Has there been a more competitive time to release a video game? Possibly. Without resorting to blunt totting-ups of metascores and sales figures and some kind of dividing-by-gap-between-release-dates, it’s not really something you can measure. One particularly rectangular section of my brain was tempted, mind, in the same kind of doomed endeavour as Civilization 7 designer Ed Beach trying to mathematically quantify whether his team was sticking to Sid Meier’s rule of thirds. After a physicist who helped launch the Hubble telescope told me he couldn’t make that work, I thought better of it.
Instead, then, we must go by vibes, and the vibe right now is it is a very competitive time to release a video game. Or maybe more specifically, a live service video game. This has been one of many big headscratchers for the people at the top of the games industry recently. At the risk of re-treading some already over-trodden ground, big publishers, as we all know, want big profits. Specifically, they want the kind of smash-hit, hobby-grade, zeitgeist-defining golden goose profits you get from a Grand Theft Auto or a Pokémon Go, or a League of Legends, a Fortnite, a Warzone, a Counter Strike or even just a good old Wordle. The catch is these hits more often than not are live service games, and live service games require not only vast amounts of players but now also vast amounts of those players’ attention. They require time – time to be made, yes, but also time to be played – and as any painfully over-stretched modern human will have noticed, there is only so much time in a day.
This is why, I suspect, games have had so much trouble with their attempts to “grow”. They’ve shifted from being a part of the entertainment economy – “Do I spend my spare £40 on a new video game, or on a couple of new albums?” – to a part of the engagement economy – “Do I tick off some daily objectives in FC24 while listening to Spotify and talking with friends on Discord, or watch another episode of Star Wars while scrolling through Tiktok with intermittent breaks for Twitter/X, and my partner’s voice note about what I’m cooking for dinner?”
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