I’ve written more than a few articles on oversaturation. However, it occurs to me a lot of people don’t even know what oversaturation is (and you thought I didn’t read the comments). So, for one of my last articles this year, I’m going to explain how oversaturation works, through one of the best examples I can use… a New Year’s Party.
Every year, me and my friends from the gaming industry and convention circuit run a big 4 day party over New Year’s, where everyone sleeps over, hangs out, and plays games. We treat it a bit like a convention, with movies, events, tournaments, and the like. One of the events every year is a fighting game tournament. We usually pick the new big fighting game of the year and let everyone try it out, after not having played it much at all, and see who ends up winning.
So what game are we going to play this year? Smash Bros. for Wii U? Guilty Gear Xrd? Under Night In-Birth? Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax? Persona 4 Arena Ultimax? Ultra Street Fighter IV Omega Mode? Lethal League? Nidhogg? The latest updates to Skullgirls Encore? Divekick Addition Edition?
The answer is: we don’t know. All of these games are good, fun games. We would be happy playing any of them. But we don’t have the money or the time to run a tournament for all of them, whereas previous years we were pretty good at running a tournament for the one or two big fighting game releases that came out.
That is what game oversaturation is in a nutshell. It’s when too much of a particular style of game comes out that not everyone who wants to partake in those games can. Let’s take the fighting games as an example. If those game releases were spread out over a couple years, we would probably buy each and every one. Since they weren’t, we are probably only going to buy a few. A lot of people would say this is natural, competition, capitalism, and all that, but some of these games are competing with themselves. Guilty Gear Xrd, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, and Under Night In-Birth are all Arc System Works Games (designed or published) for example! They are taking sales away from themselves!
What’s worse, is that when the market becomes oversaturated like this, people see decreasing sales in individual titles. Because the same amount of sales become distributed over a larger number of titles. These decreased sales make people less likely to produce games in that genre. This results in a drought of games that were popular only a few years ago because the market becomes oversaturated with them.
Then, the cycle repeats itself whenever someone gets the guts to make a new game in that genre. For example, if Street Fighter V game out in a year when no other fighting games came out, because everyone was afraid of low sales, it would get massive sales, because it was the only new fighting game offering. Seeing these massive sales, other companies would jump on board, making new fighting games because they are selling like hotcakes, until, eventually, we hit oversaturation again. It’s the circle of games.
And that is how oversaturation works.