How Many Shooters?

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 8 January, 2011

This article does not have a point. It's just a sanity check.

I took a look at GamePro's list of "big games" for 2011 and was surprised to see how many shooters were on it. I'd heard people complain about how many FPS games come out, but I always thought they were exaggerating because there are a few shooters that get a lot of coverage. But seeing how many shooters were coming out just in the first quarter of 2011 gave me pause for thought.

Q1 2011 (7)
Bulletstorm
Conduit 2
Crysis 2
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Fear 3
Homefront
Killzone 3

Q2-4 2011 (5)
Duke Nukem Forever
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
Rage
Resistance 3
Socom 4

That's some serious front loading. We've got more shooters in the first three months than the rest of the year.

But is it really more shooters overall than previous years?

2010 (9)
Aliens vs Predator
Bad Company 2
BioShock 2
CoD BlOps
Fallout: New Vegas
Halo: Reach
MAG
Medal of Honor
Singularity

It's a little more. But looking at the bigger picture, there were five hundred games on the list I looked at. I will not take any complaints about there being too many shooters seriously for the time being.