I may well regret creating a forum topic, but for the moment let's just see how it goes.
So, gaming droughts. I'm sure they happen with most consoles from time to time (certainly, pretty much every console at least has a dry spell in its first 6-12 months as developers get their first games out). I've noticed talk of a drought at the moment on Wii U - it's getting very little third-party support and two of its three big Xmas titles (Mario Tennis and that Animal Crossing amiibo whatever thing) have been critically panned, meaning its Xmas lineup is basically riding on Xenoblade, a couple of Virtual Console/indie releases, and not much else.
However, with the amount of complaints I've seen about it, I'm left wondering if most of the Internet has a lot of spare time, or only started gaming this year, or all of the above.
Question: how many new games do you need in a year? Between Wii U and PC, I've already probably picked up more than a dozen titles this year, and even if there hadn't been a single game to release this year that I wanted to play, I'd have a backlog of dozens, maybe hundreds, of games I haven't gotten around to. There's nothing new I want to play at the moment - I'm holding out on Fallout 4 until it gets some bug fixes and a GOTY edition, and the Wii U hasn't had a ton of games I care about lately - but that's no big deal. I'm finally getting around to Baten Kaitos Origins (which had been sitting on my bookshelf for about eight years), I'm getting through Yoshi's Woolly World with my partner, I'm tweaking a few levels for Super Mario Maker and I'm dipping into Sunless Sea, which I got in a Humble Bundle ages ago. A month or two without exciting new releases is a chance to catch up on everything I missed.
Then there's the time issue. I work a lot, and while I love gaming I can only really spare 10-20 hours a week at most. If games I wanted to play came out at a faster rate than they do at the moment, I'd never get a chance to get around to everything (hell, I probably won't even with things as they are at the moment). When I hear people complain about about gaming droughts, I find myself wondering how much time they've got to play games, or how few games there must be out there that they're interested in.
So, how about you? Are you fazed by gaming droughts? How big is your backlog? How many games do you reckon you manage to burn through in a year?
