Have you also noticed the sudden influx of new slots appearing in game lobbies at a rapid pace?

You’re not alone, and the question has to be asked; are there too many slots being released now?

Well, it would be fine if all new slots kept a high quality, but this isn’t the case.

Some game studios have a clear strategy of releasing as many new slots as possible to ensure constant visibility in casino game lobbies. Many of these slots are straight re-skins (clones) of older slots that have proven to be successful.

How does this affect us players, as many of these games become churn and burn slots that disappear from the casino sphere as fast as they appeared?

To further prove our point, let’s have a quick look at another industry that went through a similar experience in the 1980s and 90s.

Ataris’s failure in the 1980s video game market

The (once) video game behemoth was the king of that industry until the company and market completely crashed in the early 1980s, as it saw video game sales drop 97% from $3.2 billion in 1982 to $100 million by 1985.  

So why did this happen?

One of the main reasons was the complete lack of control of the number of games being released by game developers, which led to an overall poor quality of games.

People got fed up and bored with this.

This even led to Atari infamously burying 728,000 games in the desert. Some reports indicate that there were actually more than 3 million unsold game cartridges hidden in this landfill. 

Nintendo’s solution

Video games made a grand comeback in the second half of the 80s and early 90s, with Nintendo being the number one brand with a 90% market share in the US at one point.

One of their solutions to prevent earlier mistakes from happening again was to introduce a cap of maximum 5 new games per game developer / year.

With this restriction in place, game developers really had to think twice before releasing a new game and put proper effort and investments into developing that game instead of shuffling new games out at furious speed.

What can the online casino industry learn from this?

The online casino industry is booming as it’s growing worldwide yearly but isn’t it better to be proactive instead of trying to fix issues later down the line?

It should be, but what gets in the way? -Greed!

Ultimately, it’s a competition between game studios to get as big a piece of the pie as possible. Therefore, the ones that have the capacity and will to produce new games like there is no tomorrow will do so, as who’s there to stop them?

As long as the strategy of releasing as many new games as possible is viable, it will continue.

Don’t get us wrong, we love trying and playing new games, but the average quality of these new games could ideally be a bit higher.

You don’t even have time to get to like new slots sometimes. We tried to play a new game again that we enjoyed and had played the previous day, but it was already gone from the New Slots lobby. Since we couldn’t recall the name of that specific slot, we might never play it again.

There is a reason why older slots like Book of Dead, Sweet Bonanza, Reactoonz, Gates of Olympus, Starburst, Extra Chilli, and others are found on casinos’ “Top Games” lists year in and out while new games come and go faster than we have a chance to try them.

Game studios and online casinos; please learn from previous mistakes and put us, players, first by giving us the high quality we want and deserve.

Meanwhile, our experts at CasinoWizard continue to review new games, give you our viewpoints, and guide you toward the high RTP slots.