Too Many Games - Why Can't You Find the Games You Want - Extra Credits

I often hear people say that "There are too many games coming out these days." And I don't mean that feeling of there being too many great games you wanna play and not enough time to play them all. That I totally get. I mean more on the sense of being overwhelmed of the shear number of games coming out every week I mean last week, we even mentioned in passing that the number of games coming out on Steam this year was getting a little huge. And I think that's a pretty commonly shared feeling that it's gotten a bit overwhelming.

Big AAA releases, handheld games, Indie games Big AAA releases, handheld games, Indie games
Mobile games, classic rereleases There's just... Too many. Well, yes, and no. It is overwhelming, no doubt but I wonder if the number of games is actually the source of the problem.

I mean, are we arguing that we want fewer games? That we want less choice available? That we would rather not have the option to buy something just because it wasn't everyone else's cup of tea? I mean, we have all found that hidden gem at some point that we thought was great, but that maybe nobody else saw its genius or even noticed. It seems to me that the argument can't really be that we want fewer games or that we want fewer people making them. Instead, I think what people are reacting to is that a lot of their favorite stores are getting flooded and it's getting harder and harder to find the things they'd be interested in amongst the sea of things they just really don't care about. And I think it's important that THAT's what we're communicating Because simply saying "I hate how many games are getting released" sends the wrong message to publishers, developers and especially distributors.

And, I for one can say, personally, I found a lot more games I wanna play in recent years because we've moved away from only giving distribution to people who could afford to put a boxed copy in GameStop. But if the number of options being overwhelming is the problem, how do we fix that? I don't think the answer is:
"Make fewer games." I think the real answer is:
"Get better stores." Or, more specifically, get better search engines for our stores. The truth is, as digital distribution has picked up at an exponential rate, the user-facing technology for many of our digital distributors started to look more and more behind the times. The iOS app store is the most obvious example and the one most cited when people talk about a flooded market.

But it's not the number of games, it's how woefully inadequate their search engine is. You have the largest digital distribution platform in the world, and in 2014, if you don't know the exact name of a product, even if you're off by just one letter, it often can't find it. How is that even remotely useful? And this means that keywords don't really work. Putting in CCG is only going to find games that put that term in their description or their title; not games that embody CCG as a genre or that a CCG player might like.

But beyond that, searching within a category isn't even possible. I can't even search within the RPG category for games with the word "Story" in them. Instead, I get everything with "Story" in the title in the entire app store. Because, yes.

"Bakery Story" That's exactly what I was looking for, thank you. It seems to me that this should be worse news for Apple than it is for the user. Whatever it would cost to build a decent search engine for their store has got to be less than the business they're losing every day because no one can find what they want. I don't want work there.

And who knows? Something could be wonky in the way iTunes is structured and fixing this problem might be way more expensive than I think it should be. You see what I'm saying, though? The problem isn't the number of games; it's that we have a 1995 level of ability to sort them. But the app store is pretty easy to throw under the bus. It's sort of everyone's favorite whipping boy.

So let's talk about the elephant in the room: the DRM we've all come to love: Steam. The Steam client's functionality is only slightly ahead of iTunes. Weirdly, if you use Steam in a browser, using Google search on the Steam store and utilizing some of the functionality that's built-in with every modern browser can actually get you a much more usable experience than just using the Steam client's search function. But I'm going to talk about the Steam client itself because I assume that's where most of Steam's hardcore audience operates and it's where Valve wants them to operate anyway.

Now Valve clearly sees the problem and is trying to address it with things like User Reviews and keyword tagging. They've also increased the functionality of their search engine and have been working on ways to better categorize games but there's still a long way to go to make the store not feel overcrowded. First off, it's a browser, just like any web browser. So it's kind of strange that you can't open up multiple tabs and compare games side by side.

Or at least not have to go back to the top of the new release list and scroll all the way back to where you were every time you go back from looking at a game. But that nitpick aside, it's a combination of the best functionality being buried too deep and none of it quite being up to the standard of its web counterparts. The "Recommended for You" section is a marvelous idea, but it's woefully inaccurate , even compared to similar services by things like Amazon or Netflix. More importantly it doesn't really address the "flooded store" issue.

It would be far more useful to have on the front page ... Section. Or at least have those games highlighted somehow. And while there is now a lot of good functionality in the search engine, allowing you to search by categories like "co-op" and "controller supported" or "Sort by Metascore" like the "Recommended for You" function, most of it's buried behind the three clicks it takes to get to it.

But still, it's there, and that'a a big start. Unfortunately, it's still missing a great deal that the store needs to allow customers to sort through the bulk of products now appearing on it. First, being able to search for "Games like BLANK" would go a long way. How many times have you sat down and just wanted to play something like Final Fantasy IV.

Or like Ikaruga or like Skyrim? Having a "Games like THIS" search option would help you find those because very often you know what you're in the mood for, you just don't know specifically what that game is. And sure, this is difficult to get right It would probably take over a year or two to get refined to the point where it's really spot - on but it would at least give customers a starting point rather than having to wade through everything that's vaguely in the same genre. Next, being able to search by Metascore is fantastic and it definitely helps, but a lot of games never get a Metascore. And today, with  the plethora of early access games, we're seeing a ton of titles that simply don't have that "At a Glance" rough seal of quality.

A 90 Metacritic may not always mean the game's actually great but you can usually pass on the ones with a 40. Of course, now that Steam has user reviews, being able to sort by percentage of positive user reviews would help fill that gap. You can even gate it so that the percentage doesn't show up until a title gets at least... 30 Reviews or something.

Again, this wouldn't tell you if a game is great or good for you, but it would help you not have to wade through some of the stuff you probably feel like is just cluttering up the store. And we don't have to worry too much about users "trolling" the system because Steam accounts mean users can only post one review per account and for any game to get caught up in some fanboy fight like "Call of Duty" or "Battlefield" their Metascore will be right there to call out the troll reviews. Lastly, since we have the comment functionality, I like to be able to search by frequency of a term in the user comments. So let's say I'm looking for an RPG with a good story.

Well, no Metascore or category tag is going to do an adequate job for that, but if I could search for games where the term "story" is frequently used in the user comments, that might lead me a lot closer to what I'm looking for. So, in the end, it's not the fact that so many games are coming out that's bad. And we really gotta stop putting it that way. It's the fact that our tools to sort through these games haven't kept up with the pace of games getting released.

And if I thought that it was impossible to give us these tools If I thought it was too big a task or economically infeasible for these companies to do, I'd be talking about other solutions. But I think, for the leaders in digitally distributed games to remain the leaders in this field, there is no way that they could let our abilities as consumers to search through their offerings remain so woefully behind what we've come to expect from other major sites on the web. In the meantime, I hope you all keep finding those hidden gems. See you next week!.