It’s true. Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one. I’ve got a list of 20+ games that came out this year that I still haven’t gotten around to. I might get through 5 of them before the new year. And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my ability to play more games if more of them were shorter.
EDIT: I provided this anecdote as a reason contributing to the problems that the industry is experiencing. The article is about the trouble the industry is experiencing as a result of too many competing games being released in a given year. It is not about how I feel about trying to play through many of the ones I found interesting. Apparently Schreier had the same problem on BlueSky with people answering what they think the headline says rather than what the article is about.
Considering the hours you put in a good building game just about every one of them is “free”. But yeah, OpenTTD is great and a lot of fun. TTDX was my first PC game which was an instant buy (before I even had a computer but was getting one in a couple of months) after I saw a review on TV. The 90s was something else.
In building specifically, I only played OpenTTD and Dwarf Fortress.
And I paid for DF after sinking most hours.