Is the games market over-saturated?

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Is the games market over-saturated?

(10 posts)

Started 2 years ago by silk
Latest reply from

silk
Member

After seeing poor sales from Enslaved and Vanquish I thought I'd start a discussion.

I feel the reason many titles aren't selling well (especially new IPs) boils down to "too many games, not enough time" syndrome. Something that's getting worse and worse.

Look at it this way.. films only take a couple of hours to watch, job done, so can go buy more films. Games can take 10-20 hours plus, if not more. And then MMO's make the problem worse; I spend most of my time on WoW so even less reason to buy other games.

Same can be said for online shooters, TF2, CoD and BF. You spend a good portion of time on these, you have less time for other, newer games. And what about DLC? Well I was about to put my copy of Fallout 3 on the shelf but I think I'll spend another 10 hours on it now, instead of buying another new game. Does DLC cause more harm than good in this regard? Or, is DLC truly the way developers should be going, releasing a *minimal* amount of new titles?

I personally have a backlog of 40+ games. If a game I wanted drops below £10 I impulse-buy but other than that I don't buy no matter how good it looks. Why bother. I work full time, never gonna get time to play it. I also impulse-buy on the steam sales, it's so easy. But half of them I haven't played yet so I'm also starting to "just not buy" anymore.

Most of the people I speak to lately also have a backlog of games to get through so are less inclined to buy new ones.

This year I only plan on buying Rift and Diablo 3. I "want" enslaved and vanquish, but not going to buy until under 10 pounds as in absolutely no rush for even more games that I don't have time for.

Posted 2 years ago #
Psychotext
Member

At some point it's going to be just like the world of movies and books. You wont possibly be able to play all the good stuff, you simply wont have time.

I've completely stopped buying new games now, and I'm really just working through my backlog. That'll mean that some of the slightly more average stuff that gets released will be completely ignored by me in the future, and I'll just be picking up the stuff that turns out to be the cream of the crop... for next to nothing.

Developers are countering that with a reliance on MP games (which most people usually want day one to ensure they don't get left behind / they play it when lots of other are), but for people like me who don't care about MP, it's fairly irrelevant. I appreciate that I'm in the minority though.

Posted 2 years ago #
ianbenoir
Member

i really don't think it resumes to too much games and long time to play.
I think whats going on is that now we have ppl. playing games in a bigger range of ages, from little kids to old ones.
Me as an example, i think both enslaved & vanquish are good games, but they are simply not the experience i'm looking for. I don't want to fight stupid robots(!) I really miss something more mature and that can entertain me. Its like watching a Transformers movie... You think the effects look great, but the story is totally crap crap crap.

When i was younger i would spend hours trying to kill that one boss in a game, now i simply don't have the patience to do it.
Not that i don't have time to, but its just that i think its a bad design. And i still don't understand the idea of: "this is a shooter", "this is a RPG", "this is a roleplay"...

i mean, C'mon!!
can you watch a movie where a guy spend 2hs shooting people? It reminds me of that German movie that plays in the end of Inglorious Basterds. Boring!

and its not a DLC that is going to save a game. For me the only good DLC i've seen so far in a console game was Red Dead's Undead Nightmare, But that's just because it turned the game into something else, not just more 20 minutes of the same thing..

Posted 2 years ago #
G1GAHURTZ
Member

I only play one game.

I've only really played one game for the last four years!

You can only really practice mono-game-y once you're found the game for you.

After that, you don't need to look twice a other games...

Posted 2 years ago #
Callum
Member

^^ WoW ?

Posted 2 years ago #
freedoms_stain
Moderator

If there are more games that you want to play than you have time to play, then yes.

Over the last year I've had a Lovefilm sub that I've played a lot of games through, but atm I've stopped them sending me games and I'm seriously tempted just to cancel the sub altogether because I have so many unfinished and even unplayed games that I physically own, plus there're a fuck ton of games coming out this year that I want to play.

Gonna have to be seriously selective and maybe limit the amount of time I dedicate to BC2, because I can seriously end up playing that all night.

Posted 2 years ago #
G1GAHURTZ
Member

^^ WoW ?

CoD.

Posted 2 years ago #
DSB
Member

Enslaved failed on lack of publicity, and the fact that I don't even know what Vanquish is, in spite of reading VG247 every day, probably means that someone dropped the ball on that one too. Even bad games need to be introduced to people before they're going to sell.

Back in the 90's there were a gazillion games being made, not a few of them in peoples basements and bedrooms, so if anything, there are a lot fewer games to choose from today. The only place you could ever create saturation would be in the adspace, but personally I don't run into a lot of game ads in the mainstream media.

I bought a lot of games on Steam over the holidays, only to find that most of them really weren't very interesting to me after all. Which is pretty much how it's always been, and as such I'm not that compelled to buy anything that looks slightly interesting at full price.

Posted 2 years ago #
Hunam
Member

I think there is a lot more games worth playing these days as the minimum quality has gone up drastically. But back then there was probably 6 or so games a year worth buying hence why PC online shooters were big business, because that's pretty much all we did on the PC back then and publishers didn't want to have 5 FPS games out a year because people would often spend a year plus on each big FPS game they bought when playing online. I mean I put in over 2 years of play on CS back in the day because we had the time as there wasn't much competition.

Posted 2 years ago #
Anonymous
Unregistered

they were new IP that's why they got poor sales also they need to figure a good month to release a new IP you cannot release new IP when reach,uncharted3,cod,assassin creed are releasing
i am pretty sure sequel if they ever made would sell better and may slighty boost sales of previous ones

Posted 2 years ago #

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