The Window Problem: there are too many games and not enough life

Even Xbox is joking about it now. When the platform holder itself posts tongue-in-cheek about the sheer volume of games hitting at once, the joke has stopped being a joke. It's an admission.

Look at the run we're in right now:

Here's the part nobody in a publishing boardroom seems to price in: the player.

Take a normal person. A 9-to-5, three children, a house that doesn't run itself. Realistically that's maybe five to eight hours of gaming a week, and that's a good week. A 40-hour RPG is a two-to-three month commitment at that pace. A 60-hour one is a season of your life.

So one game per quarter. That's the actual budget for most adults. Not one game per week, which is what this autumn's calendar demands. I'm playing Mortal Shell 2 right now and I fully expect to be on it for another six weeks minimum. In that time, six or seven “must-play” titles will launch, get discoursed to death, and fall off the front page before I've finished my current playthrough. By the time I'm free, the conversation has moved on. The game I “missed” feels old at eight weeks. That's madness.

The industry understands windows. It just understands them selfishly. Every publisher this year did the same calculation: get out of GTA 6's blast radius. The result? They all dived into the same August–October trench together. They dodged one giant and trampled each other instead.

Moving within the right window is the difference between a hit and a ghost. Hi-Fi Rush proved a surprise January drop can own a dead month. Baldur's Gate 3 famously moved to avoid competition and inherited an empty August. The lesson is sitting right there: empty months are gold. Yet the calendar still looks like everyone booked the same wedding venue on the same Saturday.

Everyone knows why — fiscal years and marketing beats all point at the same before-the-holidays, after-the-summer slot. What nobody does is coordinate. So the player pays for it.

So what's the pivot? A few things have to give:

Shorter, denser games. Not smaller ambitions — tighter ones. A brilliant 15–20 hour game that a working parent can actually finish inside a month is worth more, culturally and commercially, than a 70-hour epic that a third of its buyers abandon at the halfway mark. Completion rates are the industry's dirty secret — we watch them every day on the trophy data. Length stopped being a selling point the moment our free time became the scarcest resource in the equation.

Quality over quantity. Every mid game that launches into a stacked window doesn't just fail — it drags attention away from something better. The market is telling studios, loudly, that “pretty good” is no longer a viable tier. Be excellent or be cheap or be short. Ideally two of the three.

Actual spacing. The film industry coordinates release slates informally all the time. Gaming's publishers would rather cannibalise each other than blink first. The first ones brave enough to own February, May or July will find players sitting there with cleared backlogs, full wallets and nothing to play. Empty months aren't dead air — they're unrented shelf space.

That's the existential bit. An industry that ships more content than its audience can physically consume is an industry marketing to a fantasy customer — someone with infinite evenings and no life. Every game bought but never finished trains players to wait: wait for sales, wait for patches, wait for the backlog to clear. Waiting becomes the default. Day-one becomes the exception. And day-one is where the money is.

Games don't just need to be shorter and better. They need to let each other breathe — because the alternative is that we, the people actually holding the controllers, quietly stop trying to keep up. An audience that stops trying to keep up is an audience that stops buying.

I'll be on Mortal Shell 2 for another six weeks. The industry can wait. It might want to think about why it has to.