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[A Black Falcon]

1,234.

So, recently I checked the Switch eshop, as I do regularly.  And, as of a day or two ago, 1,234 games are on sale on the Switch.  The Switch has a truly insanely large library of digital software, so much that just about any past console's library looks tiny, but here is the question: are there too many games?   There certainly are too many games for any one person to play all of the interesting ones.  That did not used to be nearly as true as it is now; in the past there were fewer games, but games are easier to develop and easier to distribute than ever.  And clearly, enough of them sell well for people to keep flooding out indie games, particularly on Steam and the Switch.  The PS4 and Xbox don't have the same volume of indie software as Switch or PC.

That's all fine, really, it's just a bit overwhelming, you know?  I like trying to find the good games that are on the Switch, but it's a bit hard when you have a constant flood of new titles releasing, and over a thousand games on sale on a random non-holiday week.  I doubt that any one person actually can follow all of the good, or bad, releases.  The democratization of videogame releases is certainly an overall good thing but the cost is that a lot of games are simply going to be overlooked and forgotten, including some good ones.  Remember when IGN reviewed every Game Boy Color game, even the random licensed stuff?  No one source does that anymore for Switch game releases, there are too many.  And that's mostly good, I just liked having a better sense of what was actually releasing than we have now.

Of course, the decline of the videogame journalism business doesn't help here at all.  A lot of titles are only covered by random people on Youtube, not anything professional, but considering everything, from the decline in game journalism revenues to the growth in releases, I get it.  It's just kind of unfortunate... there are more games than ever now, but fewer reliable, trustworthy ways than ever to judge their quality.