'It feels to many like a tidal wave is sweeping over the AAA game business,' says Epic CEO Tim Sweeney in his diagnosis of the industry's woes

It is a "time of both crisis and opportunity" for the games industry, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in his concluding remarks at today's Unreal Fest address, where the Unreal Engine and Fortnite maker demonstrated new features coming to its development tools.

The kids are playing more games than ever and Fortnite is growing again, Sweeney said, but "a huge number of the new releases of major games are failing."

"We're seeing often hundreds of millions of dollars of dev cost, followed by tens of millions of dollars of revenue, and the dev costs are continuing to grow," said Sweeney. "It feels to many like a tidal wave is sweeping over the AAA game business."

Sweeney's assessment of the problem echoed sentiments I heard repeatedly at the Game Developer's Conference back in March: Gamers want social online experiences, but it's extremely hard to break in and compete with the biggest platforms, like Roblox. Players go where their friends already are, and are more willing to buy in-game items in games they know will still be around in a year.

"One view of the future is that Roblox g...