"Are there too many games?" is probably not the right question

I enjoyed reading Jeff Vogel's recent essay, "There are too many video games." I shared it in two different game development communities, and it was interesting to compare the difference. In one of them, the article was met with thoughtfulness. In the other, I saw what looked like knee-jerk reactions against Vogel's rhetoric rather than a thoughtful engagement with his conclusions. This forced me to ask myself, "Are there too many video games?" My next step, though, was then to ask, "Is that the right question?"

Vogel cites an analysis from VGInsights that shows that there were over 11,000 games released on Steam last year. That averages to over thirty per day. Is that "too many?" In the BSU Game Design and Development Discord (which, if you're a student, faculty, staff, alumnus, or partner, you're welcome to join), the point came up that it's definitely a lot, but nobody wants to be the art police. Certainly, nobody in my social networks seems to want to do that, and even my good friend who is skeptical of the value of playing games does not deny the artistry and skill in making them.

If, as Ethan writes, the problems are larger and systemic, then we should not fret over very small numbers when they are dominated by large ones. In this case, I wondered about the ratio of time spent playing games to time spent making them.

I wrote up an ad hoc analysis filled with estimates and handwaving in the BSU Gamedev Discord, and I decided to copy it over here. If you happen to have more information that could improve the estimates, or if you think other conclusions should be drawn, feel free to leave a note in the comments.

I got to wondering what the scale of consumption on Steam is. Let's say we were able to estimate how many hours of time went into making the 11,000 games that were released last year. How would that amount of hours compare to the number of hours spent playing games on Steam worldwide last year? I bet it's a tiny fraction, but I don't know how tiny.

This old article says that people spent 31 Billion hours on steam in 2020.

Let's say it takes 18 months of 50-hour weeks to make a game and release it. That's 3900 hours for one person. Complete ballpark indie team size estimate: 5 people. So maybe it takes about 19,500, or roughly 20,000 person-hours to make a game. Obviously, a AAA title is going to be much more than that, but we're not really so concerned with those.

20,000 person-hours x 11,000 games is 220,000,000 hours. So, roughly speaking, making 11,000 games took about 220 million person-hours.

Let's scale 31 billion hours of play from "per year" to "per 18 months" and get a ballpark figure of 46.5 billion hours.

Taking these estimates with a huge grain of salt, that means that while 46.5 billion hours were spent playing, 220 million hours were spent making.

If my math is right, that means that time making was about 0.5% of the time spent playing.