As I get older I find I just don't even have the time for AAA games. Other than Elden Ring, I haven't played a AAA game in goodness knows how long. 80-100 hours of playtime is basically a year-long commitment.

I love that there are so many indie games that offer a more compact experience and seem easier to put down and pick back up. Much more my speed these days.

I agree though that we're at a point of oversaturation. Steam is full of shovelware and barely discernable clones of crafting-survival games. But I hope the studios doing interesting work are able to survive this period so we can continue to benefit from their creativity.

It helps to make games people actually want. I know that seems obvious, but so many game studios just make games that are fine, but are not exactly inspired.

I don't have numbers on this, but I'll bet the percentages on mobile studios struggling financially are even worse.

Plus, there may be too many games, but I'll put an asterisk on there that there are too many long games. When so much of it is designed to keep you coming back to this one particular game over and over again, there's less room in your life for other games that you otherwise would have been willing to buy. I've got a list of 14 games that came out this year or have release dates this year that I'm interested in getting around to still, on top of the 8 games that I've already started or finished, plus another 8 that are expected to come out this year but don't have release dates yet...and I'm still going to spend a few hundred hours across three different fighting games that I've been playing for years.

You basically got to have your own little reliable niche

I think one big problem is originally. So many indie games are essentially clones of the games that the developers happened to like. Zelda-likes, rogue-likes, greyscale puzzle platformers about depression. There are literally hundreds of examples of the first two of these, and not as many but still weirdly a lot of the third. But without something to make it stand out, casual players will come across the game and think "This looks neat, but basically the same as about 4 other games in my wishlist that are already very well reviewed. Maybe if it starts getting rave reviews, I'll add it to the queue".

Not to paint all indie games with one broad stroke, the most novel game ideas out there are also usually from indie studios. I don't have numbers and I don't know about longevity, but I bet that games with novel ideas get more initial downloads