Not interested in the far future

After retirement, I built a house and moved. So now I live just 1 hour’s drive away from the location of the world’s largest video games event and trade fair, Gamescom. I didn’t go last month, I never went, and I’m not planning to go in the future. Gamescom feels irrelevant to me, because of its time horizon. And I am writing this because I felt that even stronger about Blizzcon, where they announced a Starcraft shooter game for 2030. What do I care about a game to be released in 2030? I don’t even care about the games announced at Gamescom, and many of those will be released in 2027 or 2028.

I am probably not alone in the feeling that I can’t keep up with video games anymore. Steam now releases over 20,000 games per year. The fraction of those games that I am even remotely aware of is tiny. There are a handful of triple-A games that are so huge that you can’t possibly miss them, and there is a lot of trash. But there are also a lot of mid-sized games that are quite good, and not all of them manage to make headlines. So sometimes I become aware of a game only months after release.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example I played Valheim in 2021. This month Valheim version 1.0 was released. Today is the release date of Endless Legend 2, a game I played nearly a year ago. On the one hand I am sure that the release versions of these games are more polished and complete than the early access versions I played. On the other hand, in a situation where I can’t even keep up with new releases, how would I find the time to play these games again. For me these games are done and dusted, I already played them until I ran out of fun. I couldn’t even manage to find the motivation to play Civilization VII again, after the huge changes.

Civilization VII I bought. Endless Legend 2 I played on Game Pass, and I don’t currently have a subscription for that. Financial tip of the week: Don’t let all of your subscriptions run all of the year, but occasionally drop some, and then maybe resubscribe later. Anyway, if I now wanted to play Endless Legend 2 again, I would need to check whether that game was still on Game Pass, and then pay for that subscription again. I probably won’t do that, given my mixed impression of the game.

So as I can’t keep up with new releases, and even less with new versions of older games, I am really not interested in the games being released a year, two years, or more from now. In a market in which video game projects are often cancelled, developers layed off, and studios closed, I can’t hold my breath for a game that might not even make it over the finish line. Blizzard cancelled two Starcraft shooter games before, so even if I were interested in that type of game, I can’t be sure it would be worth waiting for.