First post, by gerry
i was looking through yet another one of those youtube channels that combine hundreds of gameplay videos with very few subs and views (the sort i mentioned here Re: Less popular Youtube channels)
and i thought - just how many published games are there?
let's restrict it to x86 lineage in 16,32 and 64 bit systems with dos/windows/linux and games that have been released and are (mostly complete) and playable - that includes commercial, shareware, freeware / pd, open source
think of it like an iceberg
the tip is the commercial releases
then there are less known commercial releases
then the endless shareware and freeware of the sort that used to fill magazine cover CDs way back
and finally the absolute mass of playable amateur made games by enthusiasts whether on qbasic, c+allegro or more recently unity etc that made it online (or onto a CD)
i think it must run into 100's of thousands globally and maybe more - think of all the hours of coding and debugging on commercial scales and lone amateur scales, all that effort
what's your guess? perhaps you can think of better definitions and categories for what qualifies as a game in the total number
