Editorial Reaction: “Too Many Games” — Jason Schreier’s Provocation and the Industry’s Reality

Jason Schreier’s recent Bloomberg editorial, “The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games”, is both a sharp diagnosis and a deliberately provocative framing of a truth the industry has been circling for years. The claim—that the sheer volume of releases is itself a structural problem—forces us to confront uncomfortable realities about discoverability, sustainability, and the economics of attention. But it also risks oversimplifying a phenomenon that is as much about distribution models, platform governance, and cultural shifts as it is about raw numbers.

Where I Think Schreier Is Right

1. The Data Is Unignorable
   • According to SteamDB, 18,626 games launched on Steam in 2024, nearly double the 9,656 released in 2020. That’s a 93% increase in just four years.
   • This isn’t just “more choice”—it’s a flood. For small and mid-tier studios, visibility has collapsed into a lottery system where even well-reviewed titles can vanish without a trace.
2. The Attention Economy Is Finite
   • Schreier correctly frames the issue as one of attention scarcity. Players cannot possibly keep up with the volume of releases, and the result is a brutal Darwinism where only the most aggressively marketed or algorithmically boosted titles survive.
   • September 2025’s “crowded release window” (with Starfield, Baldur’s Gate 3 console launch, Madden, NBA 2K, Spider-Man 2, and countless indies) illustrates how even great games cannibalize each other’s oxygen.
3. The Human Cost
   • Schreier has long reported on labor conditions in gaming. Here, the connection is implicit: when studios gamble on crowded release calendars, the pressure to “hit big” intensifies crunch, layoffs, and burnout. The oversupply problem isn’t just economic—it’s human.

Where I see Schreier Oversimplifies

1. “Too Many Games” Isn’t the Problem—It’s the Platforms
   • Steam, the App Store, and console storefronts are not neutral marketplaces. They are algorithm-driven ecosystems where visibility is artificially scarce.
   • The issue isn’t that 18,000 games exist—it’s that platforms have abdicated responsibility for curation, leaving discovery to opaque recommendation engines and influencer ecosystems.
2. Abundance Is Not Inherently Negative
   • More games also means more voices, more cultural representation, and more experimentation. The democratization of tools like Unity, Unreal, and GameMaker has allowed marginalized creators to tell stories that would never have survived the old gatekeeping model.
   • To frame abundance as a “problem” risks echoing the logic of legacy publishers who once controlled access to the market.
3. The Real Crisis Is Economic Inequality
   • Schreier’s framing risks flattening the issue into a numbers game. But the deeper crisis is that revenue is hyper-concentrated: a handful of AAA blockbusters and live-service juggernauts absorb the lion’s share of spending, while thousands of smaller titles fight over scraps.
   • This mirrors broader cultural industries (music, streaming TV, publishing), where “winner-takes-most” dynamics dominate.

What Needs to Be Observed, Not Declared

1. The Shift From Ownership to Services
   • Subscription models (Game Pass, PS Plus Extra, Apple Arcade) change the calculus. In these ecosystems, abundance is a feature, not a bug—players want a buffet, not a curated shelf.
   • The question becomes: how do these services compensate developers fairly in a world of infinite content?
2. The Role of Community Curation
   • Steam tags, itch.io bundles, and influencer-driven discovery are imperfect but evolving. The “problem” of too many games may be transitional, as communities build new filtering mechanisms.
3. The Historical Echo
   • The “too many games” panic recalls the 1983 video game crash, when oversupply of low-quality titles (famously E.T. on Atari) tanked the market. But today’s ecosystem is different: digital distribution eliminates shelf-space scarcity, and quality indies can thrive in niches.
   • The lesson isn’t that abundance kills industries—it’s that industries must adapt their discovery and revenue models.

Schreier is right to sound the alarm: the flood of releases is unsustainable for developers, and the human cost of invisibility is real. But to say the problem is “too many games” risks misdiagnosing abundance as pathology. The real issue is how platforms, publishers, and communities manage abundance—whether through exploitative algorithms that bury creators, or through intentional systems that elevate diverse voices.

In other words: the problem isn’t that there are too many games. The problem is that there are too few ways to find the right ones.

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