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.

scale down then. or make better games.

capitalist crises of production are dumb.

"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’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 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 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

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".

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

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.

You dont have to buy every game a reviewer hypes.

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

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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