Hello.

My name is Petar.

You may remember me from such games as Far Cry (the original and best), Halo 3, Halo 3:ODST, Halo: Reach, Destiny and perhaps even 50Cent:Bulletproof.

I am here today to tell you about the biggest problem facing the video game industry today. I did not find this problem, it found me as I was trying to get an innovative and unusual game in front of people, in the last couple of years.

First, the good news. There has truly never been a better time to get into game development. Thousands of smart people have spent thousands of hours making tools easy to use, pre-solving common problems and allowing people to create games almost “at a click of a button”. Computers are super powerful, and can run even advanced games inside a browser.

Also, it’s now easier than ever to offer and find offered games as they are mostly accessible online, and it’s very easy to acquire them immediately via a simple download.

Truly, it is a renaissance.

While this democratization of the creation, offering and access to content may have had many positive side effects, it has has one *GIANT* drawback.

There is now, a shitload of stuff.

This is not an exaggeration. Just on Steam, one of the many digital download storefronts available online, there were over 9000 games released just in 2018. If you take into account all storefronts, the number is likely to be much bigger — and that’s not counting mobile games.

I can hear you think — so what? More games, more choice — it’s a win/win. But that’s not what’s happening.

Without meaningful curation, the games are lost in an ever-growing pile. Individual selection is impossible, as the majority of games in the pile are duds, and when you have pulled out a dud 9 times out of 10, you quickly lose motivation to keep digging.

The game industry is drowning under its own output.

But, but — game press and YouTube/Twitch are curating games.

No they are not. Game journalism is a notoriously underpaid, overworked and underappreciated career, so outlets tend to only go where the clicks and the advertising money is.

But that works, I hear you say. Someone will pay to promote a good game and it will get noticed.

No it won’t. There are only 52 weeks in a year, and more than 10000 games fighting for the advertising time available — even at a low estimate of games, that’s almost 200 games a week. And even if only 10 of them are really any good, you are still left with having to advertise 10 games in one week.

What about YouTube/Twitch?

I will grant that those platforms are doing some kind of curation. Namely, they curate games based on “how many fart jokes and bloodcurdling screams they can make while playing a game”. They curate for what brings them video views, not gameplay quality or even (gasp) the artistic evolution of games as a medium.

Plus, they are also feeling the “call of the click”, as most of them play the same 5–6 games that bring in the views. As harsh as it may seem, their audiences are not watching them to find something new, they are watching because they want more of the same.

Finally, the last consequence of the “democratization pile” is the fact that everyone has a huge backlog of games that are waiting to be played. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to play all of the games you *want* to play, so people are not looking for the next new thing as much as they used to.

The pile has made QUALITY curation more important than ever, while simultaneously making it MORE DIFFICULT to curate it. It’s a veritable Catch-22.

I used to think that was a problem of the game industry — but the same thing is happening to video. There are so many streaming outlets, so much content being produced for the consumer — that it’s becoming harder and harder to decide what to watch.

Our society is experiencing a rapid onset of choice-paralysis. (obligatory TED talk).

This problem will keep growing, yet no one is talking about it.

Talking about it is the first step in fixing it.