Ten stalls beat an endless list

Every arcade eventually faces the same problem: the shelf grows until choosing becomes work. A list of four thousand games is not generous, it is paralytic. The moment browsing takes longer than playing, the arcade has failed at its only job.

SowSoy is deliberately capped. Ten stalls, twelve games on each counter, one hundred and twenty in total. That is small enough to read in an evening and large enough that every stall has real variety.

Twelve is not an arbitrary number. It is about the most a person will scroll through on a phone before their attention moves somewhere else, and it is enough room for a stall to contain an obvious favourite, a couple of odd ones and something you would never have picked on your own.

The cap also improves the quality of what is here. When you can only keep twelve cooking games, you stop accepting the thirteenth-best one. Every slot has to argue for itself against everything else in the same stall.

This is the opposite of how feeds work. A feed wants to be infinite because it is optimising for time spent. An arcade should be optimising for time well spent, and those two goals point in different directions.

If a game stops earning its place, it leaves and something else arrives. The stalls are meant to be a short menu, not an archive.