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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

"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/

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

You dont have to buy every game a reviewer hypes.

How comes movies aren't like this? I feel like there are so few movies but so many games.

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

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

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.

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

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?"

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.

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".

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.