Saturation Point

In most industries when you reach a saturation point, that industry no longer becomes profitable to anyone but the company or companies that saturate the market.  In the UK for instance in the business of food supply there are 4 big retailers, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, and Morrisons, there are a few smaller national chains that typically serve a niche market or carry a price tag that excludes most people from shopping there.  There are also independent stores, and a there are budget stores.  That pretty much sums up the ecosystem that exists in terms of food supply.  If you wanted to become a new national retailer of food you would find that a very difficult task to achieve, indeed in other countries where companies like Amazon have wanted to venture into this industry they have found it easiest to pursue acquisition as an entry strategy and buy up existing business.

The point I am making here is that once the saturation point is reached, the industry stops being profitable to new entrants and you eventually reach a point where less startup companies try to break into the industry as a whole.  This also applies to individual products within the industry, there are a number of big brand names that establish themselves and gain a reputation for certain foods.  Take sauces and condiments as an example, in the UK these are dominated by Heinz, Colman's, HP, and Schwartz.  There are other brands that provide something specific like Bisto who mainly produce Gravy granules and Stock, and there are a plethora of independent producers who make one thing really well like Levi Roots which makes Reggae Reggae Sauce.  Again this establishes the ecosystem that exists but beyond this existing ecosystem any new entrant is met with barriers to entry.  Levi Roots is a prime example, the founder Keith Graham and his story is quite well known as he featured on Dragons' Den, the UK TV reality show based on the Japanese original called Money Tigers, US readers will know the format as Shark Tank.  The point here is that Keith needed the trifecta of finance, exposure, and connection provided by the show in order to get his product into every store in the UK - the sauce is incredible and he deserves the success he has had but for his success story there are countless others who did not succeed.

This ultimately brings us back to the core problem that saturation creates, that is it prevents success of anything other than that which is already successful.  A brilliant product in and of itself isn't enough to promulgate within that environment.  I was thinking about this concept whilst browsing Steam for something to play.  The more I reflected on the fact that the abundance of choice provided by Steam made choosing incredibly difficult, the more I realised this has become a problem everywhere.  Netflix has the same problem, Disney+ has the same problem, even social media sites to an extent have the same problem, you have to know what you want before you visit these sites in order to find it.  "Browsing" these sites for something new is incredibly difficult, despite their attempts at providing curation and algorithmic suggestions the abundance of content is reaching a point where there is so much you can not conceivably navigate through it.

I have mentioned in the past that this is one of the biggest problems with YouTube as a website, you go there to consume your subscriptions, to watch a video someone sent you or that was embedded in another website, or you constantly watch videos it recommends for you, beyond these entry points it's very difficult to "find" something new to watch that you might actually like.  Steam was once only a platform for Valve and a handful of other publishers to distribute their games but has grown to the point where anyone can submit a game, much like Amazon provides Kindle Direct Publishing as an open platform for anyone to write and submit content to for approval.  The latest figures I could find for Steam releases on Statista, a statistics and research website, cover 2004 through 2018.  This chart shows that in 2004 there were just 7 games submitted to the platform but 2018 saw 9,050 games submitted.  At the end of 2018, there were a grand total of 27,279 games available on Steam.  That also means that 33% of the games available on Steam were submitted in 2018, rising to 59% when you combine 2018 and 2017 or 74% if you include 2016 as well.

If the trend continues, then it's fair to say that Steam has already far surpassed the point of saturation, as a service it is no longer viable to discover games, instead it is akin to YouTube, something that you visit if you know what you are looking for already, or want to consume content you know in advance is waiting, or something you want to see suggestions based on what you already consume through the platform - Steam doesn't do this last one very well, it does have a feature providing this in a way but not to the same extent of a never ending list that YouTube provides.  The other problem is that YouTube videos can be consumed in bulk by binging one after the other, it's very difficult to "binge" games in the same way.  Taking the 2018 total of 9,050 as an example you would have to play 25 games per day in order to play them all in the space of a year, practically speaking that won't be possible, even if a large chunk of those games could be played through in under an hour, the games that take much longer would negate those gains that's before you even factor in rest breaks to sleep, eat, drink, bathe etc.

Youtube passed this milestone many years ago, at present as of 2020 around 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, that's 262.8 million hours of video per year, or 30,000 years of content per year, in other words even if you devoted every single second of your life to watching YouTube you would not even scratch the surface of the content that is uploaded in a year.  Or to put it another way, 720,000 hours of video are uploaded per day, so it would take you 82 years just to watch all of the content that was uploaded today.

When it becomes impossible to consume everything, and impossible to browse through everything on offer, at what point does the creative process have to end?  There is no sign of the rate of submissions slowing down, even though these platforms have huge swathes of content already available.  The platforms themselves don't want to delete anything for that matter, even when a game has literally never been downloaded by anyone at all it still remains on Steam so long as the developer wants it to remain available.  The same applies to Amazon with the Kindle Store, a book with zero sales and zero downloads will remain on the store, just as all your old tweets and status updated on social media also remains.  The cost is negligible to these platforms to host this content but that cost will rise over time and in years to come when these platforms become less profitable there will inevitably be the question of whether zero consumption content will be removed. 

There is a service I have mentioned before called Forgotify which plays only music tracks from Spotify that have zero as their playcount.  The latest statistics I could find for them was cited in an article in 2017 the original link no longer works sadly but at the time there were 4 million songs on Spotify that had never been played.  Again hosting this content comes at a negligible cost to Spotify but as the service grows that cost will accumulate over time.