The French publisher’s publishing director says there are too many games available…

There are a lot of games on Steam, but also on the PlayStation Store and the Nintendo eShop, and a large number of them can be considered bad, amateur games, asset flips (store-bought models, textures, etc., with minimal work). It wasn’t just the AAA games that were scandalously bad last year (The Lord of the Rings: Gollum…), because there is a much higher proportion of this type of product here. While the gaming industry is booming, one side effect of this is that there is a higher proportion of these particular shovelware creations among the more games out there.

The other side effect is that it is harder to get attention for an otherwise honestly made game. This was also discussed in an interview with Gamesindustry by Benoit Clerc, publishing director at Nacon: “There are too many games on the market today. We’re seeing the results of investments made after COVID, when the market was exploding and every game was making a lot of money, so there was a lot of investment. This is two or three years after that, so the games we’re seeing on the market now were funded during that time, and there are just too many for customers to play. If you look at Steam, some days there are 50 or 60 games released in one day, so it’s harder to get enough traction to get a game out there. We’re seeing releases without a day one, to use the old retail term, without any exposure for a title that has been properly marketed,” Clerc said.

Nacon’s solution is to focus on niche genres, so off-road racing, the roguelike genre, or sports (such as cricket or tennis, developed by Big Ant Studios) are what the French publisher is targeting. Another solution would be indie consolidation, where instead of two developers creating the same or very similar games without marketing, they would come together to create something bigger, which in turn could attract the attention of the public, so there would be fewer games on the market and the quality would improve.

Source: WCCFTech