What is the value of a video game?
There’s this idea out there floating around that there are simply too many games in existence. I don’t really know where it comes from, but it seems fairly consistent over time. There have always been “too many games,” too many consoles, not enough quarters or hours in the day. And this is the basis of the worrying “indiepocalypse” notion.
Who plays every game, though? Even if you found some perfect way to sift the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, how many dozens of perfectly fine games come out every day, or every week, to say nothing of every month, and never get played? Nobody plays literally every game, not even game journalists. (And really, especially not game journalists.)
What is the value of a single video game? Prices vary between generally $10 to $60, with several outliers on each side of that range. But then you have to factor sales events in, which might reduce the price significantly or make the game straight up free. Price by itself is probably not the best metric of a game’s value, though. More than a few $40+ games don’t get very good critical or audience reception, and way more than a few sub-$20 games have been lauded as “games of the year” when they were released. What about budget? Or that aforementioned critical reception? Or popularity?
What is the value of a video game?
There are games in my Steam library I have never played, or played for mere minutes.
I haven’t looked at many of the titles I’ve downloaded on itch.io since I got them.
The number of games I’ve downloaded and then discarded without playing on Xbox Game Pass is shamefully high.
Of the 100+ titles on Apple Arcade, I have played maybe 15 of them all the way through and maybe another 20 partially.
I have put in hundreds of hours in Destiny and Destiny 2, though. Just weeks of time. I’ve also played a lot of Final Fantasy XV. I beat Titanfall 2, and Nier: Automata (five times), and logged over 30 hours of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Oh and I could run through Undertale blind at this point. My favorite game of 2018 was the indie visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine. And just for flavor? My most-played mobile game right now is a title from who knows* called Balls Master. I’m at level 935. (*I’m just kidding, the game is by Coda and Loop Games.)
There is no reason to this rhyme. No method to the madness. I’ve been writing about games “seriously” for a year and yet I could not, based on my own history of play, tell you what I value personally in a video game. I have no strong emotions about the genre or presentation of games, except of course when I do, and I struggle to find meaning in any of it. Big games, small games, cheap games, expensive games, games made by indies, games made by AAA studios – I literally don’t know what the thread that runs through any of this is.
This isn’t a new revelation for me, by the way. It’s something I’ve been thinking about since last year. Because what really bothers me on a fundamental level is that, despite feeling about as disconnected from, as unsure of, all of this as I do, I have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on games and consoles and PCs. And not just games and the machinery to play them, but also memberships, subscription services, season passes, DLCs, microtransactions, and cosmetics. No other hobby I have or have had comes close. Not music, not reading, certainly not podcasting or photography.
What is the value of a video game?
Too many games. There are too many games. More games than you could ever hope to play in a lifetime. Don’t bother trying, because you definitely couldn’t afford all of them. And listen, pirated games? Sure you could do that but not every game is good enough to be pirated. It’s not worth the effort. You already have too many games as it is. Your Steam library is full. You keep buying those goddamn humble bundles and never play most of what you get. Every sale, every free game festival, just satiates your need to consume and the industry is happy to give it to you. What you do with the product doesn’t matter as long as you keep forking over the cash to get one (1) hit of dopamine and serotonin.
But there are too many games. And too many developers. Haven’t you heard of overpopulation? Because there are too many games, the Free Market can’t handle it. It’s gonna crash. And you know whose fault that is? The people making the games. How fuckin dare they load the market down with their froo-froo arthouse crap? Most of them aren’t even good, they’re just repackaged Unity asset packs, or so I’ve heard from the other people who agree with me that there are too many games.
Oh – have you seen the new season of Apex Legends? It looks so cool. I can’t wait to sink hours in this weekend. Gonna have to do some spring cleaning, though – can you believe that Call of Duty: Warzone is 100gb? Oh well, I can just clear off the games I don’t really care about to make some room. I’m also trying to save some space for Cyberpunk 2077 lmao, but I figure I don’t need to worry about that for a few months. What were we talking about?
Oh, right. Too many games. Fuckin Steam is impossible to wade through with all the little bullshit on there. How are any indie developers supposed to even make money? I wish someone would just do something about that bullshit.
While I was doing research for this part of the Video Game Industry Simulator I decided to dig into the SteamSpy numbers for the last 15 years or so of game releases on Steam. I’m by no means a statistician, but I do know how to make an extremely basic column chart. When I plugged in the numbers of releases per year, I got this:
It’s my understanding that 2014 is the year after Valve opened up Steam as a platform to more developers, which accounts for the 100+% increase in releases from 2013 to 2014. And that trend of doubling the release figures of the preceding year seemed to continue for quite a few years until 2018 and 2019. Look at how close those two years are in terms of releases. 2019 ended up beating 2018 by only about 90 games.
Now to be 100 percent fair to the folks complaining about too many games, looking at the sheer numbers, nearly 8300 games is a FUCKload of games to come out in one 12-month period. And I would hazard a guess and say that many of these games never had a soul playing them. But… that’s the thing that’s been bothering me about this whole “indiepocalypse” business, this so-called game overpopulation crisis. It seems that year-over-year, rather than completely fall apart, the market continues to expand with the growth. And yes, the result is that probably a wide plurality of games that get released never see a moment of playtime by anyone, but these numbers are no longer causing major disruptions, if indeed they ever were.
Why is a tsunami a disaster, whereas high tide is expected and even mundane? Both events involve rising sea levels over a relatively short period of time. The answer to this question should be blindingly obvious to anyone: the tsunami happens extremely suddenly, with limited to no warning, as the result of an earthquake on the ocean floor. High tide is a gradual, gentle sea level rise by comparison. There’s no time to plan for a tsunami as it’s happening; it’s too late to build infrastructure to stop its disastrous effects, your best bet for survival is to evacuate, as fast as you can, to higher ground.
Looking at the year-over-year release data it’s tempting to call the 8300 Steam releases in 2019 a tsunami; and if you’d dropped this volume of games on Steam in, say, 2004, it would have been, for sure. But look closer. Look at the release numbers over two twelve-month periods in 2018 and 2019.
Now, again, I need to just put a reminder here that I am not a statistician. Noticing that roughly the same number of games get released every month doesn’t take a full-on brain genius, but I don’t know how much I can help you in interpreting what this means. This is just a selection of a larger data set. Time stretches in both directions, before and after these charts. By themselves, they may mean nothing, honestly. You could probably break this down into a 52-week graph, or a 365-day graph, and flatten everything impossibly. Awful people might even take these numbers and find “the optimum number of games per day you’d need to play to get through EVERY NEW RELEASE EVERY YEAR” but like, god, that sucks to even think about.
Is it so bad that thousands of games came out in 2019 alone? Are there just too many games? Honestly, even in this first leg of my investigation I’m inclined to say no. When you go to the beach, you don’t play with the entire ocean. Just make sure you’re aware of the possibility of tsunamis.
Like Apple Arcade.
I can give you three things regarding Apple Arcade: this data, a personal anecdote, and a quote from another games journalist. Let’s start with the data. First of all, this graph doesn’t show the full picture. When you see 72 games come out in a single month, you might refer back to the above Steam graphs and go “oh this seems like a drop in the bucket.” But what you need to understand is that these games didn’t drop across the entire month of September. The launch of Apple Arcade wasn’t evenly distributed across all 30 days. ALL 72 of these games were released in one chunk, on September 19th.
They could only be played on two types of devices: iPhones and iPads (the macOS and tvOS versions of Apple Arcade weren’t due out until October). Sure, there was controller support, but with no embargo period save for like two or three days between the Apple Keynote and the launch, trying to get a full sense of what Apple Arcade had to offer and do every game justice was simply not possible. I gave up on it. (TBH it’s what compelled me, towards the end of last year, to stop trying to post new content every day.) Even now going back and looking at Apple Arcade’s launch catalog is a dizzying experience. And sure, yeah, I’m a novice or an amateur or a hobbyist, whatever, but I asked around.
“I downloaded everything at once!” VICE games reporter Patrick Klepek said in a Twitter DM. “Everything that was available on day one, anyway. I’d wake up each morning, pluck away at a few of them, and realize I could never, ever spend meaningful time with all of them.”
What is the value of a video game?
Eighty percent of all games released on Steam don’t make $5000 in their first two weeks. That seems like a useless factoid to me, honestly. I made $17 last week on a book of articles that have appeared on this site which you can read for free. The amount of money individual developers make, as a metric, doesn’t tell me anything about those developers’ motivations, the value they place on their own game, or even the quality of the game itself. How many millions did 2K make from people buying WWE 2k20 just to watch wrestle boys turn into eldritch horrors? How many people DIDN’T buy Where the Water Tastes Like Wine?
When I think about my own game habits I feel guilty. I’m never adventurous enough. I get sucked into AAA “live services” too easily. I don’t play enough indie games. I’m honestly not even immersed in that world like the RE:BIND crew is, for example. Even as I was writing this post I converted my Xbox into a Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy box, ignoring and even deleting quality games from my hard drive that probably deserve more consideration from me than a 10-year-old shared game mythology.
The sheer number of games, by themselves, is not the cause of the so-called indiepocalypse, if it exists at all. Indiepocalypse is a narrative that, I believe, starts with the AAA industry and ends with you and me. Everything from what our shared understanding of what “good” and “bad” are to the kinds of games that ever see the light of day in the press do more to harm indies than any rising tide of games being made. Hopefully, by the end of this project, we’ll be able to show a path forward.