Perhaps the problem is..we have too many games?

Kyleran

At least one studio exec, Nacon head of publishing Benoit Clerc thinks so, interesting article where he elaborates on why.  What do you think, is he on to something?

"There are too many games currently on the market," Clerc says.  We're seeing today the results of investment made after [COVID] when the market was bursting, and every game was making a lot of money so there were a lot of investments being made.

This is two or three years after that, so the games we're seeing now on the market were financed in that time and there are simply too many for customers to be able to play them."

When you look at Steam some days, there are 50 or 60 games released in one day only so it's more difficult to get enough traction to expose a game."

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nacon-exec-says-industrys-problem-is-too-many-games

Wargfoot

Looks like a whole lot of not my problem.

Wargfoot

Actually, this does create some problems.  I know people who hit a game 24/7 for two months and then are gone.  Does anyone play a game and develop a community 5+ years anymore?

Everyone runs off to another shiny but its just a reskin of what they already were playing.

Wargfoot

I know people who’ve rejected Game A because of PvP, but are now in beta for a PvP title.  The ‘new’ is the only feature they chase; whereas, I hate new games because of th learning curve.

Tiller

Here is a game for everyone

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2696480/Nothing/

mekhere

We had to many games 5 years after the ps3 came out. social media helped with this problem. rich kids wanted to get paid to play games. those same kids made them pump out too many games. once again rich people ruin stuff. 

Kyleran

I have to admit every day games launch / close that I never even hear of.

Often I see games referenced with mega millions of players, yet despite knowing gamers of all ages, none of them are playing these very popular titles which have entralled so many others.

Maybe there's too many damn gamers with wildly differing tastes, so it is  challenging for developers to identify and market to the target niche, especially for mid sized studios  like Nacon.

Sovrath

Kyleran said:

Maybe there's too many damn gamers with wildly differing tastes, so it is  challenging for developers to identify and market to the target niche, especially for mid sized studios  like Nacon.

I think this is pretty much it.

I will say that sometimes larger games get released and they obscure the release of smaller titles. Or smaller developers just don't have the resources to market their games properly amid the crowd of other marketing endeavors.

Kyleran

Sovrath said:

Kyleran said:

Maybe there's too many damn gamers with wildly differing tastes, so it is  challenging for developers to identify and market to the target niche, especially for mid sized studios  like Nacon.

I think this is pretty much it.

I will say that sometimes larger games get released and they obscure the release of smaller titles. Or smaller developers just don't have the resources to market their games properly amid the crowd of other marketing endeavors.

Or some games get an amazing amount of hype or notice for reasons I don't understand, like the Day Before.

OK, maybe I do know for that one, it had zombies.

cheyane

A lot of games that is true. Hard to pick good ones from those.

Quizzical

The problem is not that there are too many games.  The problem is that there are too many bad games, which makes it harder for gamers to find the ones that are actually good.

Scot

Well this happened in MMOs, just too many of them, but since then gaming does seem to have gone for a baulk not quality option. I guess the butterfly players have pushed that, you know most players will not stay in a game for more than a month, why put more than a months time into a game?

Studios must see big content success like BG3 and go "sure great success but what about the risk?". Even BG3, (when I get it) if there are achievements for getting beyond a certain stage what will I find? Typically only between half and a third of the player base will reach the last third of the game and I am only counting games which scored 80+ on MC here, but that does not matter they still go.

madazz

Pretty disappointed in this post.

I think it should be, and probably is pretty obvious to most, that the real issue is too many terrible games.

This is what F2P/P2W brought. People on this very forum defended it with passion. And now here we are.

Kyleran

Is OK, I'm pretty disappointed in some folks ill-thought out replies as well

Crap stuff is always being made no matter what the product is, the trick is how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

As a publisher the question is how to get the message across to your target niche that your game stands out from the rest. (Assuming of course it actually does)

F2P is a problem, it is not really a major root cause to this problem.

Try thinking a little deeper.

Asm0deus

Wargfoot said:

...snip....

 I know people who hit a game 24/7 for two months and then are gone.  Does anyone play a game and develop a community 5+ years anymore?

Everyone runs off to another shiny but its just a reskin of what they already were playing.

No, even the really good games are generally not worth playing 5+ years non stop. 

Community now is finding a good group of peeps on discord and playing various games with them. Inside your community you have a people you get to know that you can pop in and out of games with as new content becomes available.

It's really not a problem IMO.

ValdemarJ

Are there too many movies, music, art, tv serials, or theatre being made? No.

This is really only a major problem for publishers who want to cash in on easy GAAS revenue, or studios that don't have a strong enough title to stand out from the crowd and make the money that meets their expectations.

The downside is that the large amount of churn and noise, along platforms playing exclusivity and revenue game, that makes it harder to find compatible games for players than it should be. Apple Music and Spotify are very good at making suggestions about what we want to listen to. Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation struggle to do that well and Nintendo doesn't do it at all.

Personally, I'd rather have more choice than less. In the 80s and 90s the landscape was relatively bare. We "liked" what we played because there was little choice. Either play what's there or starve and what we really wanted to play mostly wasn't available, at least not often.

Kyleran

Funny thing is, with all of this great  "choice" available today I still only find about 3 titles a year worth playing, same as it's been for more than 25 years now.

Is it really because I'm that choosy or is it developers haven't figured out a good way to reach me with to try their game out?

Probably a bit of both I suppose.

BrotherMaynard

Are there, though? And what would be the alternative according to him?

Today there are more gamers than ever before. Gaming industry revenue reaches unprecedented heights, so clearly, gamers are paying for something (I know, I know, microtransactions and all of it - they don't represent all the revenues, though).

Sure, if all that your game studio does are low-effort mediocre games based on templates and moronic market studies, with zero innovation, creativity and fun, then I'm not surprised that this claptrap is all you are left with, dear Benoît.

Should we desire fewer game studios producing fewer games? Is our friend Benoît perhaps suggesting a global oligopoly would be his preference? With a well-controlled annual supply of games?

Let the creative, the agile and nimble, the independent show dear Benoît and all the ossified studios out there that there are better ways to develop games. In the meantime I'll stock up on popcorn.

Wargfoot

Kyleran said:

Is OK, I'm pretty disappointed in some folks ill-thought out replies as well

I’ll be honest the first time I read the question my first thought was “a developer complaint, because he doesn’t have the goods”

It raises the question: what is the correct number of games to be released?  Is the correct number the number that allows this publisher to make a good profit?

That seems a bit self-serving. 

As a retort if this publisher feels too many games are being created, he can feel free to leave the business. No? that’s what I thought.

So on one hand, I found the question profoundly irritating bordering on ignorant. Conversely, I am frustrated that I lose so many members of my community to people who do nothing but chase Alpha releases….. more in love, with the potential for a game than the actual realized product.

Quizzical

Kyleran said:

Funny thing is, with all of this great  "choice" available today I still only find about 3 titles a year worth playing, same as it's been for more than 25 years now.

Is it really because I'm that choosy or is it developers haven't figured out a good way to reach me with to try their game out?

Probably a bit of both I suppose.

Part of the problem is that trying out a game for long enough to understand it is expensive.  It's not just the money, but also the time.  Maybe you can pick up and quickly understand a mediocre knock-off of something else that you've already played, but those games generally aren't interesting.  A game that does a lot of novel things that I'm not used to can easily take hours before I really know if I'll like it for very long or not.

There are probably several dozen games released in a typical year that I'd enjoy if I gave them a serious shot.  Maybe the number is even in the low hundreds.  But I don't know which ones they are, as they're mixed in with large numbers of games that I wouldn't like.

If I were to pick a thousand games that seemed like they might plausibly have some potential and played them for ten minutes each, I still wouldn't know which ones I'd really enjoy if I stuck with them.  Sure, I could weed out a lot of them pretty quickly as being buggy or stupid or whatever, but that would still leave a lot that might plausibly be good.

vonryan123

Quizzical said:

The problem is not that there are too many games.  The problem is that there are too many bad games, which makes it harder for gamers to find the ones that are actually good.

This and that we have people that rather than find a game they like stay in a game they don't then complain. Then devs change the game and those people are already gone. Not to mention I think gaming being so much more accessible to people has made a lot of people "gamers" that are not gamers.

Quizzical

If you think it's bad now, just wait until we get AI generated games.  What happens when one shady developer is able to put dozens of new, terrible games on Steam in an average day?  What happens when dozens of shady developers all do that?  AAA developers with big ad budgets will be able to stand out, but new solo developers or small indie teams are going to find it very hard to get noticed.

AAAMEOW

It's probably tough for indie developer or small studio since anyone can publish on steam, and there is a load of it.  So it's probably hard for a half decent indie game to stand out.  

Most people just pay attention to the main stream games.  

Brainy

I think its the opposite.  The problem is we have no amazing games these halfwit low energy game develops can copy.

It used to be that the reason movies were not doing amazing was because there was too many.   Then there was covid and very few movies were made and even less people watched.

So NO, we dont need to go back to old days of TV with only 3 channels, and being forced to watch Trash.

There are so many game players like myself that are on the sidelines that cant even find  1 good game.  This industry is releasing garbage and this dev says there are too many LOL.

I say, make better games and customers will follow.

mekhere

AI can't be all that smart. It's been out for over 6 months now and we don't even have a triple AAA game, new game engine, or better immersible 12k graphics. what hope do you all have that these milestones will be met in the near future? I find it amazing they can make trade bots with AI and pump out millions of dollars from various exchanges but can't develop one impressive tripe AAA title. 
My hopium is as cold as the start of a crypto winter before AI. I hope real change in this industry can bring it back. 

BrotherMaynard

Quizzical said:

If you think it's bad now, just wait until we get AI generated games.  What happens when one shady developer is able to put dozens of new, terrible games on Steam in an average day?  What happens when dozens of shady developers all do that?  AAA developers with big ad budgets will be able to stand out, but new solo developers or small indie teams are going to find it very hard to get noticed.

I don't see that as such a big problem, at least not the way you describe it. It will change things, but not by much. (Just to be clear, I don't mean here using AI 'legitimately' to enhance the production of proper games and the in-game experience; I mean mass-production of garbage clones.)

We already have countless clones of bubble shooters, jewels games and what have you - adding AI to the mix will not change this situation that dramatically. It will not be substantially different, just on a different scale. This issue is not at all unique to gaming - we've had mass-produced cheap counterfeit knock-offs for ages: they will always be part of our society. We learn to adapt.

There is an obvious tech solution for the likes of Valve: they can add flood control to their markets, just like what people use to fight spammers (online discussion groups have used it for 30+ years). When Steam detects a studio dumping games on the market, it puts them on hold either until human review or just adding a cooldown to the developer, e.g. 1 game per six months. No human crew could realistically churn out legitimate games faster.

The bigger problem are stores like Google Play and all business models that rely almost solely on in-app purchases: they have an incentive to allow flooding the market with free products that are monetised in-game. AI will boost this by orders of magnitude.

The second part of the solution is us. First, human brain is good at recognising patterns.  Excellent, even. This will also apply to cheap AI knock-offs. People will learn to look past the genre tags, game visuals, sales pitches and will start recognising the scam patterns behind. (Of course, what they will do with it afterwards is another question - even now people fall for scams despite all the warnings they have.) So this first part of the human solution is simply about us being able to look past the superficial descriptions and recognise the patterns. Our brains are good at that.

Second: gaming communities and curators will have a much bigger role. Various sub-reddits and similar dedicated groups will be vetting the games constantly. Steam can integrate their curators more deeply into their store and review system. In other words, people will rely more on the community to evaluate and prune the games.

This AI invasion is more of an issue for the legitimate developers, especially the small ones. They will need more effective ways to get noticed in all the background noise. I assume it will be mostly based on building up their reputation, directly engaging with the players (e.g. via the dedicated communities mentioned above); in short, developing people-to-people strategies to build up their studios and games, allowing them to stand out from the AI noise.

In summary, I don't see this as a major problems. We already have a similar situation and we already have the tools and approaches to address it. It's just a question of adapting. Which we will do - as we always have, it's part of our nature and biological hardware.