The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games

I disagree. The PC gaming market is about $76.67B. That's ~$4M for each of the 18,626 games, most of which are asset flip crap. Many of the remainder are by indie devs (generally <30 people). The article mentions about ~10% of those games receive 500 or more Steam reviews, so we're probably looking at $40M on average person game w/ 500+ reviews (i.e. probably not asset flip crap).

There are only about 20-30 AAA games released every year. The indie game market size is about $5B, and that's across platforms. Even if that was only for PC games, that's still 85% going to AAA studios, as in those 20-30 games that get media attention.

We don't have too many games, we have a problem where too few people buy indie games. The average successful indie studio isn't making $40M per game, it's likely much less than that.

Indie games are overrated, it's still mostly crap. I don't blame people for waiting for absurd popularity to bring actually good titles to the surface. It's still the same general problem, I have a the time for maybe 5 games per year, and that has to compete with my existing backlog, favorites and new titles. I'm not risking that time on Indie or AAA titles without some good evidence it's worth it.
But how on earth do you get people who only buy and play 4 or fewer games per year to look at those indie games instead of one of the same big games that all of their friends are playing? That demographic is why Grand Theft Auto, EA FC, Assassin's Creed, etc. is so big, because they capture the people who don't play many games. There is technically enough money to support the entire industry, but that's not really how consumer patterns have ever worked; most of it always goes to a select few.
- You're not going to convince the Madden/FIFA/etc group because community is more important than the game itself. The same is true for the big competitive games, since again, community is more important than the game itself.
  The rest of the market is massive though, and even the people who only play a handful of games still pick up the occasional game to play on their own.
  The solution here, IMO, is a high profile reviewer that focuses on indie games. In fact, we don't really need reviewers going over AAA games because their marketing departments are already handling it. I want professional reviewers who try hundreds of indie games every year and promote the top 10-20 or so. Indie games are some of my favorite, but finding them is incredibly time consuming.

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.

It does make sense, because "choice paralysis" is a thing that exists. So instead of choosing the game you want and playing it, you might spend more time looking for games to play than actually playing them.
- So there are not too many games. That seems like a personal handicap than a real problem.

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

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.

Those dastardly reviewers, always reviewing games and stuff!
- Have you read some of these reviews? Outright waste of time way too often.

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 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.

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.

scale down then. or make better games.

capitalist crises of production are dumb.

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.

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
No, but I find fund in adding them to my backlog list anyway.

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".

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 like having a lot of choices. You don't need to play all the games!

And then i play some city builder that cost $20 for 300 hrs

OpenTTD is free
- Considering the hours you put in a good building game just about every one of them is "free". But yeah, OpenTTD is great and a lot of fun. TTDX was my first PC game which was an instant buy (before I even had a computer but was getting one in a couple of months) after I saw a review on TV. The 90s was something else.
Which city builder? I think I have 300 hours in Cities Skylines by now
- Cities Skylines
Or in my case, old driving games

"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.

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.
- Can confirm, my neighbor makes indie films, and I don't live in Hollywood or anything, just a random town in Utah. There are more than you and I expect.
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.

The article seems primarily focused on new games. And the article still makes some great points, but when you factor in older games the problem gets bigger.

I am not going to say that old games were better or that "they just don't make them like they used to". What I will say is that a lot of older games that are super cheap on Steam or out of print entirely are still great. There are occasionally new great games being released of course (I haven't played Hades 2 yet but I expect it to be great, for example). But there's a lot of new games being released where I think... "Why would I spend $70 or $80 on this when I already have this backlog of older games? Why would I spend my time playing 7/10 games when I have dozens of 9/10's sitting in my library waiting for me?"

Yeah. When they announced the new Silent Hill I was somewhat interested - although I felt the peak was back then with SH2. But having read about the remaster of SH2 and some reviews that said, it'd return to the roots? Nice!
Then I saw a streamer play it early, watched a bit and it looked promising. So I went to wishlist it. Then the release day comes and steam lists it for 70 bucks (available in two days) or 90 bucks now. Well, no. Let's see how long the price will be that high, but WTF? I don't wanna know what's the price on console for it - usually it's 10-20 bucks more?!?
Very true. And sometimes there's an answer to those questions, even if we discount the games designed to disappear after a few years. You might be sensitive to spoilers, it might be the perfect game for you in the moment (like the right game for a handheld system just before a trip), your friends might want to play it with you or talk with you about it when you're done, etc. But that competition with back catalogs absolutely exists.

I don’t feel there are too many games, because I can simply buy fewer games, but I do miss the feeling that there are games that everyone is buying and we’re all playing at the same time. I felt like everyone I knew was playing BG3 and we were all talking about it all the time. I don’t want to only play those kinds of big, blockbuster games, but I do want a few of them per year.

I've learned to be more careful with those hyped games. I don't like souls likes or platformers, but black myth wukong and silksong are both massively popular. I saw enough comments claiming BMW "wasn't a souls like" that I decided to give it a try. I'm sure there are some technical deviations from the genre to claim it's its own thing, but fit me it was just a miserable waste of $60.
Omg there's too many cars I can't buy them all.
- I mean... Unironically, yeah. Do you want to start importing Kei cars? What about ADM, or Euro spec? You want to collect a specific year of econobox or do you want to aim for a high end sports car?
  Too many cars.

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

Yup.

The overabundance of games is killing great games.

Can't tell you how many fantastic multiplayer games I've bought only to find out they're ghost towns or become ghost towns soon after purchasing. And it's because players are so spread out over so many games. 20 years ago these games would have been major successes with a huge player base for years, but they're dead on arrival or within a few months. It's a real bummer.

That being said, I'm going to plug Mycopunk. Just got it and it's great. Like Deep Rock Galactic and Risk of Rain 2 had a baby. We need more players though. Came out in July. Currently on sale. But base price is cheap.

Will give mycopunk a shot.
- It's great. It's early access, so it needs some polishing, but it's already pretty solid. It can be a little overwhelming at first, so make sure you're doing one of the easier difficulties. Get your weapons and character leveled up and it starts becoming more engaging. Try out different weapons too. I was struggling until I started branching out. And keep in mind that the enemies are made up of various parts and you can blow those parts off and then other enemies can pick those parts up and use them. So learning how to take off limbs and then make sure the limbs are destroyed so they can't be re-used is important.
  Oh, and it allows gifs in the in-game chat. Something I've never seen in a game before. Type "/gif" followed by any keyword and it tosses an appropriate gif into the chat. It's a lot of fun to mess around with.
There are multiplayer games from 30 years ago that still have 30 people who play on the first Friday night of each month, and they will put that in their calendar and keep the game alive.
The idea that multiplayer games need huge communities of players otherwise they are "dead" is what is killing multiplayer games.
- There are three tiers of activity:
  Active enough that I can queue at any time of day and find opponents close to my skill level with good ping
  Active enough that I can queue at peak hours and find opponents
  Need to schedule games via Discord matchmaking
  If I really love the game enough, I'll put up with jumping through hoops to play it, but it does get frustrating when the games I like are a lot more convenient to play than the games I love.
- I mean I get what you're saying. I've been playing Sven-Coop for 26 years and counting. People are still playing. People are still making new levels for it.
  But it's mostly people on the older side and it's because it was a mod for a HUGELY popular game and the mod itself used to have a ton of players.
  But a lot of these new, good games never get that big following that allow for a small fan base decades later. Or even months later. Because there's so many other options spreading gamers out.
- Maybe smaller titles could enable players to actively communicate times to meet.
Multiplayer games 20 years ago were also built to be more scalable to different numbers of players, and they mostly had bots and such, too. I might push back on how long they sustained huge player bases though. Those games were often sequeled very quickly, and most of the players would move to the next one, leaving behind a small percentage. At least the old game was always still playable for those who bought it, though.

I dont really think this is an actual problem. Yes, theres a lot of games now, far more than ever before and more releasing in a year than some consoles had in their lifetime. But this is actually a good thing because it means this industry is more accessible than ever and we have very little limit on what experiences we can have.

The actual problem is the diversity and quality of those games due to muddy motivations. Like any entertainment industry under capitalism, artists are not just performing their art because it is their passion, its also to make a living. At the start, the core motivation is passion, a desire to create and innovate and expand on what that medium can be. When that medium reaches a point where a newbie with great talent can become an overnight sensation, then the motivations for creating art in that field become tainted because individuals start to believe that they dont need passion for the art in order to make massive amounts of money. The market will start being flooded with greedy, talentless people who are looking to cash in on the craze.

Ive been gaming since Sega Genesis, and have followed the industry closely most of my life. To this day, I believe everything in modern gaming can be connected back to the insane popularity of Call of Duty 4. Before that game, nearly every game that came out was trying to do something unique. They might share a genre, but they always did something to stand out from the crowd. Very few games were ripping off a competitor, and the ones that did normally did it so poorly that they immediately got ignored. But after the success of CoD4, that changed massively. Everyone was releasing a first person shooter with pvp multiplayer. Games that didnt need multiplayer had it tacked on per publisher demand. Japan went full on stupid and stopped making games that had that particular vibe that only Japanese games had, and even went as far as hiring western studios to redo franchises that absolutely did not need to be redone, with Capcom coming to mind as particularly bad about this. The market was flooded with low quality, cheaply made games trying to get a part of that bag that CoD4 made.

But we actually got lucky during all of this. Xbox and Steam were both platforms that attempted to lift up independent developers. Unlike the film industry, a space was created for low budget game development, and tools to make games were permitted to be accessible for very cheap. What this did was allow those artists who actually have passion in their art be able to take a pathway to creating high quality games. The ripples of that are felt to this very day, with Silksong being a perfect example of why accessibility in a medium is important.

There are a lot of games, and a lot of them suck for sure. A lot of them are rip offs, overpriced re-releases, clones, and even scams. But with that we've also gained so many great games, in so many genres, with new genres being molded like every month. The AAA space is arguably in a state of painful saturation, where budgets are bloated, dev times are too long, quality is poor, and prices are absurd. This will end up in whiplash against the AAA scene in time, probably sooner than later. But unlike when a similar phase happened in the Atari era, almost killing the games industry, that just wont happen this time, because the industry is not reliant on giant corpos to carry it.

What i would recommend as a gamer is to give up on the old notion that you can play all the games that come out. Especially as you get older, you wont have the time and you shouldny try to make the time for all of that. Treat games like people treat music. You cant listen to all of the music, and you shouldn't try to. You find the type of music you like, and search that space to find more things to enjoy. Do the same with games. Dont rush through them, play them at a pace that is fun for you and lets you soak them in, and play the games that specifically appeal to you. Even if its a single game you play on repeat, if it brings you joy then it shouldnt matter.

A more controversial recommendation is stop being averse to spoilers. If your friend plays a game that you dont know if you will ever bother to play, let that friend tell you about the game. Studies have actually shown that players enjoy a game more when they go in knowing spoilers. This might not apply to all games, but from personal experience I can say letting a friend ramble about a game they love that I only have a mild interest in has not only caused me to actually play those games, but games are so rich in detail and varying experiences that I will end up having a very different experience than them that I now get to share with them. Being less averse to spoilers both helps you be able to communicate with more people about gaming, as well as gain new insight on games you might be on the fence about. This can help reduce the amount of games you feel an urge to play but cant make time for by acting as a social filter, or "word of mouth".

Competition is what degrades quality. People who's needs are met are more creative and more likely to take risks and more likely to try to make something unique. That's the problem with the influx of games. You see it in everything. People who are already insulated with a secure amount of wealth are able to become creative musicians/artists and others will just try to copy what makes money, but ultimately most will fail due to the sheer amount of people competing. If every developer and creator's needs were met before they tried creating anything then the landscape would look very different, but that's not the world we live in.
The market is extremely competitive, and ever more so with each new developer. Everything is more accesssible yes, but that is worse for everyone besides major IPs who will always make money and those who can take risks because they are in a position to do so. This is the problem with all creative fields. It's great for people who are already secure and terrible for everyone else.

It does feel like the market is so saturated now.

In the end it's up to us to vote with our wallets and spend how we want.

My gaming backlog is so big ... I don't really feel the need to buy new games unless it's something universally loved, like Clair Obscure.

Aside from that, I really ought to work on my backlog.

Whether I succeed in this impulse control is another story ... Lol.

Statistically, if more than half of a random sample of steam games are rated to be good, the standards for evaluation are shit.

And the people that were supposed to let us know if a game is good or not, the "professionals", have a median score around ~75% according to open critic data, otherwise they wouldn't have a job because sponsors would gfo.

We're on our own shifting through a pile of de facto shovelware to find anything of worth nowadays.

It's a problem not exclusive to games, mind you. Music, scientific publishing and other content for profit industries have the exact same issue: Vetting quality requires work so for profit institutions offload the vetting to the user.

Oh well, ill just stick to forums to find out about quality games.
The things getting reviewed already have a selection bias that makes them more likely to review well. It's not a problem that reviewers focus their time on the games that their audience is most interested in, as opposed to reviewing every asset flip published to Steam.
- I'm sure Kane and Lynch are audience favorites. No reason not to think only the best games get reviewed and thus, shifting the mean 25% in the favor of the companies that just so happen to be the ones paying for advertising. It's more likely outlets, on average, only review good games, that sounds more reasonable.

The problem they describe will self-correct; the "market" will drive that. But it might not be pretty. The things below are already happening, but will be further instigated:

New AAA non-franchise titles will be less common because return is less likely amongst the sea of new games coming out. Investors will continue to gamble on them, but they'll be fewer and further between.

Mid-budget AA games not in a niche will disappear. You'll still have your city builders, your milsim squad shooters, your competitive RTS games, but you won't be seeing many new AA action platformers, multiplayer CoD style shooters, block puzzlers, adventure RPGs, etc. They'll either be bare budget / indie or mega budget.

You'll see dev cost continue to be driven down to mitigate this risk, making quality suffer. Asset flips, AI, and outsourcing will increase for most studios that don't get recurring revenue from live service games.

Indies will continue to be random breakout hits, but their studios will die fast because followups to their breakouts often drown in the sea too.

Being an employee in the industry will probably mean jumping from company to company where you might only stick around for 1 - 2 titles before a major layoff. Contracting will get more common.

Going to need a global wave of union organization to at least get royalties on sales determined for contribution levels. That's unlikely to be incredible money but anything is better than nothing as you age towards their elder years

Besides that, no real solution. It's happened to every art industry. It turns out there's probably been an incredible amount of artistic talent every year throughout the millenniums but it's just the last couple decades where it didn't require super levels of luck and financial backing to make it

I believe Gearbox has always done this royalty situation union-less. But that doesn't spread out sales to other games that need customers. There are still going to be plenty of games that just don't move a lot of copies because other games suck the oxygen out of the room.
- Let's not toot Gearbox's horn. While Borderlands 3 was their biggest success when it launched the people working on it got less royalties (per person) than they got for Borderlands 2. Meanwhile Pitchford bargained himself a 12 million bonus before the game was even released. Oh and when people complained about getting less royalties Pitchford said, like the asshole he is, they're free to quit. Gearbox does royalty situation union-less (as I know 40% of the royalties are split between the employees), but that comes at the cost of having to put to with one the biggest assholes in the industry who will tell you to eat shit if you don't like something.

Dear video game developers,

There are too many video games nowadays. Please eliminate three.

I am not a crackpot.

I haven't finished half of my backlog because I'm mainly playing Fallout 76 and No Man's Sky. I don't have time to play every game I want just like I do not have time to watch every show on TV.

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.

ADHD is treatable.

Unless you’re from the UK where their idea of treatment is getting you to give up seeking it.
- Or if you're in the US where all healthcare is absolute dogshit.
This part of ADHD actually isn't.
What I'm doing is the opposite of ADHD. You also could have read the article.

Why does anyone read Bloomberg? That shit is the equivalent of the suit wearing shitty little twerp on a college campus c. 2017 being a conservative edge lord. Change my mind.

I have zero interest for Bloomberg in general, but, that's Jason Schreier.
He's one of the very few you could reasonably call a videogame journalist non-ironically, and I really don't think "conservative" describes his views.

This is also a lot of covid era games/funding come to fruition imo

How is having more options a problem?

I'm playing games that came out 10 hears ago, and I have a backlog of many years and I couldn't be happier with it.

It's better than no having anything to play.

At a industry level we all know that gamedev is not a great career. Specially if you are indie the most common profit is 0. But it's ok. You can do it just for the love of it as I do. I spent time making games just because I love it. No everything have to turn a profit.

It’s the same with tv. I am very picky with my time. So i play very few games or watch very few shows.

It's not a problem for me just because of the cost. I want to play Expedition 33 but I'm not sure I want to pay $70 to do so.

I'm happy just playing my old ROM collections or booting up Cyberpunk or whatever. but now I just can't justify dropping $70+ on a game anymore.

sigh, I'll probably just end up going back to EVE Online.

Not every game costs $70. Expedition 33 in particular only costs $50 when it's not on sale, unless you're in a different region where $50 USD converts to $70 in your country.
- yup, am a Canuck :/

And you know, if wouldn't hurt my ability to play more games if more of them were shorter.

From the article:

In 2024, a staggering 18,626 games were released on Steam, according to SteamDB, a website that tracks data on the popular PC platform. That’s an increase of around 93% from 2020, when 9,656 games were released.

By my count, if you don't sleep or eat and only play videogames you need every game to be about 30 minutes long on average.

I mean, it wouldn't hurt, but I'm gonna say it's not enough.

In all seriousness, I'm more concerned by the competition from social media and on demand video. I'm typing this, which isn't that interesting of an activity. Idling online is a huge time sink, and it's getting bigger.

EVE ONLINE UNTIL I DIE

I'm still playing Doom, the original!
please, don't. I'm on another 3 month break from EVE and I don't want to go back just yet but....please...don't I'm tired boss.
this has been my life since 2003. EVE, take a break, EVE, another break, EVE, so on and so forth.

No one is forcing you to buy more games than you can play. Take some responsibility.

I've been playing The Binding of Isaac for decades. I've bought it probably 5 times on different systems, for friends, etc, bought the expansions as well. I've probably still spent less on that game than what a current AAA title costs, and I still have new content to play.

The problem with the industry is they are all trying to get the "next big thing" and they stick to the same formula, there's no innovation from the big studios anymore. That's also why I play way more Indie games, I think the last major title I bought was Tears of the Kingdom, and that was probably the last Nintendo title I'll purchase.

Silksong & Hades 2 will probably be enough to last me the rest of the year. Having 1000 games to pick from doesn't bother me because I don't need to play them all.

This becomes even worse when you also want to play old gems that missed because you weren't even born, or because you had kid taste in your early gaming days, but there are worse things to complain at.

My first two video games that I had were Gran Turismo and Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22, so at my 6 years old or so I already had negative time of hundreds of nice jRPG gems LMAO.

Hmm… newest game in my library is Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes from last year, which is a re-release anyway.

I bought 13 old-ish (pre-2022) games this year for less than $100. I have no reason to spend %60-80 of that on 1 game I probably won't even like, and that's if it clears the seemingly impossible "playable" hurdle.

Let me count upcoming games I look forward to playing/am curious about:

Ninja Gaiden 4 (Happy to wait for a deep sale)
Onimusha (Happy to wait for a deep sale and may even refund if I don't enjoy it)
Okami 2 (Happy to wait for a deep sale)
Marvel: Tokon (Will definitely wait for a deep sale—$10 base game)

That's it.

I definitely went to see more new movies at the cinema this year than I played new games. IDK where the industry is headed and I feel for all the underpaid, overworked developers at risk, but there isn't much I can do if publishers collectively decided to abandon my favorite genres.

Elden Ring has been praised by everyone.

It's one thing if a reviewer says it's good. His livelyhood relies on the video game industry thriveing. If you stop buying this game, the studio won't make the next game. If the studio won't make the next game, the reviewer can't review the next game. If the reviewer can't review the next game, then where does their paycheck come from?

So I'm not saying they knowingly artificially raise scores and sell games. I'm just saying maybe a 7 gets reviewed as an 8 just so the reviewer won't feel awkward when meeting with industry folk at the next industry get together.

But when gamers collectively band together, and say itxs 10/10, and game of the year, I feel rest assured that Elden Ring is as good as people say.

I have not bought Elden Ring. I have not played Elden Ring. In all honesty, I probably won't. Why?

BECAUSE YOU DON'T NEED TO PLAY EVERY SINGLE GAME JUST BECAUSE IT'S AMAZING!!! YOU CAN JUST NOOOOOT PLAY IT!

Don't blame too many games. Don't blame reviewers. Don't blame anything. This is only a problem if you let it control your life. Variety is good for everybody. Some games you can just let others enjoy. I'm glad Elden Ring is so great. I don't feel bad I missed it. I'm happy for you if you loved it.

Isn't that so much healthier of an attitude to have?

The article is about how so many games are coming out that many of the companies making them are going under even when they make games that are evaluated as being good or great. I provided an anecdote about myself that probably contributes to it. I didn't really share it to be about my attitude toward being able to play these games. I'll be just fine.

The problem is the immature critique and not the quantity.

you mean too many shit games. its insanely hard to put anything into whishlist, cause every game is one of these:

phone game fps on rails, ported to pc, runs even worse than on mobile
anime girl doing something generic, the gameplay is pretty much abismal at this point.
pixelated sidescroller with the classic brown-green mario lookin map, but the leveldesign was random generated
action roguelike that pops up an upgrade every .1 seconds
ue5 horror game, where the first scene is an idiot going to a dark shed with the same flashlight model everyone used for 20 years now. runs at a cinematic fps on the lowest setting with dlss.
visual novel but the aspect ratio doesnt fit any known screen resolution from the past 29 years
good lookin game that is sitting in early acces for 7 years now. gets a balancing update every year, but we all know the campaign is never gonna get finished.
ragegame where its hard to control your own character cause "hahaxdfunny"
hardcore game that doesnt show you a tutorial, expects you to learn it from ingame, but since its hardcore it only has empty servers. devs tells you to engage with the toxic 200 ppl community in his little discord server.
super popular multiplayer where noone communicates, but you are suppose to work together
a game that was clearly made within a week, plays well, but its short and has no control settings. you never see the dev again on the internet.

there are so many games, cause it is just too easy to make something. the end is a neverending sea of slop. the worst part is, real gems are just almost impossible to find anymore.

Well said IMO.
Soon to come: AI made games? 😬

The main problem I see is that creators and all of the people involved in creating games get a smaller share than they would have in the generations before and games aren't getting cheaper to make. It's the same with movies and music and everything. There's only so much capital and the pool of people fighting over it keeps getting bigger. It would be nice if people could make shit just for the sake of making it but instead every market has become a cutthroat competitive wasteland of bland bullshit and half assed or unfinished projects.

I buy tons of games. I hardly play most of them. So many have potential, but stay in early access or fizzle out and the developers abandon it. It really sucks, because I do see a lot of creativity and really awesome ideas that go to waste. Unfortunately, people have to make money to survive and can't just create art for art's sake.

The answer is slow gaming. If it is not still known as a good game 5-10 years after release, it is not worth buying.

Also helps avoid games which vanish like a fart after they get your money.

Back when I was on Reddit years ago, one of my favorite subs was the Patient Gamers one. There are a couple of similar ones on different Lemmy instances but they're nowhere near as active.
I remember friends of mine assuring me I absolutely HAVE to get games like Atomic Heart, High on Life, Avowed, the Oblivion remaster, Starfield, Prey, the Outer Worlds, and many more. There are series that I have enjoyed in the last that have way too many entries to keep up with- 3D Sonic, Assassin's Creed, Monster Hunter, Yakuza (with all it's spinoff games like Judgement and others). I'm sure a lot of those games are great, but I just don't have the time to play then all. And with hundreds of games in my backlog already, these games need to be on sale for dirt cheap and without anti-features like DRM and micro transactions and online requirements in order to get me to buy them.
So I think it's worth asking- are there enough whales willing to buy these games for $70 or even $80 to subsidize people like me picking them up for $10 in five years? If not, perhaps these developers and publishers will need to move to a different business model. Maybe there are simply too many devs and too many games getting made.
- I have a friend that insists on getting games at launch. When I get the games years later though I notice they haven't even played them for a hour while I go on to actually finish them.
  So I think some people buy because of the hype than to actually play the game, since the act of purchasing gives them the high.
That's an answer for you as a consumer, but the article is from the perspective of the industry. If no one ever bought new games, game development would not be sustainable.
The answer to what?
I mean, that's the problem, from the article's perspective.

So? It's your own fault, just as it was mine, for compulsively buying games you're not going to play ever. There's still going to be games being released after you die, so, why worry too much about the volume of games?

I'm only buying the games I'm going to play, and this article is about the industry's problem.
- But I don't see how it is a problem. Because the article or whomever wrote it, is basically asking the industry "hey, take a break, stop producing things." Which, you mind as well ask every other industry and it'll more ridiculous per request.
  "Hey Authors, please stop writing things, I need to catch up on my library!"
  "Hey movie directors, please stop making films, I need to watch my library!"
  "Hey TV Networks, I need to catch up on this series!"
  See how dumb that all sounds?