Desk notes · 24 Sep 2026 · 4 min read
The case against endless lists
Ten thousand games is not abundance. It is someone else’s inventory problem, handed to you.
Big portals brag about catalogues of ten thousand games. Read that number again as what it is: ten thousand decisions they refused to make, priced into your attention.
Somewhere in every ten-thousand-game list are maybe two hundred entries that pass a five-minute test. The other nine thousand eight hundred are filler — dead covers, broken embeds, clones of clones — padding the scroll so the ads have somewhere to live.
A dozen entries per section is our answer. It is a small number, and it is expensive: every addition means a real test and a real removal. That is precisely why it is worth reading.