And the industry isn’t planning to slow down anytime soon. Just Cause 3 is right around the corner. No Man’s Sky, Far Cry Primal and Ubisoft’s next Assassin’s Creed game will be out next year, and Horizon Zero Dawn and Crackdown 3 might also be joining them.
That’s just too many open-world games to play.
It’s not as if these are quick, linear games that can be finished in under 10 hours. All the games I have mentioned have massive worlds to explore, with loads of content jammed into them. Some are shorter than others, but even the short ones have a good 40 or 50 hours of gameplay to go through.
I think we are fast approaching open world fatigue at this rate. A lot of gamers just don’t have the time to play through all these, especially if they have a job or are in college.
At the moment, this fatigue hasn’t hit yet. The games I have mentioned are doing really well in terms of sales. But by next year, people might already be sick of open world games and we’ll start to see a shift in those numbers.
By contrast, the sales of games offering a short linear experience should go up
Gamers still want to play games, and if we are fed up of these massive 50-hour plus games, the short linear experience will be a breath of fresh air. This will end up being a win-lose scenario when it comes to sales. We’ll probably see sales of open world games will go down while shorter games rake in the cash.
If this happens, though, I wouldn’t be too surprised by the end of this console generation, I’m writing about why there are too many short linear games on the market. With that being said, there is a trend at the moment when it comes to too many games br=eing made for a genre.
During each generation of consoles, there is one particular game genre that is made in an abundance. Last generation we had loads of shooters being made. Go back to the PS1 era it was 3D platformers. The gaming industry has this cycle where certain genres are made to the point of over-saturation and then move on to the next genre.
This kind of game making needs to stop. Sure companies want to make games on a genre that are popular to get better sales, but when multiple companies have the same idea it gets a bit out of hand. Hopefully, in the near future we won’t have to deal with this over-saturation of game genres. Until then, we just have to deal with all these open world games being made.
