Colin Stevens176 Games By Christmas - Are There too Many (LINK)
June 30th 2008 02:02
From the list of upcoming titles I was able to obtain we will see another 176 titles hitting the shelves between now and christmas. I was able to narrow it down to 19 titles that I would like to own, which suggested to me that there are too many games being released.
Game developers have never had the level of support of funding then they do now. Hollywood is having to think about the entire medium of visual entertainment as profits soar. In the wake of this we are seeing a deluge of titles. I don't want to sound like i'm whining, the amount of choice is amazing and the quality at a jaw dropping excellence, but the fact is that not only can I not sustain this many titles but surely gamers will eventually have to decide which great titles to support and which will go by the wayside.
A lot of this decision is made through the community. Previews and reviews tend to let us know what the hits will be before they are released. So far we have been able to support the best titles. My games collection though is starting to rival the DVD's, who are nervously looking on as their real estate is eaten up by the latest collectors edition package.
In all of this we are still levelling critisism on games that are "too short". A 9 hour single player game will receive condemnation, regardless of the entertainment it provides. This critisism usually comes from the gaming sites. Now I can understand that reviewers jobs are to play games beginning to end, but for the regular gamer a 40 hour epic is something that will probably end up unfinished in todays rapid release enviornment. The majority of these games tend to pad out the story anyway. As much as I love Half Life 2, if the game were half the length and lost the boat and corridor crawling sections, I would have let it move in, choose its own linen and had it's chilldren. Online play has almost taken over as the preferred mode of play, and for the most people it's due to the ability to pick up and play when you can for as long as you can, be it a short of long time. Episodic content has attempted to address this, and even games such as Mass Effect have bite sized missions, perfect if you have 20 minutes to knock off another chunk of the storyline.
We must be cautious, the last thing we want is for the publishers to get nervous about bringout out big budget blockbusters becuase they think they might not cut through the sea of competitors vying for our dollars. My hope, and what I believe to be likely, is that as games get bigger we will see a proper release schedule emerge, a balanced story whose length is decided by the content rather than numerous filler levels, and a price drop to allow us to own a few extra.
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