Has the game industry reached a point of sautration?

[Shadow1980]

The market for conventional consoles reached saturation back in the PS2/Xbox days. Combined sales of the two platforms remained relatively unchanged for three generations straight, and doesn't look to be budging. That puts a cap on the number of potential buyers of any particular game, though realistically a large majority of owners of a particular PS or Xbox console will not own any specific titles (only a literal handful of games have had an attach rate of over 20%; GTA5 on the PS3 had the best attach rate, with just over a third of PS3 owners buying a copy). Even if we add in PC, the market for AAA games is limited. Nintendo is kind of their own thing and have been so since the Wii, but the market for that is still finite. The DS is their best-selling system ever and it one of only two systems ever to sell over 150M units (the Switch is likely to pass that mark as well). Nintendo games have much higher attach rates than games on other systems, but even then there's an upper limit, and even the best-selling Nintendo games on a given platform have never cracked a 50% attach rate without heavy bundling. The market has been "saturated" for a long time.

People's time and money are both finite. There are more games than ever before competing for that finite time and money, regardless of what system(s) they play on. When it comes to online games, people that play them are going to pick just a small handful at most and stick to them, and they're likely to congregate to popular ones. Why would someone go play Concord when they already have Overwatch or Valorant? Hero shooters, battle royale games, and so on are a dime a dozen, and most are going to fail. It's very hard to break through into these kind of markets, and the number of bona fide hits with very strong player counts is relatively small. People still play League and Fortnite, but countless other live service titles have been sent to the graveyard of gaming history.

When it comes to single-player games, people want their $60-70 to go to a game that they think is really worth their time. Major hits like Call of Duty and Rockstar's open-world games find absolutely massive audiences. They have that "it factor." But a Ubisoft open-world game sitting at a merely okay Metascore, a niche title about a Pict suffering from psychosis probably won't be it, or a derivative, bog-standard hero shooter probably won't have the same broad appeal.

Some games are hits. Most are misses. It's been a thing since video games have existed. It has nothing to do with diminishing returns in graphics or console gaming being a zero-growth market or whatever.