We’ve been an Xbox household forever, but recently I stopped paying for Game Pass due to the price increases. Last night my daughter was complaining that there was “nothing to play”.
There are 416 owned games available for download on that Series X which have been accumulated over the years through purchases or Xbox Live Gold or whatever, and she’s barely scratched the surface of them.
For the total life of my PS1 ownership when I was her age, I owned 5 games.
“In my day…”, etc etc
This sounds like analysis paralysis. If you have 5 games, it’s easy to select one. If you have 416, it’s difficult to select one.
I’ve often found that the more options I have, the more difficult it is to come to a decision. And when you think about “what game should I play,” it sounds like a silly problem to have. But when you extend it to other problems in life, like “what should I have for dinner,” then you see it start to cause some pretty serious problems.
Lately I think I spend more time trying to decide what to play than I do playing games. Then I’m not always successful in making a decision, or might run out of time, and then I don’t play any games. Following the same reasoning, sometimes I don’t eat dinner.
If you start to notice this is becoming an actual problem, the good news is there are tools and techniques that can help you make a decision. About a thousand of them. Good luck picking one.
This is definitely part of it. When we had Game Pass, which would add 3 or 4 new games a week, the kids would spend their time trying them out to see if they liked them. Games that had been on the service for a while got ignored, as they weren’t presented as “new”.
That was one of the beauties of Game Pass to be honest, in that the kids would try out whatever was released that week, whether it was AAA or a small indie, and generally they preferred the novelties of the indies.
Now, with just one huge list of older games, they’ve got that paralysis.