Xalavier Nelson Jr. on why the Switch 2 won't solve the industry's sustainability problem

Writing up an interview with Xalaiver Nelson Jr. is really hard. Usually, when you interview someone, you can talk to them for 30 minutes to an hour, and your job at the end is to pull out the handful of quotes or select ideas that are really interesting, or smart, or worth discussing and then couching them in context that makes it engaging for the reader.

Having read through my transcript with Nelson Jr. several times, basically everything he says is worth printing. This isn’t me worshipping at the feet of an auteur creator - I think Nelson Jr. would fly back over to Ireland to yell at me in person if I did that - it is giving credit to the fact that he thinks deeply about the industry.

Beyond just working on deeply personal and often offbeat games like El Paso, Elsewhere, CLICKHOLDING, and Sunshine Shuffle, Xalaiver Nelson Jr. spends much of his time pleading with the games industry, highlighting how broken systems of game development are and how they harm everyone. That was what his talk at the FÍS Games Summit in Galway was all about.

Don’t Let The Bastards Win

His talk, “Don’t Let The Bastards Win”, began by highlighting that current video game development is broken. It has been seven going on eight years between Rockstar’s last two games, Ken Levine has been working on “narrative Legos” since 2013, and Naughty Dog might not release a new game this console cycle. Games are getting bigger and bigger and taking longer and longer to create. However, Strange Scaffold, Nelson Jr.’s company, has released nine games since 2021, and has three games scheduled to release in 2025, all under the mantra, “Better, Faster, Cheaper, and Healthier.”

“ Better, faster, cheaper, and healthier represents to me the idea of us confronting the cultural assumptions around games”, Nelson Jr. told me over Google Meet a few weeks ago, “The current equation that we use to judge the quality and standard and effort put into a game is that you put more money, more time in a better game will result. And we have thousands of examples over the past decade of that simply not being the case. Not just because of mismanagement, not just because of things going wrong, but because the assumption itself is baseless.”

For Nelson Jr. and his team of frequent collaborators, the puzzle of making a video isn’t solved by throwing more money and manpower at development issues, it's about finding precision tools and effective methods to work around challenges.

Nelson Jr. explains that, " Constraints can further creativity and in games in particular, I believe that they're fundamentally necessary. So at Strange Scaffold, we look for ways to not just make games faster, cheaper, and healthier, but for how that perspective of existing within a constraint, [when] intentionally taken and embraced, will let us build stronger, more intentional art. A great example of this is in I Am Your Beast. A game without a budget for cutscenes gets a kinetic typography system unlike anything I've really seen in games, and that I've since been told by other developers [who were] inspired [by] them to also look for alternative approaches to cutscenes. Because there's no reason a cut scene is just a 3D model moving around, or even a motion comic. It can be this incredible landscape for different creative execution and for representation of intention if it is approached in that way, and working faster, cheaper, and healthier lets us embrace, and forces us to search for, those opportunities.

This restraint-based development ends up providing opportunities for unique experiences, bolstered by Strange Scaffold’s free-form nature, which Nelson Jr. describes as looking something that “looks more like a floating boat of chaotic artists than a formalised software development house.”

By releasing more games more frequently, Strange Scaffold feels less tied down to the traditional game publishing mentality of if you hit gold, you keep mining until the ore runs dry. This is why, despite announcing an El Paso, Elsewhere 2, Xalavier Nelson Jr. is very up front that that game isn’t in the studio’s immediate future. “If we let even a little bit of time pass, we can say something significantly different with the same material. Even working in the same code base is something that excites me, and I think makes a sequel make more sense for a Strange Scaffold title.”

Every other art form does this

I’ve talked to enough developers to know the objections to this: When a game gets to a certain size, these sorts of development practices don’t hold up. You can’t have a team of 300 float on different smaller projects, while they ideate on what Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 might be for a few years. But it is not that Xalavier is saying that Activision should do exactly what his much, much smaller teams do, it is that he wants to challenge the rigidity of that thought process that would dismiss trying new development systems out of hand.

In recent years, Nelson Jr. has assisted with writing on licensed games like Stranger Things VR and South Park: Snow Day! and has recently been drafted by Gearbox to help write for what will undoubtedly be one of the best-selling games of the year, Borderlands 4. In doing so, his beliefs seem to have been galvanised, saying, “The wild thing about moving at different scales and games at this point is that I was told my entire career that the things I did and were doing weren’t possible, that they wouldn't be effective and then that they couldn't scale. And at every turn of my career, it turns out that making a game with an awareness of quality and budget and time is something that is natural.”

“Every other art form does this.” Nelson Jr explains, “It's [the] games [industry] that determines ahead of time that it's not possible. So. I didn't find it difficult to move into the world of Triple-A. I was a lead writer in Triple-A. I've worked on larger things like Borderlands or Stranger Things. If anything, [it's] been more jarring to find how often, yes, scale changes and there are more people involved, but the fundamental concepts and ideas and principles of maintaining quality, budget, and time. Thinking about how, whether or not this game can exist, this version of a game that's being proposed, can exist given all of the other factors involved, or if it begins to contradict itself. Those are just universal artistic processes and principles that I was surprised [by] how easily they did scale. I was surprised how much there wasn't really a difference. It was primarily one of cultural assumptions, discounting solutions before we even proposed them."

The Great Plateau

Currently the traditional video game business is plateauing. Xbox has seen Game Pass user growth stop, so now Xbox games are releasing on more platforms. Video games went from $60 to $70 because they are still getting more expensive to make, but more people aren’t buying them. The consoles are going up in price instead of down, because companies want to make as much money from the gamers that exist right now, not grow the market.

The games industry didn't get here by accident, for years, systems that encourage stable growth were tossed aside in the name of pursuing the next big hit. Loss leader products and big failures have been able to have been written off by the next big thing that investors wanted to throw money at. But right now, there is no next big thing, and Xalavier is worried that expecting the rising tide of a few to lift all boats is naive.

He explained further, saying, “At the moment, I feel that Switch 2 is fascinating for what it represents for the industry. I think there were a lot of people waiting for Switch 2 to emerge and be the bump that saves games. If you look at the pattern of how games have been developed, and produced, and marketed over time, what you'll notice is [that] there are outlier successes. There are things that kind of strike in the middle and in the process slip beneath the waters. And then there are a lot of invisible failures.”

“The thing that has kept a largely unsustainable industry from collapsing under its own weight entirely, has been these floods of money and opportunities to pursue elsewhere. For a little bit, it was Game Pass. For a little bit, it was VR. There's always been a wave to catch to account for the fact that in terms of our principles and approaches, the games industry has not been operating sustainably or with any focus towards the well-being of its developers or players.”

And he’s right, look back at the growth of the video game industry, there has always been a cash flow from investors interested in a new idea to keep things afloat. 16-bit graphics, 3D, HD, motion controls, multiplayer, games that imitate prestige TV, battle royales, and battle passes. Hell, it didn’t even matter if the fad stuck around or people liked it, saying your games had NFTs and/or Web3.0 integration was a great way to get investors' money for a while.

“ I think there's a lot of desperation to find the next thing that will allow the games industry, and games investors in particular, to tank failures or mitigate their risk,” says Nelson Jr., “Now we exist in what is for players, both the best and worst of times. A period in which a game you bought 10 years ago can still be updated with new content. A period in which a micro-transaction can be more expensive than an individual game, and the games that are being released are all competing with each other, all the time, in an eternal context. If you're releasing an indie game today, you aren't competing against your fellow indie developer. You're competing against a survival crafting game that came out 10 years ago and just continues to get new content. The industry has not recalibrated.”

"Switch 2 will not save you"

So with the market more crowded than ever, by games that last longer than ever, is there any validity to the idea that many analysts have floated that the Switch 2, or GTA 6, or $100 games, might provide the boost to the industry needed for us all to carry on as we are? Nelson Jr. certainly doesn’t think so.

“I think Switch 2 has been viewed as something — if only because it's the next thing from Nintendo, which tends to operate at a counter to the rest of the industry — that would give a money gate again to the people who entered it. I think Switch 2 is really exciting. I'm excited to get my hands on it as a player, but the business context into which it enters is very clearly ‘Switch 1 and Switch 2 coexist’. If you are already feeling the pressure of unsustainability... particularly in an age of tariffs where people will have to pick and choose what games they engage with more than ever because of import costs, Switch 2 is not going to save you.”

“I think that that's going to continue to be the really dire beat of games for the next few years, is a lot of desperate investors and developers looking for something to save them from the unsustainability that is the status quo in games. And finding [that] Switch 2 will not save you. The next PlayStation will not save you. The next Xbox will not save you."

We’ve made 15

So, if things are going to stay tough and get tougher, how do you survive as a game developer? One option is to spend years of your life working on one game and hoping that it will please the algorithm, filter to the top of Steam, get popular on Twitch and be the new one in one million. Be the next Balatro. Xalavier Nelson Jr. would advise against hunting that fool's gold.

 "The one that Strange Scaffold is definitely pursuing, the one that I'm doing inside and outside of my studio, is making interesting things consistently and efficiently. I don't expect to be the next Balatro, but in the time that it takes to make one game for the average developer. We've made 15. We've made 15 games in five years. We have three games coming out this year.”

He goes on to explain that for him personally that, “the thought that even if my career cannot continue, I have a legacy of now [of] literally hundreds of games I've contributed to is something that provides a lot of comfort during this time and that something that makes me feel that I can offer players more.”

In a world where a game can take seven years to develop, cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, and then be taken offline less than two weeks after release, deleting thousands of man-hours of development and work, suddenly not making games like Strange Scaffold seems like a bizarre choice.

“I exist in this period and find sustainability during this period,” says Nelson Jr., “Not by competing with GTA 6, but by very explicitly attempting to fill a different space in someone's life…  Strange Scaffold is just making things that can fill other spaces. By filling other spaces [we are] able to have different conversations with players and therefore survive… it has worked and it's working and it's something that even if it doesn't fully succeed, there's not a way that we can fail. And that's a very, very rare thing to discover in this time.”

Lexi Luddy

Contributing Editor

Lex Luddy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has written for Vice, Fanbyte, PLAY Magazine, Gayming Magazine, Push Square, startmenu and more. She can be found on BlueSky @basicallilexi.bsky.social talking about Like A Dragon, Kirby, and queer representation in media.