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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh well, ill just stick to forums to find out about quality games.
Tap for spoiler
Surprise, dickbag! Its all guerilla marketing!
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
This is also a lot of covid era games/funding come to fruition imo
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of people here didn’t read the article and took the headline to be a personal problem rather than an economic one, lol.
No, but I find fund in adding them to my backlog list anyway.
And then i play some city builder that cost $20 for 300 hrs
Or in my case, old driving games
Which city builder? I think I have 300 hours in Cities Skylines by now
Cities Skylines
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 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.
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? 😬
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.
