End of the Game

The steam sale is over.  My ever-growing stream backlog grew slightly but for the most part I controlled myself. Most of the games in my steam account are bundle games. In the early days of steam they had catalog sales where you could buy a company’s library of games for less than the few games you were going to buy. Many other games in the bundle are also ones I want to try when there’s time so on the surface the bundle seems like a bargain. The reality is that there is not enough time.

Making matters worse is the proliferation of bundle sites. The first one I heard of is Humble Bundle. It was made up of indie games and wasn’t that frequent. Now it is every week and there are a large number of other bundle sites doing the same thing.

So, I have a lot of games, what’s my point? There are a lot of people in the exact same position. This may not be good for the game industry. If all the people with huge backlogs of games start working through their backlog instead of buying new games, game sales could plummet. Free-to-play games are already making it hard to sell games. Making things even worse are the huge number of game making tools on the market. It is now possible to make a game without any programming skills. As a result there are a huge number of games coming out. People claim that the good games will stand out, but I have seen a lot of great games fail. With the glut of games coming out, do people want to find diamonds in the manure pile?

Essentially game development has become a very difficult field to make money at and things are going to get worse before they start to get better. My solution is to keep it a hobby. There are probably other solutions. I had thought that Kickstarter was one alternative, but I am no longer convinced about it. That is a topic for a different rant. Possibly next month, but I am hoping my 2600 project will be marked before then and that I will be able to get into my 2600 material.