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[LectureMaster]

I'm struggling to see the "problem", but let's just say "too many games" is a real problem for a second.....what's the solution?

Too many competitors for devs? No worries, papa Phil will buy you out.

Too many choices for gamers? Rest assured, papa Phil makes them all free for you on most premium most profitable sub service.

 

[Player Respawn]

Too many indie games, I miss the time of too many aa or aaa games.

 

[touchfuzzy]

Based on what I see on the storefronts, most of that enormous increase since 2020 is literally shovelware and AI slop.

 

[StereoVsn]

I'd bet most of these games are slop. I saw a video on YouTube where they literally had the same problem in the 80's on Atari, I think. Too many games being released to the point where they would just send the cartridges straight to the trash. It's a problem but it'll fix itself with a bunch of companies going bankrupt.

That's the interesting thing here. A ton of games that are destined to be buried are actually pretty decent to great.

The issue isn't just slop (ton of that as well), the issue is the sheer number of good games that are being released in conjunction of huge amount of games from the past for cheap.

There is too much content as teams across the world have access to global audience. And there isn't enough time for customers to play all that.

Couple the above with other time commitment like streaming, TikTok, YouTube, social media and so on…

 

[Killer8]

People should be feeling the squeeze and realizing that their time on this Earth is finite. The idea of not being able to "keep up" assumes that you are going to have the time to play everything. You don't. You will never get through your 400 game backlog. New releases are always coming out and adding to it. You simply need to be selective and only play what really matters to you. It's like when you were a kid and you didn't have money to play everything. Well, now as an adult you don't have time.

 

[bitbydeath]

Alternate title:

The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: It is doing too good

 

[DreamcastSkies]

People should be feeling the squeeze and realizing that their time on this Earth is finite.

Wise words. I'm in my 30s and I LOVE these things (these franchises, these games) but I can't buy all of them or play through all of them. I just can't. Time is needed for other things that need to get done, other things that are fun, and self-development.

 

[Hypereides]

I just perceive it as a positive change in the future of game development. There's a plethora of tools available and accessible than ever. Anyone whose willing or wants to get started on gamedev can get on it. Does it mean an increased output stream of games? Sure.

Personally, I think we're seeing a return to bedroom programming which is how game development began and we'll see the emergence of very small teams, and possibly "rockstars", again make new break away hits independently.

 

[Northeastmonk]

Queue the FOMO music.

 

[Loomy]

I'm not sure there's any solution to this problem.

....because it's....not a problem.

"Oh no! We have too many good things to choose from! Someone please start releasing some shitty games"

 

[Omnipunctual Godot]

This happened in the '80s, too. It preceded an industry crash. I'm not cheering it on, but I'd be okay with that at this point, honestly. If there's a videogame apocalypse, my backlog is basically a Vaul-Tec bunker.

 

[Minsc]

I feel like this is a much bigger issue for literature than gaming.

There's way, way, way too many books.

Also music. Way too many songs.

 

[StereoVsn]

I feel like this is a much bigger issue for literature than gaming.

There's way, way, way too many books.

Also music. Way too many songs.

And TV shows as well. For books though AI is a huge problem. So much slop is being produced, it's crazy.

Specifically for games, where this is leading is that publishers are increasingly unlikely willing to take risk. It's too easy even for bigger games to get lost in the large stream of new releases.

 

[Skeptical]

I dont understand what the point of this is? Is this a cry to action to make less games?

Well, Bloomberg is a business-oriented news organization. Maybe it's a warning that gaming isn't a good investment right now?

This wouldn't be in issue for developers if games weren't overpriced.

Doesn't matter the price. It's a problem for $10 indies just as much as your $100 Special Edition AAA game.

Reviewers can't keep up, algorithms are broken, and gamers are barely keeping up. We have slowly slid back into what it was like during the wild west of the 90s, when you'd grab a random import of a PS1 Japanese game that looked interesting but had zero US/EU reviews and hoped that the game was fun.

There's lots of people saying this is all just AI Slop or impossible to curate or not wanting to wade through 8000 asset flip games or whatever. Sure, there's some legitimacy to that. But did you miss the part where there are 260 games released so far on Steam this year with >500 reviews and >90% positive? Or check out Metacritic. 204 games so far this year with a score of 75 or better and a minimum of 7 reviews. Yes, not every good game can get reviewed. But there's still plenty of games that are reviewed out there that are still struggling.

Besides, literally every game has at least a 1 minute trailer that you can get some judgement on it. And the AI slop and asset flips are easy to spot. So this isn't as bad as the good ole days of judging a game by one screenshot in a magazine.

I'm struggling to see the "problem", but let's just say "too many games" is a real problem for a second.....what's the solution?

That's the neat part. There isn't one. Don't expect things to get better for a while.

There is no problem. You wouldn't know that reading GAF for the last 5 years though crying about devaluing.

The solution is games failing and the successful ones finding an audience.

No, it is a problem. Yes, the free market will correct, and companies will fail and other people will have success. The issue though is that AA and AAA games require significant investment and the potential return is spotty now. Easy enough for a 3 man team to take a gamble and find massive success like Hollow Knight. Maybe a 30 man team can do it every now and then. But 300 man team? If you can no longer rely on consistent sales for your products, how can you keep a consistent 30 man team?

And even if a 3 man team finds success, what then? Sure, Silksong was a huge success. But how many indie games out there had a reasonable amount of success in their first game, spent 4 years coming up with a sequel that they thought was an improvement, only to discover the population had moved on? If there's no consistency in the market and everything is so fickle, you can't properly assess your risk and can't make safe investments. So unless you have a mega success you can coast on, you end up always one failure away from closing down.

It's extremely hard to turn an AA game into a surprise massive success, because once you get beyond $20 people start demanding "polish" that eats up a lot of cost, and then devalue games that don't look like massive AAA games. So trying to build success on lots of new AA games means you end up failing (Square had a phase where they were throwing out all sorts of new ideas. Other than HD-2D, they all bombed and now they are scaling back on that). And massive AAA games take 6 years to make and thus a company needs to stay chained to them to maintain success (hence why Capcom is basically a Monster Hunter/Resident Evil company and barely anything else). Neither are positive for the industry.

And even trying to bond together to spread the risk around doesn't help in the indie world. Thunderful had serious pedigree, with a Steamworld franchise that was well regarded and had met with commercial success. They tried publishing, curating games that ended up critically acclaimed. They went bankrupt.


I think Schrier missed two issues here that compound the problem. The first is that there hasn't been any major new innovations in a while. You had screenscrolling in the 80s, 3D in the 90s, the push for ultrarealistic cinematics in the 00s (+online), and the indie boom in the 10s. What has there been since? With the industry space growing, investors could at least look at a game and say "That's new, that's going to get people's attention!" Now it's yet another Rogue Isometric Action with RPG elements and blah blah blah. Novelty catches people's attention. See Balatro or Vampire Hunters. But with the technology stagnant, novelty is hard to find.

It used to be that you put out a big budget game and it would automatically wow you. But does Starfield do anything new? Does Ubisoft's Star Wars game do anything new? It's no wonder those games bombed!

The second is the digitization and backward compatibility of gaming, which is also related to technology being stagnant. You are no longer competing against games released in the last couple years. You are competing against games released over the last 10+ years. When Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight first came out, Metroidvanias on modern consoles/PC were few and far between. Now there are 100s. And when a company released Action Game 4: Action Harder, people bought it because they didn't want to keep pulling out their old consoles to buy Action Game 3: Electric Boogaloo. But now why buy Action Game 5 when you can still play Action Game 4 easily? This is especially true for games not heavily reliant on plot or level design. Sure, you can point to poor implementation or bad decisions for why the latest Civilization game failed. But you can also ask why does anyone need to bother updating anyway?

There's also a third that is solely in multiplayer, and that's the death of couch/arcade gaming and the exclusive use of online. If you just want to hang out with your friends on the couch and beat each other up with a fighting game, as long as the game was fun then it didn't matter which one you got. Dead or Alive, Soul Calibur, Bloody Roar, just depended on your preferences and what kind of characters you liked. But now everything must be played online with ranked matchups and blah blah blah. So your game not only becomes un-fun, but nearly unplayable if there is no userbase. So new games are extremely risky. So why bother trying a new fighting game, even if it looks cool? Better stick with Tekken or Street Fighter. This one isn't new, but it's still causing bombs that take their publishers by surprise somehow. Didn't the latest Guilty Gear struggle?

 

[March Climber]

There's lots of people saying this is all just AI Slop or impossible to curate or not wanting to wade through 8000 asset flip games or whatever. Sure, there's some legitimacy to that. But did you miss the part where there are 260 games released so far on Steam this year with >500 reviews and >90% positive? Or check out Metacritic. 204 games so far this year with a score of 75 or better and a minimum of 7 reviews. Yes, not every good game can get reviewed. But there's still plenty of games that are reviewed out there that are still struggling.

My point was that I myself am not missing this, but tons of other people, including many here and elsewhere, are.

When the average person is seeing a random mediocre or bad AA, F2P, or indie game when they open up gaming storefronts or interact with their algorithms, then they are turned off or turned away from those experiences due to this, that is directly a curation issue.

Music, books, and movies are facing the exact same issue, which is why quite a few people have turned backwards, sticking to their favorite franchises and artists for far too long, barely checking out anything new due to being overwhelmed by the amount of choice and also the risk of being let down.

 

[Js562]

No such thing

 

[Minsc]

And TV shows as well. For books though AI is a huge problem. So much slop is being produced, it's crazy.

Specifically for games, where this is leading is that publishers are increasingly unlikely willing to take risk. It's too easy even for bigger games to get lost in the large stream of new releases.

Yes AI has made its terrible mark on more than just gaming, good point. Books written by AI. Fan fics of non-canon ships. So forth.

I did miss the biggest "too many" culprit though, it's not books, movies, music or games. It's people. There are simply too many people.

Think of any civilization game, how fun they are when it's beginning and manageable, then think how annoying they get when you have 40+ towns, hundreds of units moving around, and so much money, resources and power, but more problems than ever. The more you have, the more you ignore what you have.

If you had way less people, you'd have less games, less shows, and less books. Cut the population down by 1/1000th of what it is now, and other than all the AI slop, you'd have no excess. # Thanos was right?

Or more seriously maybe it is just technology. You can do far more, with far less human resources, on average, now than before.

 

[GHound]

• A comittee of chosen people deciding which games are deserving to be released and get the spotlight/best dates?

I think what's more amazing is how many retards would agree with him if he came out championing exactly this. Right up until it meant that a game they want was canceled because the committee in question is made up of people that hate their guts.

Can you imagine? "Sorry. Fuck off. We don't want your game to be released because it doesn't check some DIPSHIT DICKHEAD box we randomly decided on today. Go put it in cold storage and maybe it'll be trendy in a decade."
I mean hell there's kind of people already advocating for exactly that.

 

[Abysse]

I think Schrier missed two issues here that compound the problem. The first is that there hasn't been any major new innovations in a while. You had screenscrolling in the 80s, 3D in the 90s, the push for ultrarealistic cinematics in the 00s (+online), and the indie boom in the 10s. What has there been since? With the industry space growing, investors could at least look at a game and say "That's new, that's going to get people's attention!" Now it's yet another Rogue Isometric Action with RPG elements and blah blah blah. Novelty catches people's attention. See Balatro or Vampire Hunters. But with the technology stagnant, novelty is hard to find.

Players are allergic (especially casual players) to innovation or change, and they make up the majority of sales for any game. If a game changes the way it is played, they will complain.
"Why didn't they make it the same as other games?"