Decent take. I can see that it is unique but once a game goes on sale it looses a lot of it's profitability and if it's a flop it's going to help very little but ease the pain. Games can indeed come back to life which is really unique but rare. Idk, I hope for the best but a wave of studios and publishers toppling is a real possibility mire so than in decades. 

You don't see that the industry is held up by those Pillars? Not many people gonna be buying hardware for indies, they buy for the big games. 

Well, when you look at it like this, they wouldn't continue to release them if they weren't making money somehow. What I worry about is people's time is a finite thing and in economic boom times studios can rely on gamers to buy games just on a whim, probably boot it for an hour if at all and then move ontop the next game and do the same. Gamers are now being forced to become savy and impulse buying becomes a thing of the past and with the higher prices no more buying games unless they are actually going to be played. Publishers have raised their prices on the idea that gamers will buy anyway, I think they will be sorely disappointed if not out right hurt. 

Anyway, these problems are easy to course correct in current day. Maybe it'll just mean a redistribution of funds and wealth and the big companies are smart enough to reabsorb that wealth before disaster. 

There are only 5-6 AAA games released per year that I'm usually interested in. Most game reveals, I look at it and go meh.

Just wanted to point out that I meant steam had 19k releases, not accounting other stores like the smartphones ones but that is totally different

Good lord. 

However. If there are 3 billion gamers and 30,000 games that's 90,000 gamers per game. Even if it's one billion who ate actually actively gaming there's a lot of coin to go around. If there is 500 billion there is 1.6 million for each game. I know it doesn't get divided like this but my perspective on this matter is starting to change.

I can't remotely keep up with games releases for years now, so yeah, too much stuff.

Things are certainly not ideal currently with stuff like the layoffs but the massive amount of releases is only a good thing. Video games are still young compared to other mediums so that's just a normal and healthy part of it continuing to grow. We're still some time away from having major figures in their 70s and even 80s being heavily involved in making video games like how film has really old famous veterans still directing.

Are those games lucky to break even though? I haven’t been following them but is there some sort of evidence that they are expected to underperform? And if so, what makes you think it’s because there are too many games releasing?

Could anyone ever keep up with the game releases of any successful platform?

The PS2 had thousands of games, hundreds of solid games, and yet I only managed to play 200 give or take including crappy ones. No one is ever going to play every good game. The best consoles have a tie ratio of 10-17~. Per console unit, this is just 11-17 games sold, out of thousands available. But these numbers are more than enough to keep the industry strong all things considered. Unlike the PS2 days, we have multiple platforms with well over a 100 million active users each. This is without counting mobile phones.

There has never been a better time to make quality games, because there are more players across multiple popular platforms ready to spend a lot more than the average gamer of the old days. Naturally, this leads to a greater software output and sales but also a larger number of flops, because countless smaller companies will attempt to get a piece of the pie.

The most dominant home console of all time (PS2) had a tiny number of 10 million+ sellers. Competitors at that time couldn't dream of reaching 10 million in software. Fast forward and now the 10 million milestone is so regularly reached, with several games exceeding 30 million, and a few 70+ million. Even Devil May Cry and NieR Automata are 10 million sellers.