Dyack seriously needs to shut up and get to work on Eternal Darkness 2.

he should be congruent and stop doing bad games.

Survival of the fittest. We'll see the bad companies drop, and good companies will still around and continue to release good games. It'll self regulate that way, and a one-console future isn't going to do anything to affect that.

If you want to sell more games, Dyack, make better games. Adapt or die.

Enh, there's been a bunch of games that I want to play, but totally don't have time for.

Too Human, for example. I dig it, but its got to go back to GameFly next week. Too many cool games I want to play in my Queue. Same happened with Locke's Quest. Solid game, but i can't make the commitment with other very enjoyable games staring me in the face, or otherwise chokeholding my attention (BlazBlue came out of NOWHERE for me).

And that's not even considering solid downloadable titles that I want to get into.

However, turning off the valve and saying "oh please, no more games! I don't want new content" is kind of a ridiculous notion. I don't see any reasonable solution to that issue that doesn't involve good games *not* coming out, which would suck, right?

Another solution is less quantity, MOAR quality.

I also don't see how a single platform will fix this. It'll just make it so there are too many games released on that one platform. As it is now, I don't own a PS3, so when AAA titles come out on that (or if they ever do, AM I RITE?) I don't consider purchasing them. They're mostly off my radar. And even with the limited selection of only two consoles and one handheld system, there are still too many games to play. Right now, my backlog is at least 10 games deep, and I'm barely making any progress playing a few hours a day.

Uh... how the fuck is "embracing a single platform" the solution to "too many games"? That makes no sense. I only read the blurb above and didn't and probably won't RTFA that was linked, but is what he's really saying is that we have "too many platforms"?

But yeah, if it's about the games, he kind of has a point, in a way. There are so many games out there these days that I've had to pass on some good or at least decent ones, for the time being anyway, and I certainly don't have time for shitty ones (like, say, Too Human).

Yeah. Needs more Eternal Darkness.

There have been more games than one person can consume since 1985.

The trick is to make a game that rises above the others, not to make a game that no-one has an alternative but to play.

Wouldn't having one platform just make things even more saturated, with everything being in one place? Why yes, yes it would. It's the variety of platforms that allows this many games to be made in the first place.

Of course all the games need to stop releasing at once in the holiday season, and it seems like publishers have been realizing that lately anyways.

this is absolutely true- unless you are both

1. someone with no job or a kid who is out of school and has all the time in the world
2. independently wealthy

you are not going to buy most of the games that come out, the fact of the matter is that even when you are unemployed you MAY be able to go through 4 or 5 games a month if you game for most of your waking hours doing it and not perusing any trophies or achievements, which if you are a ps3 person isn't bad but if you are an xbox person it doesn't even come close to the release numbers per month

I agree that the Holiday months are oversaturated, but the next few months are generally pretty dry so you have time to catch up.

The REAL issue here is that he released his BAD game at a BAD time. SOMEONE testing this game must have told them it was tedious and needed work, but the guy continued singing its praises and overhyping AND they chose to release during the holiday season.

Unless you are a big-name, ACTUALLY GOOD game, you can't make it during the holiday season.

Pretty obvious really.

considering how I only buy about 2 games every year (I get really into only the good ones)...(and I borrow the others...) Then I'd say they're right. I don't have the time or the money to play all of these games. So I guess I just won't.

Another important problem: The price on the supply-side is completely inelastic, so as developers pump out tons more games, consumers get no price relief. He says, "We're making more games than consumers can possibly consume." One way to change that would be to make games more affordable and, perhaps in some cases, shorten their length to better correspond with the lower price point.

I just started playing Too Human this weekend, I'm actually thoroughly enjoying it, it has quirks I wish they could fix(camera, weapon control), and the graphics could be a bit better, but with a friend it's a lot of fun. Brought me back to the days of Diablo 2 with a bunch of pals, I just hack and slash games with looting, they never get old, unless they're branded MMOs.

Give him a break, he just wants more people to follow his lead. Making a game for way too long, and not releasing anything the consumers would care about.

Over-saturation problem solved.

There's so much wrong here, how did this guy have anything to do with Eternal Darkness? Or was his contribution the idea to put in that part where you basically have infinite sanity partway through effectively rendering you invincible and the game boring?

Either way, he's got a minor point of relevance that he totally botches in the middle of his clown show. There are in fact too many games. Whether or not that is a bad thing is open to interpretation, but there are definitely more games that I want to play each year than I will ever have time for to say nothing of having the money to afford.

But how is one console going to do anything but make that worse? There aren't that many games on 360 (exclusives, obviously) that I have any interest in playing, but there are a few and if there were only one console I'd probably own that console and have that many more games competing for my attention. Maybe he meant that his game would sell better if there were more people who could play it, but that'd also be true if he didn't make crap.

I'd be all for the One Console Future(tm), except there is no way that would end well. How would you decide whose "One Console" would get released? Would it be a console by committee? Would everyone (assuming at least established developers, publishers, current console rights holders) be consulted? How would you keep the specs from being dictated by a couple of top players paying top dollar to control it?

There's no way Microsoft would be kept out of the decision making there. Sony couldn't even keep them from putting their finger in the Blu-Ray pie, despite NO ONE using their weak video codec (to the best of my knowledge, which includes 0% research and 100% the feeling I've gotten from reading a couple of articles). I like having the choice of not buying predictably unreliable crap from Microsoft and would have no recourse but to spend the rest of my life kicking Denis Dyack in the nuts every 15 minutes if this were ever to come about.

And that's not even as bad as what would happen if (and it hurts me to say, because I've been a life-long fan) Nintendo's philosophy were to win out, which going from hardware sales at this moment would be the sensible thing to do if install base is your prime objective as I assume Dyack's to be. At least with a Microsoft console my hands would eventually adjust to the pain of using their controllers and when the console was between trips to the shop for repairs there would at least be games other than Dokapon Kingdom that I'd want to play on it.

Now isn't there some meme along the lines of "Dear Denis, Shut the fuck up! Sincerely, hpv" that we're supposed to be propagating?

Gamers only have so much time and money to spend on video gaming in a year. God knows how much of that time and money is wasted on crappy games. I'd be happy with no more than 2-3 great game releases a month. Problem is, that might mean no game developer will bother taking risks or be creative or visionary.

Sometimes I wonder what it be like if all we had was HL2 and the mod community.