1000% I've gone full in on the retro computer and I also bought a PS2 this year and did the HDD bootmod, a PS3 slim, and an Xbox One. I don't think I've done much gaming on my actual gaming desktop this year it's all been done on Windows 98 das a PS2 PS3 or an Xbox One. And I mainly playing 360 titles on it it's just a 360 cost more than an Xbox One.
Nearly half of the 19,000 games released on Steam this year went almost unnoticed
- Thread starter Skye Jacobs
- Start date
A few interested me but I'm not willing to pay more than $29 four piece of entertainment I'll just play the older stuff and buy the current stuff when it goes on sale in a couple years this is been my hard price point for the last 20 years and I don't see it changing. I've only ever broken this rule a handful of times.
Half Life 2 collectors edition
Orange Box
Star Trek Starfleet Academy Big Box with Chekovs lost Missions (found it at a used game store for $30)
While this may be true steam has also made great changes to help gamers find games that they're the most interested in with features like the discovery q that's been around for a while but now a new thing that works even better to show you more games that are similar to the games that you like to play the most.
To be fair a lot of games come out with demos and our showcased during different events steam holds over the course of the year and a lot of those games get added to players wish lists and then purchased later when the game comes out or if the final product is worth buying. The biggest change though is the fact that the economy is so bad right now for the last couple years or so that a lot less games are being purchased then they were like right around the beginning of covid because so many people were at home. So it's entirely possible that a lot of new games were put out trying to cash in on that but now nobody has extra money to buy those games.
To be fair a lot of games come out with demos and our showcased during different events steam holds over the course of the year and a lot of those games get added to players wish lists and then purchased later when the game comes out or if the final product is worth buying. The biggest change though is the fact that the economy is so bad right now for the last couple years or so that a lot less games are being purchased then they were like right around the beginning of covid because so many people were at home. So it's entirely possible that a lot of new games were put out trying to cash in on that but now nobody has extra money to buy those games.
For me, the latency wouldn't be too bad. I have FTTH and the nearest nVidia GeForce Now data center is not that far away from me.
Suffice it to say, I think that eventually gaming will have to go this way simply because the graphics cards will be too damn expensive for the average person to buy. And before anyone claims that it's just nVidia being greedy, that would be true if it wasn't for the fact that prices have gone up in a linear fashion just like the complexities to build them have.
Think about how things were back before fancy stuff like ray tracing. Even the likes of the GTX 1080Ti could be afforded by the average person. Then the first RTX cards came out, the RTX 2000-series—prices went up incrementally. The same happened with the 3000-series cards, each evolution being more expensive than the previous.
If you want to know why that is? Take the heat sync off your graphics card and look at the size of that monster of a GPU die.
One, it's pretty big, physically. Because of the size of the die itself, the amount of dies that nVidia can get from a single silicon wafer is less than they could get back when dies weren't nearly as big. Less chips per wafer equals higher prices.
And then let's factor in how because the dies are so big and ultimately so complex, the odds of getting a perfect "golden sample" die that's capable of being a xx90-class (or even xx80-class) chip diminishes greatly. This isn't just an nVidia problem, this is a monolithic chip manufacturing issue. It's the same reason why Intel chips were so expensive when compared to that of AMD Ryzen chips that used "chiplets". Smaller, less complex dies, cost less to produce because they literally use less silicon to manufacture and not only that but because they're smaller, the chances of defects also go down. EUV tooling costs are astronomical and get amortized across fewer usable dies thus the prices have to go up.
Another factor we have to look at is the cost of literally the shrinking of nodes. The machines that literally turn a wafer into a die, the machines made by the likes of ASML, are getting more and more expensive simply because of the complexities of getting nodes to be smaller and smaller.
In my opinion, the glory days of mid-range ownership are probably over. Gone will be the days of the average person being able to afford the kinds of hardware that we take for granted today.
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I wonder how many of those games were developed by AI? I suspect we're seeing a flood of games due to people using AI such as Qwen3-coder and Vibe thinking they'll create a hit if they just crank out enough new games. I've been using Qwen3-coder to create some geospatial mapping software with some amazing results so it's possible we're seeing this huge bump in games because AI is helping speed things along, but I also suspect that many of these games are most likely shovelware rehashes of existing games because many AI users are novice coders who don't take the time nor make the effort to create a truly unique game.
At this point a huge chunk of those 19,000 “new” games are basically engine samples with default Unity/Unreal assets, template UIs, and the most barebones gameplay slapped together in a weekend. When the barrier to publish is that low, the store gets flooded with what are essentially slightly tweaked tutorials rather than actual designed games, which just drowns out the few indie projects where someone actually put in the time to build original art, systems, and content.
LimyG
Posts: 583 +251
Great article and true.
The sad thing is that there really are some excellent, and cheap games made by small studios or Indie. Of course there is trash too.
As there are so many, it takes a while to search less advertised games. Major studios always stick out, but I'd say that with a bit of time searching, it is possible to find a game by a small studio/unknown studio/Indie that rival AAA releases.
They are also FAR cheaper. Examples are many and people have already posted so I'll just mention one example, Expedition 33. Fortunately enough folks bought it for it to become visible among the 4,000 other games. Oh, one more, Still wakes the deep. High production values, doesn't over stay it's welcome - fairly short. Worth it for the great voice acting (Scottish accent/slang and the way the Scottish are so eloquent when swearing!!)
I've blocked Ubisoft, that helps a bit. Can't stand that company and their attitude towards gamers.
Finally, I have many games, some were very cheap, I forgot about them, only to notice them in my library, literally a year or two later. Those are the "invisible," small studio/Indie games.
Sometimes they turn out to be great and the devs have really put a lot of effort into it. How many gems of games do we miss?
I haven't bought a AAA game since the excellent RE4 remake. Oh, and a few WRC games on huge discount sales.
AAA, no longer means good.
An odd situation. Not surprising I guess, but it's worth checking out some of the lesser know games.
The sad thing is that there really are some excellent, and cheap games made by small studios or Indie. Of course there is trash too.
As there are so many, it takes a while to search less advertised games. Major studios always stick out, but I'd say that with a bit of time searching, it is possible to find a game by a small studio/unknown studio/Indie that rival AAA releases.
They are also FAR cheaper. Examples are many and people have already posted so I'll just mention one example, Expedition 33. Fortunately enough folks bought it for it to become visible among the 4,000 other games. Oh, one more, Still wakes the deep. High production values, doesn't over stay it's welcome - fairly short. Worth it for the great voice acting (Scottish accent/slang and the way the Scottish are so eloquent when swearing!!)
I've blocked Ubisoft, that helps a bit. Can't stand that company and their attitude towards gamers.
Finally, I have many games, some were very cheap, I forgot about them, only to notice them in my library, literally a year or two later. Those are the "invisible," small studio/Indie games.
Sometimes they turn out to be great and the devs have really put a lot of effort into it. How many gems of games do we miss?
I haven't bought a AAA game since the excellent RE4 remake. Oh, and a few WRC games on huge discount sales.
AAA, no longer means good.
An odd situation. Not surprising I guess, but it's worth checking out some of the lesser know games.
LimyG
Posts: 583 +251
Totally agree. There are low price, unknown Indie games that really shine and show a lot of love and attention to detail.
Problem as you alluded, is finding them amongst the "template," games.
PXAbstraction
Posts: 122 +424
Ding ding ding!
I've been meaning to write a blog post on this forever, but anyone who can't find good games today simply isn't looking hard or wide enough. I used to play exclusively AAA stuff and while I still do, it's far less than I used to. There are so many smaller games out there of exceptional quality that are reasonably priced and can often run on a potato. People aren't buying Steam Decks by the millions to play the latest AAA releases. If you don't want to look beyond AAA, hey that's a personal choice, but don't then claim there's nothing out there to play. I met my girlfriend a few months ago who does play games but mostly AAA stuff on her Xbox. I showed her what I have on PC and it blew her mind and now she wants a Steam Machine to dig into that stuff.
But also, tastes change and if gaming's just not your jam anymore, nothing wrong with that either. I've been a gamer for 40 years and still love it, but I'm trying to broaden my horizons into other stuff as well. Whether in games or other hobbies, always try other things because your next obsession might be right around the corner.
This report also doesn't talk about how of the 19,000 games released on Steam, probably 15,000+ of them are asset flips, AI slop or someone who coded something in a weekend after watching Unity tutorials a week before and thinks it's worthy of being sold for money. Some argue that Steam's almost libertarian approach of allowing anyone on the store who can pay the $150 fee is a good thing because it lets people decide, others argue that it destroys discoverability and makes many good games die in obscurity. I think it's somewhere in the middle, but it's also incredibly naive as an aspiring game developer to think that you don't have to make marketing your game a big part of its development. Your game being good and simply existing won't make it sell. Discoverability is certainly an issue, but you should know those challenges and have a plan for them when you start making your game.
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Probably a lot. I've been seeing a big push to label Steam the bad guy with stories like this that I can only imagine are being pushed by Steam's competition and publishers that can't pull their scummy tactics with Steam in the way. It's always about some poor dev who's game went unseen but it would have been just as unseen anywhere else because they did no outreach of their own and the game kind of sucked. They act like it's on Steam to make their game successful instead of just host it for people to buy.
There will always be an inherent oversupply in any product whose creation is inherently enjoyable. We see this with indie games, Twitch streamers, influencers, artists, etc.
Game purchases will naturally cluster due to network effects, even if they are single player titles. You will play a game that your friends play, that has good guides, that has a community that you can discuss it with, and other functions of critical mass.
Valve could help this problem with more curation of the dregs: human test and filter out AI/stock asset junk, enforce strict early access rules, and otherwise reduce the clutter.
There's also finite time for so much gaming (hello Game Pass) and non-gaming content. Not everyone will make the cut, especially if their pitch is "genre but with one quirky change."
Game purchases will naturally cluster due to network effects, even if they are single player titles. You will play a game that your friends play, that has good guides, that has a community that you can discuss it with, and other functions of critical mass.
Valve could help this problem with more curation of the dregs: human test and filter out AI/stock asset junk, enforce strict early access rules, and otherwise reduce the clutter.
There's also finite time for so much gaming (hello Game Pass) and non-gaming content. Not everyone will make the cut, especially if their pitch is "genre but with one quirky change."
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