The video games industry is growing, Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime says

Despite the onslaught of layoffs and cost-cutting, ex-Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime says that the games industry is still growing.

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Following massive expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic, gaming is going through a great contraction as the industry returns to a steady-state equilibrium. Gone are the days of thunderous growth spikes in spending across software and services. That growth is still happening, at least by analyst projections, but at a much more consistent pace; things aren't as wild as they were during the pandemic when everyone was stuck indoors.

Some industry figures have conceptualized this growth-shrink phase on a business level, and now we have similar comments from ex-Blizzard president Mike Morhaime. As the head honcho for one of the world's premiere service-oriented companies, Morhaime was privy to a lot of factors and insights on the industry.

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In a recent interview with Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, the ex-Blizzard president and company co-founder expressed what he thinks is happening in the games industry right now:

"The gaming downturn, even, is a little bit overstated. Because if you look at the gaming industry in general, it's actually still growing. More people are playing games than ever before. But I think the situation is that you had is, going through the pandemic, people didn't have a lot to do so they turned to streaming and games.

"It was a huge increase in usage and a lot of the companies say that and they thought that was the new trend and that was just going to continue. So there was a lot of investment and when that didn't continue, I think probably the finance department said 'oh wait a minute, margins and everything' and they wanted to cut back to the trend line.

"It's been really sad to see. It's affected a lot of people, it's not a great efficient way to grow."

Morhaime left Blizzard in April 2019 and has since become the CEO of a new company, Dreamhaven, which is working on two new games.