It looks really good. This is most easily seen in big pub earnings reports. Things are going quite well when you look at total spend.
I was just referring to the reported spend and how that could go up as well if there were more games.
Generally? More games is the answer to everything. Well, everything except where to find the money and people to make them.
On that final sentence, do you think the latter might actually be the bigger problem than the former?
I look at corporate job sites, and even smaller studios often have 20-40+ job openings, and publishers lament how there aren't many great M&A targets for them to work with to make more high quality content.
Like a lot of these publishers are very cash rich, and could certainly afford to make more games, but they seem to struggle to find the staff to do so.
To use a really easy example, Naughty Dog split into two teams to make Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us, but had to re-merge into one team to make Uncharted 4. The same happened with CD Projekt and The Witcher 3/Cyberpunk 2077, despite them now being much closer to 500 staff than 200.
And if you can only hire 40 extra staff members, or those staff are maybe only qualified to make a more contained game, the studios start turning their second projects into games like GWENT (no retail release) instead of another Witcher AAA WRPG, which would require closer to 400.