It’s true. Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one. I’ve got a list of 20+ games that came out this year that I still haven’t gotten around to. I might get through 5 of them before the new year. And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my ability to play more games if more of them were shorter.
EDIT: I provided this anecdote as a reason contributing to the problems that the industry is experiencing. The article is about the trouble the industry is experiencing as a result of too many competing games being released in a given year. It is not about how I feel about trying to play through many of the ones I found interesting. Apparently Schreier had the same problem on BlueSky with people answering what they think the headline says rather than what the article is about.
This isn’t a problem. For the first time in a very long time, I actually have a queue of games I want to play and din’t just mindlessly scroll steam store or wait for big releases. In fact, I no longer follow game releases, there is something at any given time I can find to play
Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one.
That’s why i only wishlist games that i’m interested in. by the time i get around to them, there’s usually a sale and/or price drop. Some games have been on my wishlist for years, while I’m working through my backlog, waiting for their price to drop even further.
This doesn’t make sense. Nobody is supposed to ingest all media. It is impossible.
You can’t hear every song. You can’t watch every movie. You can’t see every painting.
It should be celebrated that we have so much accessible art and entertainment.
Bullshit propaganda, sorry not sorry. The problem isn’t too many games, its reviewers overhyping too few games. Gta6, marathon, whatever the heck else, seriously do some basic research and you’ll find great games at a great pace. There is, in fact, room for all games in the market.
XD
This is a good thing for everyone besides the capitalists who seek to profit from their game.
We need a UBI so these artists can just make the games they want, and so “too many games to play together” is no longer a financial issue.
Again, wealth redistribution fixes a problem phrased by news as a consumer problem.
This is my point exactly. Art should be accessible for both for the artist and those that enjoy the art. In the current landscape too many artists is a terrible thing for most besides the ones who are already wealthy, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I see so many extremely talented and creative people who can’t afford to make art and are forced to waste their talents because they can’t survive as an artist. Good art takes a lot of time to create and only wealthy people have free time.
There have been ‘too many games to play all the ones that seem interesting to me’ since the late 90s, at least.
There has always been absurd levels of competiton in video game releases.
What this person is describing has been the broad state of the overall industry as long as I have been alive.
It is not a problem.
It is totally fine that decent games are moderately popular and quite good games are quite popular and occassionally something seemingly simple is actually novel in a fun way, or hits just the right combo of gameplay / art style / narrative elements at the right time and is a breakout hit.
It is totally fine that giant evil megapublishers who exploit their employees and then slave drive and mismanage them into producing shiny, but buggy and lackluster garbage… are not making back their marketing budgets.
It is in fact very very good that they are failing.
The only thing different now is that video gaming is massively mainstream nowadays and normies struggle with choice paralysis more publically these days.
A real dedicated nerd is capable of seeing through marketing and doing their own research, thats… kinda the whole thing that makes one into a nerd, a seemingly odd obsession and inordinate amount of time spent trying to understand their hobby.
If you are just a consumer who is overwhelmed by choice and marketing, pff i dunno, get gud scrub, capitalism be doin what it do, figure it out, develop your own actual personality and sense of taste and discernment, or keep crying I guess?
Video game development democratizing via lower barrier to entry is a great thing.
Players are more likely to find and get something they want for a reasonable price, megacorps are more and more likely to spend way too much money on things they don’t understand anywhere near as well as they think they do.
Whats not to love?
If their form of video gaming as a business model is unsustainable, well that sucks for them I guess?
Heh, they blamed the video game crash in 1984 on “people have got bored with Pacman and Space Invaders - the video game boom is OVER”.
scale down then. or make better games.
capitalist crises of production are dumb.
I’ve recognized there’s enough digital entertainment to last me for the rest of my life.
Anyone I see who is constantly playing the newest thing is a loser that is consumed by consumption.
I’m not sure there’s any solution to this problem. Returning to the era of gatekeepers would be a regression, and the increased democratization of game development has led to more creative and interesting products all around. This glut may be intimidating for players, but it also presents them with more choices than ever before, so long as they can ignore the FOMO of not jumping on every new release as soon as it hits.
But for the companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars into games that need to move huge numbers to break even, this is no small challenge. And it’s just getting harder every year.
Solution is simple, stop spending millions of dollars on the same bloody IP and cash grabs and give your devs some freedom.
“Of the 1,431 games released last year that garnered more than 500 reviews — an indication that they were played by at least a few thousand people — more than 260 were rated positively by 90% or more of the players. More than 800 scored 80% or better.”
Problem - You can’t trust Steam reviews. Steam users will give top ratings to “Click the Duck”.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3110500/The_Best_Duck_Clicker/
You can’t trust the reviews, it’s true. But also, it’s very much a buyers market with games in general right now. The headline issue is only a problem if you take the side of AAA studios who have to compete with passion-driven indie projects that aren’t just out to make a buck.
I’m going to spend how much to play a game with an obligatory launcher after I already opened steam? And it’s badly optimised? 100gb you say? And I have to see ads for skins? And that’s competing with a game less than half the price that’s amazing, 3gb, no ads, and it can run on a decade old computer?
This is a big-budget problem. They made their omelette, and now they’ve got to sleep in it.
It’s not only big budget. A number of indie games that I thought were superb didn’t go on to make enough money for that team to make another. Mimimi games made excellent games within their niche, but it wasn’t enough to keep finding funding, and they closed. A game like The Thaumaturge from last year has a similar scope, budget, and genre to Expedition 33, but I don’t know that they made enough to keep the studio going. Sword of the Sea this year released to excellent reviews but subpar sales. There are a lot of examples, but this is a snapshot.
Even if you make an excellent game that makes money you can STILL be on the chopping block. See Hi Fi Rush. 😟
No one is forcing you to buy more games than you can play. Take some responsibility.
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I like having a lot of choices. You don’t need to play all the games!
How comes movies aren’t like this? I feel like there are so few movies but so many games.
The price it costs to make movies and the services that promote them. There are way more new movies than you realize. The market is just as oversaturated. You’re just less likely to see low budget indie movies the same way you prominently see low budget games and music unless you follow cheap horror circles and things like found footage.
Distribution. It’s very easy to put your game on Steam next to Grand Theft Auto. You’ll have a much harder time getting your indie film in theaters or on a streaming service. High quality movies aren’t typically found on someone’s YouTube channel.
You dont have to buy every game a reviewer hypes.
I literally can’t. The article is speaking from the industry perspective of sustaining its jobs though.
And it’s a problem that will hit the smaller dev studios harder.
As they are the ones fighting for attention. Especially on the monopolised PC marketplace.
There are enough people to buy the new games. The market for games has expanded along with the number of games in the market
Did you read the article at all? That is the entire point. That there are too many games relative to the number of gamers.
Did you? Do you not critically think about the content of any text you read?
Lots of people here didn’t read the article and took the headline to be a personal problem rather than an economic one, lol.
You’re both wrong though, just because there are 93% more games than 2020 doesn’t mean they’re following the same end goal as other games, it’s like comparing fanfics on wattpad to published books.
The end goal for all of them, unlike fanfics, is to sell enough copies to make their development costs back and be able to make another game. Even if you discount the stuff that no one has heard of, the point of the article is that there’s so much competition that even making a game that does well critically isn’t enough to save it; and it used to.
No, but I find fund in adding them to my backlog list anyway.
The first and foremost problem of the Videogame Industry is the videogame corporations. They
Over work and under pay workers
Transformed modern gaming into gambling
Enable pedophiles to run rampant on their platforms while censoring people who stop them (notably Roblox)
Needlessly price hike software and hardware
Purchase popular indie studios then shut them down
Etc
