3 New Games A Day For 2008?

I know I complain about the amount of crap titles that are being shoved onto the market, but I really had no idea exactly how many games were actually being released in a given amount of time.

According to research done by Matt Matthews for Next-Gen.biz, we could be looking at a release rate for 2008 that sees a new title hit the shelves at a stupid rate of one every 7.3 hours based on the current rate of growth over the past five years. A major driver in this trend will be the blockbuster holiday fourth quarter, where publishers could be pumping out a mind-numbing game every 276 minutes. Holy crap…that’s a lot of crap. Now if only someone could analyze how many of those ~1200 games are worthwhile and worth their price tag…

Aside from quality issues, how can thy wonder why so many games are flops if the industry is expecting consumers to stretch their wallets and shell out under the sheer weight of that volume of merchandise?

There are a lot more interesting tidbits in the article, and I highly recommend having a quick read yourself. Notes of interest:

• 45-50% of game revenue comes from the fourth quarter, not surprisingly then, it was found that ~40% of all games are released during that time.
• Big games, like Guitar Hero and Halo can single-handedly cause shifts in the yearly trends
• The industry could be shifting to a more bi-modal release schedule, with peak periods in Q2 and Q4

Via | Next-Gen.biz