DC's Daily Discourse 1: Too Many God Damn Games!

E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) is coming up this week so all the big boys, and some of the little ones, will be showing off all the crazy crap that we’ll be buying this year and looking forward to next year. In light of that I’d like to illustrate a point: there are way too many god damn games nowadays! By that I mean there are way too many games released each year that are geared towards the same types of gamers, namely ones like myself. More big budget games are competing for the same money now than they used to. To demonstrate this let’s compare the big games that released last year with the big games that came out in 2000, 10 years before that. (Note:  these are just the games I personally would or want(ed) to buy/rent and not all the high profile releases for the periods, but you'll get the point.)

2000:

Kirby 64

Diablo 2

Rayman 2: The Great Escape

Pokemon Gold & Silver

Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

Counter-Strike

Skies of Arcadia

Final Fantasy IX

Banjo Tooie

That's 9 games. A pretty good selection including a few N64 games, a couple PS1 games, a couple PC games and even a great game for Dreamcast and GameBoy Color if you happened to own those consoles as well. All in all, 9 games would be more than enough for me to have in a year especially when Diablo 2 I played for many years, Counter-Strike is still the most popular Steam game 11 years later, and several other games on the list could hog up several weeks of your time in one playthrough. I own(ed) all but one of these games. Now, let's take a look at 2010's lineup.

2010:

Bayonetta

Darksiders

Mass Effect 2

MAG

Bioshock 2

Heavy Rain 

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

MLB 10: The Show

Final Fantasy XIII

Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver

God of War 3

3D Dot Game Heroes

Red Dead Redemption

Super Mario Galaxy 2

ModNation Racers

Sin & Punishment: Star Successor 

BlazBlue: Continuum Shift

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Kirby’s Epic Yarn

Fallout: New Vegas

Rock Band 3

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Sonic Colors

Gran Turismo 5

Epic Mickey

That's 29 games. Call me crazy but the games of 2010 look no less significant than the games of 2000 however there are three times as many games! Ten games would be more than enough for an entire year and that's significantly higher than popular surveys' threshold for 'hardcore' gamers. But seriously, 29 games in a year?! These are just the ones I wanted to play let alone someone with less picky tastes! Hell, more high profile games came out in the final 3 months of 2010 than came out in all of 2000. We're 6 months into 2011 and so far I've played 12 of these games, usually having to rent or sell them back in order to play the others rather than buy them new and keep them and I'm still not even halfway through them!

The video game industry is more lucrative and active than it's ever been before yet publishers wonder why GameStop can sustain a billion dollar business off of used games on top of that. The answer is simple, you're making too many god damn games! Take a break guys! We're halfway through 2011 and I've yet to play a single game released in 2011 because I'm still playing through 2010 and even some 2009 and earlier games, which are now no more than half the price of their newer counterparts. I'm not the anomaly here, you're just making too many good games and eventually the bubble's going to burst where you'll hit the absolute cap of money that can be lured from a typically poor demographic. I'll have more proof on this later.

D.C.