Why We Suffer: Too Many Games…?

As of January 2024, there is a trendy, as in fresh new approach to understanding the recent shortfall that the video games industry is facing.

There are “too many games for customers to be able to play them”.

It is not exactly clear, to me at least, where this started. There is this article where an individual, from a micro publisher, seems to have originated the talk. Personally I have first found out about it when an employee from a powerful VC firm posted about it here, on LinkedIn .

Did the publisher heard of it during a meeting or read about it, or was it the VC who read that article and made the argument his own? Who knows. Anyhow, it is being repeated and amplified. So much so that you can hear and read about it almost everyday and will most certainly continue hearing about it in the coming months, especially at the inset / outset of popular video games events.

For instance a certain post on LinkedIn written after the PocketGamer conference in London that took place on January 22 and 23. While all the comments seemed to agree, I decided to react and be voluntarily provocative about it, which got me a perma ban by the OP: what can I say, I know this is a Mickey Mouse world, but I’m just not the type of guy who’s going to smile and let it go, let it go when I’m told, as a counter-argument by said OP, that “Supercell started in 2010 when AppStore was only 2 years old, and Supercell didn’t get it right immediately”. I’ll let you correct the inexactitudes in the statement. For reference though, there were 70,000 iOS games in 2010 and 120,000 by 2012 (there’s now over a million - 1,000,000 - games as of Q4 2023).

This is leaving me wondering: what is the purpose of the message?

If you check the reactions on Reddit about the original article, they are rightfully not very positive, even though Reddit and most social platforms are by nature almost exclusively rant avenues.

With this said, I personally know of the risks and consequences of talking too much, too fast to the video games press. Mon ami, you have some excuses. Next time though, do pay for a PR firm is my advice.

But why does it get repeated and amplified, especially by the most prominent cash lenders right now? What’s the bottomline about this?

Is it just some filler argument that gets in there to reach, unlike this story, the algorithm-friendly word count? Or some ways to connect with some of the industry that, because the algo says it so, is reading about it en masse? Is it just some noise that’ll go away faster than you can say “Yuga!”?

I just don’t see the angle. Perhaps it is a simple case of someone having a tough time explaining to their LPs the ROI on his or her P&L to 2030 and is building a case of ‘I told you so’ or ‘no one could have known!’.

Too many games though seem to be exactly what Netflix believes needs to be done to be taken seriously and make the numbers, including no less than 10 million downloads in 2023 alone (wow).

The number of games also does not seem to be a problem for the prodigal PalWorld, an ‘indie’ title that everyone in the industry loves posting about right now to help us define and redefine, in all tenses and pronouns, how we can be more successful at releasing a new game. This must be a glitch then that no one, accordingly to Google Trends, did talk about this before the game’s release. Which reminds of when Fortnite was first talked about, during GDC’s 2017 edition, on the cover of a now defunct printed magazine and how the games was talked about, not as the one off hit that put Epic back on the map, but as a showcase project of what Unreal Engine could do for developers (and accordingly to show that Unreal was better than Unity, also for mobile). For reference, there were a lot of games back then, pretty much everywhere, including 800,000 iOS games on AppStore, and no less than 800 games released per month on Steam.

Too many games? Yes, it is hard when you have competition.

This reminds me a few other stories of my own.

Back in 2008, so ages ago you’ll agree, when mobile wasn’t a thing. Or actually was a thing that everyone loved to hate, especially 美国艺电公司 who expressly did not want to hire anyone “coming from mobile”. But I digress.

2008. When mobile platforms were so limited (contractors convinced the telcos it was more profitable that way) that it could only support about 400 games for purchase at any given time.

Imagine being the head of mobile at a BIG publisher, a really BIG one, and having to present roughly 30 games a year and being told “but EA, Gameloft and Glu have 1,000 games each”. Or “what do you have for us today? Baby PAC-MAN, Grandpa PAC-MAN?! LOL”.

Of course, anyone in the team wished they actually were at Glu or EA. These guys had all the hot stuff, from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to the latest action and scifi blockbuster films that they could piggyback for a penny with the console skus. And they did pay 40% higher wages too and really, really nice offsites.?

But we had to make it work. Going back to the office and say “we can’t compete with EA and Gameloft who have thousands of games” wasn’t a thing. Each month was a pain, we dreaded the next sales meeting. Eventually we didn’t even try to bring excuses, we just weathered the storm.

So when I brought that one title to telcos and said “this is going to be a hit, please help”, there was no surprise then that the only replies I got were “there are already enough brain games. From EA, Gameloft and the best one from Digital Chocolate. Bring us Tekken instead”. (note to the OP of the LinkedIn post mentioned above: DC is the original Supercell ).

One partner though did trust me and believed in the project. And thanks to him, the game would eventually be, within 3 months of its release, on the billboards of train stations across Europe, courtesy of the telcos themselves. It was the first and the last time mobile games reached a cultural status with mass appeal (at least until AppStore). The other brain games? They vanished from the face of the earth, overnight.

This is not an exercise in self-promotion or a bittersweet symphony. I’m not the one who complained back then of the market being flooded by ‘too many games’.

The telcos did.

I can clearly remember Deutsche Telekom telling us “games are a one liner in our account statement. No one cares, because we make $200 million with it and we’re a $90 billion company. All of us at DT working on this know this is a career dead-end while the best thing we can hope for is working on device management directly with the OEMs”. A clever and quasi undebatable statement. But if you could read between the lines this also meant, while we had great friendly relationships with some of them, that we were wasting a lot of time trying to make it, even with a single sku selling in the 10s of millions – an amount by the way which was not enough and brought at best 40 cents revenues and around 10 cents profits on the dollar (what that story doesn’t say is money and profits were elsewhere in the equation). And then, Apple: thank you telcos for your clairvoyance!

‘Too many games’ also empowered a radical change in the industry, when free-to-play became the norm, so sometimes around 2013/14. It was a transition time that saw an operational shift from Excel to SaaS and the meteoric growth of advertising platforms, who eventually became data aggregators and processors and allowed for yet another cycle of growth and free money in tech.

‘Too many games’ was taken over by institutional investors and their consulting firms who saw profit margins they simply could not ignore: it became a de rigueur exercise in business process optimization and an opportunity to replace amateur analysts with fresh MBAs and GS alumni (a decision that didn’t help much of anything but to those who placed them there to get the insights they needed). The gap between the FMCG business model, gaming and unregulated crypto was a very easy one to bridge. More, more, more of everything from everyone, including from those with less credentials than a chicken at a pigsty party, was what was needed to feed a machine where ‘data’ is the new gold standard, at least until Cambridge Analytica and the EU’s realization they would never be able to compete with the US without a Great Legalese Wall.

‘Too many games’ is actually why some games become franchises. Comparatively, ‘too many toothpaste’ has allowed for 高露洁 to remain the number 1 brand in the world despite existing since 1806. I don’t believe they’ve ever had a meeting with Walmart and asked them to give less shelfspace to others on the basis that there are too many tubes of toothpaste available on the market.

I could not have had the inspiration and business confidence to redo PAC-MAN back in 2013, the only PAC-MAN now available on mobile, and that downloaded over 100 million times since, if I took for granted what Apple told me back then "there are too many retro arcade titles already. Why don’t you bring us Dragonball instead". Though believe me when I say I wish I could have brought Dragonball.?

‘Too many games’ is also why I believe it has never been a better time to release a game, to market a game, to talk about games and to write about games and those people who, for the vast majority, are working as in a sweatshop to make it happen. True though, you need to have some experience and work the midnight oil to rethink how we sell games.

If we’re to say that ‘too many games’ is indeed worth talking about, then let’s celebrate it instead of using it as an excuse for yet another round of clickbait. This won’t stop those repeating it to get promoted in all the right places I’m sure.