I strongly disagree. No publisher or developer conglomerate dominates today more than Sega, Nintendo, or EA did at different times 25- 30 years ago. The past always looks great in retrospect. Today's ecosystem is so much more diverse.

It feels like the video games industry has done the reverse of Hollywood.

Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system that handled production, distribution, and exhibition by a single entity to a system where production, distribution, and exhibition were done by separate entities.

It feels like game development went the reverse way.

It's important to note that the only reason that Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system to a disaggregated one is because the US Government filed an antitrust suit that forced the disaggregation [1]. And now that that antitrust pressure is gone, we see Hollywood slowly returning to a vertically integrated system, where studios, distribution networks and theaters are all operating in close conjunction to push movies that "ought" to be profitable [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

[2]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywo...

Someone can correct me, but I'd put blame for the trend on EA / Madden NFL (~1990?).

It showed what kind of profits you could make off yearly refreshes of software, while minimizing development costs.

Why would an MBA take a chance on new IP when they have the above as an option?

Yes and no. Big companies do development, but they don't necessarily do more development than they used to. EA and Activision actually probably develop fewer titles than they did twenty years ago. They just spend a lot more on each title.

But again: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Nintendo have always been vertically integrated. This is not new.