New game releases and the preconceived ideas that people have

With the recent release of Highgaurd and the reaction before, during and after its release has made me think about the way people react these days to games and the effects this has on the game’s reception.

I saw repeatedly before Highgaurd came out it being described as another Concord. Obviously, Geoff Keighley adding it to his show as the one more thing didn’t help. There are similarities to, and for all intents and purposes it is, a hero shooter in the vein of Overwatch and the ill-fated Concord. People have also been here before and have a plethora of experiences of games being hyped up and then coming out and ending up being on a scale of slightly disappointing to downright unplayable. This breeds a generally healthy, but more often hypersensitive, scepticism for any new release, especially when there is a fair amount of people hyping it up.

But what is often not taken into account is the fact that whether you like a game or not is wholly personal. Geoff has received so much stick and has openly been accused by journalists and other talking heads of having ulterior motives, to the point where people have asked him directly if he has monetary connection to this game. I don’t think this is the case. He played the game. He liked the game. He was excited for the game to come out. He was excited for other people to play the game and thought they would enjoy it as much as he did. I have heard so many people try to dissect why Geoff would back this game (from a fan point of view and not from any sort of monetary way). I have heard people say he received a curated experience and therefore he thought it was better than what it actually was. This may be true, but he has been around the block enough to know a game he is excited for after a relatively short amount of time playing it. I am excited for No Rest for the Wicked, and it isn’t out yet. Will it be good? Who knows but I have played a bit of it and it was enough to buy the game and wait for full release.

I have zero investment in Highgaurd. I do not play these kinds of games. I don’t care if it makes it or if the devs or studio professionally survive this. Harsh, but that is always the risk with creative endeavours. If an artist creates a piece that is not well received that is just part of the creative process and it often leads to said artist moving on and learning from this. I have no idea if Highgaurd is any good or not but from what little I can actually glean from reports and people who like these kinds of games’ first hand experience, the game is OK and has potential. They have added a 5V5 mode and apparently some people have enjoyed this more. The thing I do care about as a gamer, is that any game gets a fair crack at the whip. I also have an idealistic view that if people try a game and don’t like it that they realise that others may like it and therefore they will just let those people like it. Or that people will not just follow the herd and actually make up their own minds. I know, I am obviously showing my age and yes, I am aware that the internet will internet.

And this is kind of my point. This game may or may not be good. It may or may not get good. The devs seem to be experienced developers of this type of game and seem to have creative ideas of where to take the game. They seem receptive to player feedback (always a good sign). But the whole rhetoric around this game has been negative before it even came out. I saw so many comments of ‘we don’t need another one of these games’, ‘this is doomed to fail’ and so on, on top of the Concord comparison. These are the same phrases and comments I heard about Arc Raiders and Helldivers 2 and as we can see, these comments were blown out the water. I saw a well-known FPS streamer bash Arc Raisers while playing the open beta and then get his knickers in a twist when it didn’t win game of the year. A full 180 from his initial opinion within a few months of playing the game. This seems to be the standard except very often it seems to be people dunking on a game or praising a game purely because others do. There are, as we know, a lot of sheople online. But in the case of Arc Raiders people at least seemed to give it a chance and allow the game to mature.

Too often this happens where a game is either hyped up and releases a disappointment or vice versa. I am beginning to feel like an old man shouting at clouds for being fluffy, but it really does seem to me that the way we as gamers are about games has changed drastically. People always state that games were better in the good ‘ol’ days, but I am coming to believe more and more that this is total hogwash. I think the problem is we as gamers have changed and the reasons we think these things about games is due to a multitude of factors.

Choice. We have too much of it in comparison to the good ‘ol days. I have said this before the number of games released per year has grown exponentially. Looking across decades in 1994 there were possibly only a few hundred games released across all platforms, in 2005 that number had only really increased to a thousand maybe two, by 2015 it had reached 10 000. Last year on steam alone it nearly hit 20 000 games. That’s just steam and not taking into account the platform specific and store specific games and the biggest increase of all, mobile. There is no way any one person could play a smattering of these games let alone get close to even hearing about many of them. Before, people would play what there was and what was available. Now there is an overabundance of choice. There are many great games that literally never get their heads above water. All you need to do is go watch an Indy game specific channel on YouTube or Twitch and see the games they review, and you will discover games you never knew existed. Although the number of people playing games has also increased dramatically (more on this in a bit), this game to gamer ratio has blown out of proportion. There will always be games that burst through the gamer consciousness (Expedition 33, GTA 5, COD and so on) but most games are fighting for the scraps left behind. The gaming market is at, or even beyond, the critical mass.

Currently on Steam you need to go down to the 6th place to find the first non-games as a service type game being Terraria that released in 2011 and probably popular because of its new big update. Then you need to go down to 19th Place for the next ones which are Stardew Valley (released in 2016) and Baldur’s Gate 3 (released in 2026). The newest release is in 24th Place (Nioh 3) and that currently has 48K people playing with a peak of 70K people.

The second point is, as stated above, the increase in gamers overall. Although there aren’t any actual numbers of people, I found estimates ranging from 100-300mil people playing games in 1995 (video consoles and arcades and the whole gambit of what was available at the time) to an estimate of 3-3.5billion in 2025. But I think the type of people who play games now is very different from the type of people who played games in 1995. As a 1995 gamer I can say the general opinion of the people who played video games was weirdos in their mum’s basement. I don’t think that description fits the average gamer today at all. I don’t think Henry Cavill fits this description (or maybe he does). This shows the point of 100-300mill people having access to a couple of hundred games compared to 3-3.5billion people playing more than 20 000 games is a huge difference. Obviously, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison so let’s look at Steam. There were 125 000 active accounts on Steam in 2015 and 2823 games released that year giving a ratio of about 44 000 users per game. In 2025 there were 132mil active users and 16 000 new games (although there were many more games released some were discounted as asset grabs and AI slop games) gives a ratio of less than 8000 users per new game. Add to this that the 10 top played games are played by 90% of gamers (as reported by Matt Piscatella) and that many people are playing older games (often games that are 10yrs old) and you can see that a new game coming out has, not just a mountain, but a sheer cliff to climb.

This makes me question how many games can each individual actually, realistically buy. If there were close to 20 000 releases on Steam last year, how many of those would one individual actually purchase. Even one a month is only 12 a year. According to Steam data the median number of games played per account is 4 per year with 60% of players buying 2 or fewer games a year.

On that note, there are sales figures where people are just not buying new games. Many wait for sales or just don’t purchase games at all. There has been a dramatic increase in free to play games and younger gamers are seeing this as the norm. Mobile and free to play make up a huge section of the most popular games across platforms. My son plays Roblox regularly and often is playing on his phone. He has bought or has been bought 2-3 games over the last 2-3 years (including Cult of the Lamb, Cuphead and recently someone bought him R.E.P.O). One of his most played paid games is my old copy of Terraria which he played them modded and he is now playing his third or fourth run of Calamity.

The State of Video Gaming in 2025 report by Mathew Ball is a fascinating read but it takes a little more teasing out than he sets out. There is actually a huge amount of data in there that we as gamers don’t normally have access to and if you parsed out this data it tells a huge amount about the video game industry. Personally, I don’t see anything that shows the doom and gloom people set out when speaking about the way the industry has been behaving or the way it is heading. Every time a game like Arc Raiders, Clare Obscur or Baldur’s Gate are a huge success, it validates that people still want good games. The only caveat to this is that people connected to video games, be that consumers, developers, publisher or investors, need to temper their expectations. No Rest for the Wicked has passes 1.5mil sales recently. Clair Obscur sold around 5mil. These surpassed expectations. These games have sensible expectation of sales. Compare this to both of Obsidian’s new games, Avowed and Outer Worlds 2, that have been reported to have not reached sales expectations. Baring in mind that both of these games were on Game Pass and Xbox console exclusive. People on PC are likely to play it on Game Pass, and I have seen comments that the game is too expensive for what it was (Avowed is £40 whereas Outer Worlds 2 is £60) and for Outer Worlds 2 I think I agree to an extent. Many publishers and developers have discussed low sales that never reached expected numbers. Many of these expectation are unrealistic.

This brings me to Crimson Desert. After Highgaurd this is the next game that has flooded my feeds in various different places. I have lost count of the number of ‘is this game too good to be true?’ headlines I have seen across news outlets and video titles. The simple fact is this will either be good, or it won’t. Looking at Deep Dive videos (especially ones released by the devs themselves) will not tell you everything you need to know. Cyberpunk looked amazing on their promo videos and look how that turned out.

My impression of the game is it looks good. I am imagining an MMO-style single player game. The devs have a lot of experience of MMOs and all the trappings that entails. I am personally looking forward to this game as I feel it will scratch an itch. I am currently lucky enough to have a fairly beefy PC so I don’t overly expect any performance issues but that isn’t guaranteed. I am very interested to see how it runs on consoles. The developers have made some bold claims that if true is going to show up EU5 and other engines. They haven’t outright said it will run on the Steam Deck but have stated that based on their minimum specs it should. If that is the case (and specs are not the only issue on the Steam Deck as Lynix doesn’t always play nice) and it continues to look as good and maintains a respectable frame rate, I will be impressed.

I hope over time we can move away from the polarising points of view and the pre-emptive negativity (or pre-emptive excitedness) that seems to follow the release cadence of new game of any significance. You would think that after 40yrs of gaming and millennia of human existence we would learn but maybe I will have to shout at clouds for being  fluffy for a while yet.