I think a lot of the issue regarding games being unable to find markets and unable to find audiences is due to the suite of "perma-games" that are consistently taking up tons of people's leisure time. League of Legends, Fortnite, Warzone, GTA Online, etc. Those games have essentially captured a HUGE segment of gamers and as a result those people are never looking for new or different media to consume. There's always more League or Fortnite to play. So games in the Indie and AA space get squeezed by virtue of less total people existing that even would consider any sort of game for entertainment time. People already have a game they play, no need to see another. So smaller games MUST expand their audience any way they can. By Increasing diversity, or making big titty waifus, or whatever else they can to get some eyes and some traction. Its just different approaches to the same issue.
It has less to do with what sorts of games get made and what genre they are, or if they have diversity or not. There just aren't enough people looking for ANY new game anymore to sustain the industry the way it was in the past. Hence the constant refrain of layoffs and closures-- the entire games industry is in a crisis of its own making here and all everything else is kind of a slideshow. Not that these things aren't important-- I believe diversity and inclusion are important, but they are symptoms of bigger issues not the source of problems.
I dunno what any of the correct moves are here, but I don't envy anyone working in games ATM.
I've come to think that the stickiness of live service games is overstated and used as a scapegoat to justify the failure of other games. Anyone who thinks along the lines of "Oh this game I really liked flopped because of other people who were enjoying Call of Duty or League or some other game" is being kind of ridiculous. When Concord flopped one of the dumb excuses people gave was that the live service market was saturated and there's no room for another hero shooter but fast forward to today and Marvel Rivals just set a new CCU record. It's actually
growing a month after release. Path of Exile 2 is another successful live service that just launched last month. There have been several successful games in the last year at different scales.
What I believe has happened is that the bar to succeed has been raised very high by a couple of different factors. Live services are one of those factors. People who play Counter Strike or Apex or whatever are willing to try (and even pay for) new games but you have to deliver a better or different experience to keep them interested. Otherwise they will naturally go back to the game that they enjoy more. And it does happen... CS and Overwatch are very popular but Valorant came along and mixed both formulas and found success. The last two Diablo games sold shit tons of copies but both Path of Exile games have managed to carve out a niche for themselves. Marvel Rivals is about a 90% clone of Overwatch but it is still succeeding because it is so much fun. There's an element of luck and serendipity involved but it's very important to correctly read market signals and serve your audience if you want to see success. The people who run Call of Duty, one of the biggest games around, realized that keeping the game exclusive to battle.net was not a good idea and brought it to Steam. Meanwhile, the people making the COD clone called XDefiant thought they could keep it on exclusive to uplay. That's not the only reason it failed, but man what a stupid decision that was. It's definitely one of the reasons Ubisoft is circling the toilet today. That joke of a game Concord didn't fail because it was a paid game, a hero shooter, a live service or a new IP. There have been successful games with every one of those 'handicaps'. It didn't even fail because it was a bad game because nobody was willing to even give it a chance. It had already failed before anyone even got to experience it.
The other factor is the democratization of game development and distribution. Anyone who has the drive and ability can create and release a game with very little monetary investment. This is why you get ~20,000 releases on Steam in a year and, again, your game has to be better or different enough to find it's audience. Supermarket Simulator was one of the biggest success stories of last year and I'm pretty sure it was made on the free Unity engine with store bought assets. Live services didn't stop that game or Miside or Manor Lords or any of those games from succeeding. Luck obviously played a huge part in their success by letting them beat all the competition for visibility but they also correctly read the market and served their audience (which they possibly created).
There's no one decision that determines the success or failure of a game but I do think the bar is high enough that developers and companies now need to mostly get everything right to succeed. Making a good game is not enough. I enjoyed Indiana Jones to bits but that game has definitely flopped because of the decisions Microsoft made. The biggest factor is obviously that they didn't release it on one of the largest platforms and made it 'free' on the two platforms did release it on. Microsoft has their own vision for what success should look like and we'll see how that pans out, but it is objectively a sales flop and has been forgotten a month after release. Other decisions they made that could have hurt it include using an IP that maybe doesn't matter to younger people, cutting off half their prospective PC audience by requiring RT enabled hardware and personally, I think their trailers did a very poor job of selling the game. FF7 Rebirth being a flop is another example. They decide to remake their crown jewel but then they get greedy and want to split it into 3 full priced games. Announced in 2015, probably going to conclude in 2026... how many people did they think would be along for the 11 year ride? The brand value and recognition of Final Fantasy tanked in that duration. And then they decide to make exclusivity deals with anyone who will give them a dollar. When they finally do release it on PC, you get low quality, late ports with no advertising. No release on Xbox at all. Meanwhile, their competition have been consistently growing their audience on the platform that they ignore.
Here's an example that I think is probably likely and definitely relevant. At some point around 2015, give or take a year or two, someone at Square Enix decided that FF7 remake should be exclusive to Playstation. In that same time period, someone at Capcom decided to release Monster Hunter World on PC. The consequences of those two specific decisions are about to arrive 10 years later. On February 28, Capcom is going to sell 2-5 million copies of Monster Hunter Wilds on PC on day one and will have a million people playing concurrently. Meanwhile, Square Enix is currently selling both FF7 remake games in a bundle at half the price of a single game to have any hope of success, and that success will be measured between 2%-4% of what Capcom is going to achieve.
The moral of the story is to read the market correctly and deliver what your audience is asking for and expects. Reading the market isn't easy, it's almost like divination, but avoiding obvious mistakes is the bare minimum you can do if you want to succeed. Or you could just blame Fortnite for everything going wrong
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