviors peddling the newest bullshit, there are some parallels to be drawn between the collapses of all the creative industries right now.

It’s not just rap. It’s film, it’s books, it’s the music industry at large, and of course, it’s fucking games. We’re all going through it because the institutions meant to prop up these fields and mediums are failing the very people trying to keep them alive and enable them to grow—flourish, even. Without them, and to be clear there are increasingly less of them likely to stick around with every subsequent layoff, things are going to bottom out sooner than later.

My disdain for the first-party consoles stems from my distaste for the cruelty of the assembly line that produces them. The systems now bear the stink of the cost paid to prop them up. PlayStation just shuttered Firewalk Studios mere months after the launch and un-launching of Concord last year after an eight-year development. We just witnessed Microsoft’s fourth mass layoff in about two years. Exciting games from many of those impacted developers are never going to live to see the light of day. More crucially, their livelihoods were just cast aside for a bottom line—many are reading these outsized layoffs across Xbox’s game studios as a sign of Microsoft’s deeper investment in AI, technology that’s killing the planet and has already been used to fuel an ongoing genocide.

Another significant factor weighing on these decisions—meaning another reason to hate everything that consoles have been turned into—is the way that publishers like Microsoft and Sony, who also put out massive systems they need to promote with flashy new titles every few years, have casually inflated the cost of making even the smallest of these titles, let alone the marquee blockbusters. And that’s actually largely because games don’t get made for players anymore. These games that take five years and $400 million to get out the door aren’t being developed to be played as much as they’re made to please a boardroom. And they certainly aren’t saving the industry as much as they’re dooming it.

Sure, PlayStation is happy to employ game makers who are passionate about delivering these innovative and exciting new worlds to fans around the world, but that’s a means to an end for the decision-makers. Especially if it’s made or funded by one of these huge companies, it is made for an imagined “audience” that is unrealistically large. And these companies are happy to stick the audience that does exist on a treadmill to pay for those exorbitant costs, which in turn go into producing bigger games, with more realistic graphics, and more unrealistic expectations. And time and time again, we see how this cycle is increasingly unstable, which makes moves like Nintendo’s—where the company is actively pursuing shorter, cost-effective, and all around more stable production methods—a surprise coming from a first-party developer and publisher, even though it should be the standard.

Many have said it before and many will say it after me: software is king, and the sooner this industry wraps its head around empowering as many people as possible to actually make the damn games—create the worlds that people want to escape to—the better off it will be. We don’t need Nintendo gimmicks and we don’t need more processing power than God. The console arms race, and the push for games that rationalized its acceleration, has only resulted in the utter annihilation of the games industry as we know it.

In the very next line of Lamar raps, “This shit done got too wicked to apologize.” It feels, in part, like a reference to the rapper’s now infamous rap feud with Drake, and a rumination of the landscape that Lamar can’t bring himself to reconcile with. Lines like this, as well as “We even kill the killers ’cause they like taking innocent lives/Burn the whole village we start over, it’s really that time” underscore the urgency with which Lamar is addressing his culture and his community. Anything short of a razing and reconstruction is called for when it comes to Lamar’s vision for “a new Earth/Filled with beautiful people makin’ humanity work.”

It’s clear now, in the death throes of the industry as we know it ushered in by the console wars’ race to the bottom, that there’s little hope of salvaging the institutions that pretend to hold it all up. The forces that have driven the market to this point will see it out. Games are fully in another crash—one with far more reach than the last—and that will prove more cataclysmic by circumstance. Many just saw proof of that as Microsoft pulled the plug on several internally developed projects, shuttered a studio, and is believed to have pulled funding from at least one other studio led by an industry legend, effectively pulling the rug out from them and their team. And that’s the very tip of the iceberg. So much will be lost in the time it takes the industry to die and potentially spring back up, and I’ve no platitudes to sell about what a hard time it will be. Unions and worker-owned studios feel like a step in the right direction, but also feel too short-sighted as solutions to properly save the industry. Maybe these are just the progenitors for a future model of the games industry. But first… something’s got to give.

And when it does give, I really do hope that something wonderful rises as a result. We can’t let this be the death of games, but maybe just the death of games as we’ve come to know them. And if that means a proverbial end to how we make games now, then so be it.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.