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The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games | Jason Schreier
(www.bloomberg.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Are there too many musicians? Are there too many painters? Yes, it hurts discoverability, but honestly, if your game is good, it'll be played, I'm pretty sure. Metal doesn't appeal to the masses.. same for games.. not everything will appeal to the average gamer. But if you release the gaming equivalent of Master of puppets, people will buy it, I'm sure.
Not really.
It may be “feel good nice” if you make a few bucks to a few hundred good reviews on a passion project, but it’s not enough to help you eat and pay rent.
And making a game is a pretty massive time sink. Not to belittle other artists, but the bare minimum time/financial investment for one game is higher than, say, a digital art portfolio or an album.
There are hundreds of Masters of Puppets daily probably but it’s hard to tell because so much stuff is coming out, which is an issue when we want artists to be able to afford food. At this point I think civilised countries should be exploring how to fund video games like we fund other forms of art.
Being an artist has always been a financially unstable line of work, and it always will be. Art is not a necessity, and thus it relies on people having enough disposable income to spend on things like art. Anyone that thinks being an artist is financially sustainable is an idiot. Its feast or famine. When the product is good, the pay is good. When the product is bad, you probably don't have a job anymore. But neither of those things matter if people aren't buying art because they can barely afford groceries, including the artist.
What do you mean hundreds daily? We barely get 1 a month and even that is a stretch. I actually do listen to new metal releases almost every day and I can promise you, most of them are a 6-7/10 at best. I'm not some snob or picky listener either, so it's not a me problem.
So yeah, music might have a discoverability issue due to sheer number of stuff coming out, but I don't think gaming is quite there yet.
As for the funding, I agree. But that's a society issue, not a gaming specific one. There's starving artists in every art form. If anything, game devs have it easier than most others. I remember watching a video from some game conference by a solo dev that was specialized in making solitaire games (I think? I can't find the vid anymore, unfortunately). He was basically showing how you can make a living as a dev without ever having a hit or anything of the sort.
You might try to keep track of every new release but you’ll never be able to listen to everything coming from local bands that haven’t managed to make a bigger splash even if they objectively deserve it.
I’m hyperbolising of course with the numbers. It’s a problem in loads of forms of media these days and if you happen to consume couple of different kinds of media / genres then trying to do that means you’ll get swept by never ending tides and discoverability is just part of the problem. We no longer have bandwidth to consume everything that’s worth consuming.
Of course. But the good stuff will rise to the top. Especially in games. When it comes to bands, unfortunately not always the case, that's true. But that's a society issue. Universal basic income would help.
Civilised countries already do. There's government grants available for games dev in Australia and Canada that I'm aware of, at least. Not sure about the USA, but I don't really classify that as a civilised country any more, and they do everything government related in the stupidest way possible anyway.
In a sense yes there are too many. When the question is around the industrial level and making a living off the work. There 110% are too many.
No industry can support an infinite number of creators. There is a finite number of customers to serve after all.
There's not a single genre at this point that I can think of that isn't saturated by slop.
Slop, sure. There's always people that wanna try making easy money. But I think oversaturation is when there's too much of the good stuff or when the good stuff doesn't get seen because of too much slop. Is that the case? Because, again, I'd argue that it's more about the appeal and the quality of the games than a discoverability/oversaturation issue.
If you like every kind of game out there, sure, you'll never have enough time for every single one of them. But for those that only like driving games? Or only strategy games? Or only RPGs? I'd argue that there aren't enough high quality games out there. Way too many times I felt the need to play a specific kind of game only to look and not find anything new or to only find low quality games.
But you still have to discover someone putting out the equivalent of Master of puppets. The issue isn't that too many games get released, the issue is that too many good games get released. When every year 15 master of puppets comes are you going to buy all 15? Are you even going to be aware of all 15 of them?
People will buy what they're aware of and the issue is that so much good stuff is coming out it's almost impossible to be aware of all the good stuff coming out. That's the issue here, great games falling through the cracks because other great games release around it.
Well, not everything has mass appeal. That's why I gave a metal album as an example. Despite it being a masterpiece, not everyone will listen to it because it's not for everyone. Same with games. Not every game will sell as much as it deserves, but I believe it's more because of it not being appealing enough and not because there's a discoverability issue
The closest I could find about games that are masterpieces that flopped are either old games, which is a different issue or stuff like prey (2017) or Titanfall 2. So pretty big games, just not huge.
But great things have mass appeal outside their niche. Metallica is an excellent example of that because it's not only metalheads who listen to Metallica. Same thing with games.
I think we can agree that soulslikes are not for everyone. Lies of p and Lords of the fallen give a rough estimate what the core audience for soulslike is, which is pretty small. But it didn't stop Elden Ring from being the biggest release of that year, because Elden Ring transcends the genre it's in. Great games will pull people from outside their niche the same way great songs, shows, movies, books and paintings can reach well outside the box people have put them in.
In gaming we've seen the same thing happen with Silksong. Same thing happened with Clair Obscur and the JRPG genre. Same thing happen with BL4 and the looter shooter genre. Hades 2 will most likely pull people outside the roguelite genre. Silent hill f will most likely pull people outside the horror genre. When you have so many great games pulling players from outside their niche and hogging all the limelight, how are you going to discover those other great games that don't get any of the limelight? You won't, which is why this is a discoverability issue.
But which are these undiscovered gems? Feels like we're talking hypotheticals because googling hasn't produced any examples. I feel like it's also very subjective because it's quite easy to really like a game and feel like it's a 10/10 for you even tho for most other people it's just a 6/10 or maybe worse.
I enjoy stuff like caves of qud or whatever but I understand why it's not more popular. It's not for everyone.
Of course you're going to have a hard time finding anything on Google because any game that fails to be a success also drops from search results. But to give an example, Arco. It's got positive reviews from pretty much everyone giving it a review and yet it didn't even get more than 200 concurrent players on Steam. I'm not saying it's some unbelievable gaming experience, but it is a good game. If there's nothing wrong with the game why was it a failure? Am I supposed to believe they made a game for nobody?
Dunno how accurate this is but it says they sold 46k units. Not quite for nobody, is it? Even if everyone got it at 50% off, that's still 322k after steam's cut.
Now factor publishers cut and the cost of development. At 50% they probably didn't even recoup their costs.