Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all teaming up together to warn the United States against tariffs against China affecting video game sales.

The government won’t care about video game sales, right? Wrong. The video games market is expected to be worth over 90 billion U.S. dollars by 2020, up from nearly 78.61 billion in 2017. That’s a ton of money, and a ton of production is done in China, meaning it’s going to get much more expensive for the two countries to work together. That harms everyone: the national economy, the global market, and developers as well. The brunt of which is felt by small to medium sized dev teams.

In a joint statement, the three companies put it plainly, “Unlike PCs, each of our consoles has a custom hardware configuration and design and offers unique and differentiating features that run on proprietary software operating systems connected to each company’s unique platform and services. Games and services designed for one console must be re-engineered—through a labor-intensive process known as “porting”—to operate on another console or on a PC, at significant cost to the video game publisher.”

There are more than 2.5 billion video gamers from all over the world. That’s a ton of surplus income going towards a single entertainment experience. It’s an industry that has continued to grow, while album sales, concert tickets, and movie admissions have all declined. Video games are reaching out to more people now too, with the traditional gamer persona being rewritten by a number of different socioeconomic groups now playing. Nintendo has already pulled production of consoles out of China, and Sony and Microsoft are weighing options now too.

Political affiliation aside, it’s worth the efforts of these small to mid-sized developers to be able to make their games. They’re often the ones who appeal most to niche fan groups that appreciate the attention they put into their titles. We’ll follow the story as it develops.

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