Gamer's Grasp: A deadend for opened worlds

It's a busy time to play games. Between "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim", "Saints Row The Third", and "Assassin's Creed: Revelations", there is no shortage in open-world themed games to play. In fact, there just might be too many.

The open-world genre has changed so much that it's not really a type of game anymore — it has now become canonical of most titles.

It appears that if a game does not have an open and expansive world, the knee-           jerk reaction is to call it linear, as if it's an insult.

Meanwhile, linear games such as the Uncharted series or Final Fantasy XIII are seen as a rare commodity.

What seems to have happened since the Grand Theft Auto III era (and Zelda before that, if you want to get technical) was that the concept of having an expansive, explorable landscape in games was still a novel idea.

As mentioned before, it created a sandbox world for players to experience for a lengthy bit of time before moving onto a new title.

This was great for publishers, because it allowed players to continue to play their games after its narrative had concluded.

Granted, this is a great angle for consumers who can only purchase a few games a year.

The bang-for-your-buck aspect of these games is extraordinary, as any of these titles can offer hours of playtime.

It's a double-edged sword, considering any amount of time a consumer spends playing one game is time that they won't be dedicating to another title.

As the games industry begins to merge onto this path of having most games be an opened-world, it's hard not to question a publisher's motives behind releasing all these content-rich games around the same time.

Since opened-world games do not necessarily promise that the player can go anywhere and do anything in the world, but simply that there are just a lot of things to do in the world.

Simply put, it's just not a well-thought-out business model for these games, since all these titles can last a consumer some time to play, meaning they probably won't want to be moving on to anything else anytime soon.

Luckily "Batman: Arkham City" had been released in October (November for PC), allowing players roughly a month to play it before the cluster of November titles flooded through the doors.

The fact that Skryim was released a week before "Saints Row The Third" and "Assassin's Creed: Revelations" (which both dropped on the same day) is absurd.

The thing that publishers need to realize is that the game industry does not exist in a vacuum.

While competition is all well and good (this is capitalism, after all), having so many games that are huge in scope at the same time really only hurts the games themselves.

Basically, each of these titles are like a delicious chocolate cake that you want to enjoy slowly, not scarf down to devour another chocolate cake right afterwards.

If you do that, you can't enjoy either. You also get a stomach ache.

Realistically, if a consumer wants to buy both Skyrim and Assassin's Creed but can only afford one, they're going to pick one game and buy the other later. Though one game is purchased, the other publisher misses out on a sale.

However, if Assassin's Creed had been released in August, when there were no other opened-world games being released, the consumer could buy that game then and Skyrim when that came out later.

Spreading out different types of games evenly throughout the year allows for not only consumers to bide their time, but for publishers to advertise their titles more effectively.

The result would be serveral games being able to benefit through their own merit,  without having to result to degrading marketing or publicity stunts to stay prevalent in an already crowded market.