Nobody has time for video games anymore – Reader's Feature

The recent Newzoo report, about how much of our gaming is taken up by so few titles, highlights what I’ve long regarded as the elephant in the room when it comes to the industry’s problems. It’s about how gamers are expected to spend, not just their money but their valuable and limited time.

Looking at the current landscape, I’ve no doubt that, yes, triple-A games are becoming too expensive to make, that the market isn’t growing quickly enough, and that the biggest commercial risk takers might have to figure out ways to access more of it at a lower cost.

But the one thing I never see discussed – and what must be linked to all the above – is how there’s no other entertainment medium where the time spent by customers on one product has to be so dramatically at the expense of others.

When an album, book or film becomes a smash hit it’s generally good for the market as, beyond the single constraint of finite customer spending, that success doesn’t preclude other content from being successful.

I’ve heard claims by some that the same happens in gaming (Ubisoft’s CEO recently said the success of titles like GTA 6 is healthy for his business) but considering the effort that goes into live service titles keeping people tied up for as long as possible, and inevitably at the expense of other games they could be playing, I can’t see how those claims can be supported on a practical level.

I get all the ‘player demand’ points these businesses would inevitably make, when it comes to absolving themselves of any responsibility for market health, as they need to keep the content flowing by constantly pumping perks, incentives, and other updates into their games. But if these stats are accurate, it’s ultimately destructive behaviour in an industry where a fundamental condition of major success seems to be the widespread failure of the majority of potential competitors.

You’ll notice I’m not offering a solution for how to solve this problem but, aside from content providers acknowledging it exists, they could maybe try and come up with fewer games that insist on being the only thing we play for years at a time (or at least till their sequel is released).

To be perfectly honest, if a really good multiplayer game came out that promised 100% completion was possible within 50 hours I’d be much more likely to invest my time and money into it than something that I know before it’s even made is designed to ensure I play as few other games as possible.

Of course, live services aren’t the only culprits here, and if all the most time consuming games, that are strongly recommended to us by the media and the community, are thrown on the ‘unmissable’ pile then I’d say so much of the doom and gloom we’re seeing right now is a sign that there’s just too much content. And that it’s not the money to pay for it that’s the problem but the time to play it.

And if anyone continues to be baffled as to why good value services like Game Pass haven’t exploded in popularity, look no further than the notion that 500 good games at no additional cost is completely meaningless when we don’t even have time to play the small selection of games we’ve already got.

By reader Panda

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