Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing some spring cleaning on my contacts database. This is something I’ve been dreading for a long time since the database currently has something like a little over sixteen thousand contacts in it. That’s right.. 16,000. Frankly it was getting a bit wieldy and difficult to find active contacts so it was time for me to roll up my sleeves and just tackle it. Well about three solid days later of cross checking to see who was where, what the status of the company is, seeing people move around etc, my ISV contacts tab alone went from nearly 13,500 contacts down to a little over 10,000. I’m guessing only a third of my entire database still contains what I’d call active contacts. Ugh. So what happened? I’m now kicking myself for not tagging them all from the beginning to give a more exact accounting of the total number; but what I uncovered was definitely a downer. Of the ~3300 contacts I had to put in my inactive tab; over half of those contacts and their respective companies were casualties of going defunct in the past three or so years to present. This is now up to and including the most recent announcement of JoWood. The other half of those contacts & companies were casualties from the period of roughly 1999 to 2007. The range of stories attached to a lot of these is also a bit nutty. Cases of employees being called ‘redundant’. Companies going into Administration, Defunct, Chapter 11, Acquisition; the list goes on. A few stories of entire staff not being paid for months on end. Executives being charged or indicted. In so many cases I was seeing some great contacts actually leave the games industry altogether. There’s really not any good words appropriate for a blog to convey all this so I’ll just say in a word “Ugh”. I believe the other big story behind all this is that it’s really been the small to medium sized ISVs who have really had the roughest time of it. Many of them were ‘acquired’ by larger ISVs. Not necessarily always a bad thing; but I also do believe that there always needs to be a healthy and vibrant mix. Lastly; I’m sure there are some of you out there who follow the PC Gaming Alliance Horizon’s report. Some of you might be saying well how can there be all this growth then occurring in PC Gaming? In a word that’s largely a function of ‘globalization’ and new innovative formats and business models picking up steam. A very large proportion of the gaming market has shifted to the Eastern Hemisphere. So the growth is most marked in those markets. However; even domestically PC Gaming still continues to do relatively well which is rather miraculous when you consider that there isn’t a single entity investing or dumping billions into the PC Gaming Ecosystem like you see occurring by the Console Mfgs. To spell this out it’s largely the advent of digital distribution, free to play/freemium, microtransactions and so on. In closing I don’t want people to walk away depressed or down about my observation. It’s merely a simple observation with no real methodology attached to it. I’d definitely be interested though in knowing if anyone else is seeing a similar trend; or has tracked the games companies over the past decade or more to actually apply more diligence behind my observation here? IF so I’d really love to hear from you. To the small and medium sized game studios. Hang in there and be extremely cautious of tying yourself too closely to a single platform. Tweet