The seventh console generation - why so few physical games?

[Spartacus]

I've never noticed this at all. Do you have any actual production numbers for physical games besides just what you personally collected for your own collection? Have you looked into regional differences between physical releases? Did some countries get more than others for different generations? There's still a lot of unknowns here.

I don't have access to proprietary sales information. But the information supplied by Wikipedia, MobyGames and GameFAQs corroborated with data from Reddit and YouTube collectors suggests there were 4,104 PS1 games and 4,376 PS2 games. In the 7th generation there were 1,107 North American, 354 Japanese and 191 PAL physical PS3 games. You can choose to believe or not believe these figures, but they do conform to my experience as a collector of those era's. There appears to be a significant drop in physical games during the 7th generation

As of 7 years ago, someone claimed to own 1194 retail released North American Xbox 360 games. That's still more games than the NES had released.

I don't want to get sideways mixing in NES games. I'm only wondering why there were less physical games in the 7th generation than in the generations before and after.

So far I've read suggestions that economic factors may have been in play. The 7th generation experienced the Dot-com bubble burst, the Sub-Prime Housing Crisis and the collapse of Wall Street. But physical games seem to have snapped back during the 8th generation which experienced a global pandemic that caused supply-chain disruptions with severe economic impact and yet had more physical games than the previous generation. Nintendo fans claim the Switch has 3,000 physical games already.

Another suggested that the difficulty programming for the PS3 may have lead to it's decline. But the PS3 and Xbox 3600 shared almost identical libraries in both titles and numbers - so nobody abandoned the PS3. I do remember reading about poorly optimized PS3 games though.

Not sure what the cryptic android suggestion meant. That developers chose to use their time developing games for cell phones instead of consoles? Maybe. There were plenty of games being released on 7th generation consoles, but they were mostly digital, not physical.

Maybe I'll never know why my PS3 collection is so small. I've gone over it three times now convinced I could add more games of the type I enjoy collecting and never could.

Wasn't the 7th generation when the game industry publicly called out the Japanese for making crappy games? Maybe that had something to do with it.

[Aussie2B]

If the PS3 and 360 have a similar number of releases, could it be that all the physical releases were just more evenly divided across all the platforms then? I'd be curious what the total number of physical releases were for each generation. PS1 and PS2 did get huge amounts (though this was when digital releases weren't even an option), but they also really dominated their generations. In comparison to the PS1's 4104, the N64 got fewer than 400 worldwide. The PS3 didn't have the same kind of stranglehold on the industry that its predecessors had.

[Gameguy]

I don't have access to proprietary sales information. But the information supplied by Wikipedia, MobyGames and GameFAQs corroborated with data from Reddit and YouTube collectors suggests there were 4,104 PS1 games and 4,376 PS2 games. In the 7th generation there were 1,107 North American, 354 Japanese and 191 PAL physical PS3 games. You can choose to believe or not believe these figures, but they do conform to my experience as a collector of those era's. There appears to be a significant drop in physical games during the 7th generation

I was hoping some collectors would know how many games were released for each region, as those total lists include all regions grouped together which would include the same games released multiple times. Plus I was curious if certain consoles were more successful in specific regions over others, meaning more releases in specific regions over others. This was the type of info that collectors on Digital Press used to have for other previous consoles, people tended to know how many games were available to collect a complete set for a console, but now nobody seems to know. I couldn't find this info with a quick search online either. Many of these online lists could be incomplete as well, they only have games added through user contributions and there could be less people caring enough to add every obscure foreign title for more recent generations.

I don't want to get sideways mixing in NES games. I'm only wondering why there were less physical games in the 7th generation than in the generations before and after.

I mentioned NES as it's a previous generation, really the 7th generation still had more releases than various earlier generations, it's not that every previous generation had more physical games than the 7th generation. Unless you meant the immediate previous generation only, though you mentioned PS1 games as well.

So far I've read suggestions that economic factors may have been in play. The 7th generation experienced the Dot-com bubble burst, the Sub-Prime Housing Crisis and the collapse of Wall Street. But physical games seem to have snapped back during the 8th generation which experienced a global pandemic that caused supply-chain disruptions with severe economic impact and yet had more physical games than the previous generation. Nintendo fans claim the Switch has 3,000 physical games already.

Another suggested that the difficulty programming for the PS3 may have lead to it's decline. But the PS3 and Xbox 3600 shared almost identical libraries in both titles and numbers - so nobody abandoned the PS3. I do remember reading about poorly optimized PS3 games though.

Not sure what the cryptic android suggestion meant. That developers chose to use their time developing games for cell phones instead of consoles? Maybe. There were plenty of games being released on 7th generation consoles, but they were mostly digital, not physical.

Maybe I'll never know why my PS3 collection is so small. I've gone over it three times now convinced I could add more games of the type I enjoy collecting and never could.

Wasn't the 7th generation when the game industry publicly called out the Japanese for making crappy games? Maybe that had something to do with it.

Really if you're going to compare an entire generation, you would need to add up all games for all consoles available for that generation. A main reason for the difference was already mentioned earlier by Aussie2B. The PS1 had so many releases because few people owned an N64 or a Saturn. The PS3 had less releases as more people owned an Xbox 360 or a Wii.

There's a few other reasons too. With the PS1, games had the advantage of lower development costs combined with lower manufacturing costs compared to previous cartridge based consoles, plenty of titles were released at cheap budget prices. Same with the PS2, though games weren't as cheap compared to PS1 budget releases. The PS3 era introduced the newer standard bloated development costs so there were far fewer budget releases released physically, and the real lower budget titles were just available digitally.

With the sales of PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles being so close, plenty of developers would focus on making multiple ports of the same game, rather than making multiple games for the same console. There were just less games made by developers during this time period.

Also, what type of games do you enjoy? Do you enjoy the various Call of Duty games as there's at least 10 of these for the PS3 alone, or the various other COD clones as there were tons of different similar releases that all felt the same to play. I sure didn't but that's what was available for the PS3, which is why I care so little about collecting for this generation.

Plus online gaming became really popular during this time, fewer people focused on single player games. Most people just all bought and played the same games so they could play online with their friends.

[celerystalker]

I have to admit, I've never looked into this at all. My Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3 libraries are all considerably smaller than my PS2 or PS4 libraries, but that has a lot more to do with the tyoe of games I enjoy as opposed to size of the library. I love games, but I can't think of a console that has 1000 or more games that I want to play. Maybe a few hundred. As Aussie said, the limited print companies shipping physicals of indie games definitely ballooned the amount of releases, and for me, who prefers retro games and metroidvanias, the PS4 had been a goldmine of stuff I enjoy compared to the PS3, that has a few really nice games for me, but I don't think there are even 50 physicals on the console I'd have a ton of fun with (given my own tastes).