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[KevinKeene]

I just took a look at all the game releases in Germany for March 2018. It's over 30 games. It's probably even more in the USA and Japan.

What I couldn't help but wonder: How does this work?

By that I mean that even with people having differing tastes, 30+ games simply feels like spreading it too thinly.

Is the audience really that big to grant sustainability to all those games? And it's not like that's just a bunch of small indie titles. Ni no kuni 2, far cry 5, kirby, DMC HD, Scribblenauts, Burnout Paradise Remastered, WWE, Attack on Titan 2. These are allbpopular franchises. And that's only a bunch of March's releases.

Am I underestimating the volume of the gaming audience or are many games simply being sent into death?

 

[Blam]

I just took a look at all the game releases in Germany for March 2018. It's over 30 games. It's probably even more in the USA and Japan.

What I couldn't help but wonder: How does this work?

By that I mean that even with people having differing tastes, 30+ games simply feels like spreading it too thinly.

Is the audience really that big to grant sustainability to all those games? And it's not like that's just a bunch of small indie titles. Ni no kuni 2, far cry 5, kirby, DMC HD, Scribblenauts, Burnout Paradise Remastered, WWE, Attack on Titan 2. These are allbpopular franchises. And that's only a bunch of March's releases.

Am I underestimating the volume of the gaming audience or are many games simply being sent into death?

Quite a few probably wouldn't make over their budget.

 

[Apdiddy]

It doesn't. There is a market and someone will buy, but it's physically impossible to play every release to completion even if that's what you do all day. Publishers end up hoping that people have deep enough pockets to buy it at $60/€60 for every game then any additional DLC/season pass coming down the pipe.

What's depressing is a lot of those mentioned will be on sale before the end of the year, in some cases before the end of June.

Eventually, it will collapse on itself.

 

[Ancient Dragon]

They still make enough profit to stay afloat.

 

[jshackles]

There's a reason why someone like me (huge enthusiast of gaming who spends 20+ hours a week in the hobby) still has to plan which releases to pick up when, and why I still have a backlog of games a mile long. And you're not even considering all of the mobile games and Steam games being released daily that have almost no audience whatsoever.

If you look at other media, such as books or movies, you might be fooled into drawing the same conclusion. Are there too many books being released to sustain the reading industry? How does Hollywood thrive when they release a new blockbuster every week? And yet, new books and movies continue to be released all the time.

In reality, a lot of games (especially smaller games with little to no marketing budget) won't be huge commercial successes. A good percentage of them (as Blam pointed out above) won't make back enough money to justify the time/effort put into them. Even MASSIVELY successful games typically will struggle to sell to more than 7-10% of a particular console's install base. Horizon Zero Dawn sold almost 8m units, and last I heard a few months back there were 70m PS4s sold worldwide. Obviously, 8m units sold is pretty awesome, but they were still only able to reach just over 10% of their potential customers.

There are a lot of gamers out there (literally 100s of millions) so spreading 30 "blockbuster" titles over the course of a month seems like it might not quite be the death knell you think it might be.