Tide of Cheap Games is Drowning Us

In a good way. Digital distribution, web shopping and eBay with easy to use pay options have broken the floodgates and gaming enthusiasts are literally drowning in titles.

Torchlight for 4EUR in Steam - gotta get me one, Easter sale on gamestation - gotta get me six (games most of which I will not play ever) and Conker's Bad Fur Day for pittance in eBay - just have to have it. Over the last years my gaming title purchases have skyrocketed but the amount of money spent has only gone up moderately, bargains are easier to find in the www-era and where there are bargains there are people wanting to make some.

Only problem is that the amount of time available for playing has not changed much one way or the other and attention must be paid to where that precious time is spent. I almost regret I played close to 20h Batman: Arkham Asylum because I have a backlog of ~20 games and as soon as I felt the game was mediocre I should have stopped and changed to another game.

Oh well, some people do not have OCD to finish what they started, but I do.

I still lament that I quit Gears of War near the end when I got stuck and I will not get rest until I finish it one day - maybe next year.
The games themselves are not getting any better or worse.

Sure, technically we have come far from Space Invaders but the absolute goodness of a game is dependent on what is available, back in the day 3/4 of a pie was a charismatic protagonist and for a plot it was enough to send him after some pills in a labyrinth. Today the pie has been replaced with a higher polygon count blob that sometimes resembles a muscle sculpture better at home in a Pride parade and sometimes the blob has 34DD gravity defying floaters to keep her balanced in the hectic action but both are still after the pills - nowadays the labyrinth is more often a jungle or a city and the pills are nazi gold or weird artefacts but fundamentally very little has changed aside from the polygon count.
Word of the times is "More" and more is what we have for better or worse.