An Embarrassment of Riches

Image by Steve Bidmead from Pixabay

I stole my title from @scopique‘s tweet promoting his latest blog post. He sees having too many games on the market as a potential problem, and I kind of agree with him. Games start to feel so disposable when there are so many of them around.

But you know me, I’m Mr Positive! (Ha, I couldn’t get that out with a straight face.) Most years I have a mental checklist of all the games I’m going to be playing in the Fall, but I never got around to doing that this year.

And now I’m suddenly swamped. There are SO MANY games I want to play. Gears 5 launched for some (including me) last night and so far I am LOVING it. The Ghost Recon Breakpoint beta also started yesterday and I loved that. I’ll be there at launch (Oct 4th) to play that one. Tuesday Greedfall comes out and I am cautiously optimistic about that. Destiny 2’s new expansion drops Oct 1 and again, I am cautiously optimistic about that.

Then there’s the Monster Hunter World expansion, the Legend of Zelda remake, Borderlands 3 (which normally isn’t my cuppa but I think if all my friends are playing I won’t be able to resist), The Outer Worlds, the probably too-weird-for-me-to-skip Death Stranding and the new Star Wars game.

Most of these are in September and October, a few are in November. But these are just the ‘off the top of my head’ titles; I’m sure there are more I’m not thinking of.

And let’s not forget the games I’m already playing like No Man’s Sky, Days Gone, Dragon Quest Builders 2 and I’ve recently jumped back into Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

I’m going to have to figure out how to clone myself so one “me” can go to work and the other “me” can hang out and play games all day. And even if I could accomplish that, there STILL probably wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to play all of these!

Back to Scopique’s post though: this IS kind of a problem, at least if you’re trying to sell games. If I can’t find the time (and money!) to play all the games I’m really excited about, what are the chances I’ll pick up some random lesser-known title because it seems interesting? I’m going to say, close to zero.

Exacerbating this problem is that so many of these games don’t end. A year after launch AC Odyssey is still getting new content. The Gears 5 team is promising on-going updates and content drops. I’m sure GR Breakpoint will be the same: Ubisoft has doubled-down on games as a service in what I see as a good way. Where will I find the time!?

Oh hell and I just realized I haven’t even thought about the VR games!

3 thoughts on “An Embarrassment of Riches

  1. “I’m going to have to figure out how to clone myself so one “me” can go to work and the other “me” can hang out and play games all day.”

    That didn’t work out so well for Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes 😛

Comments are closed.