The video game industry is producing more quality titles than ever before, yet an alarming trend threatens its future: brilliant games are disappearing into obscurity while mediocre ones dominate visibility.
🔍 The Discovery Crisis That Nobody Wants to Fix
At the Madeira Games Summit in May 2026, a provocative question was posed by Michal Bujko, senior business development manager at Modma Studios. He asked attendees to imagine looking back from 2031: what should the gaming industry have fixed while it still had the chance?
The response from his workgroup was unanimous and stark: discoverability.
Despite years of awareness about this critical issue, the industry has made almost no meaningful progress. This inaction represents more than just a marketing inconvenience; it poses a structural threat to the long-term health and cultural credibility of gaming as a medium. The paradox is clear: we are creating exceptional games, but they remain invisible to potential players.
📊 How Algorithms Betrayed Quality
The root of the problem lies in how modern digital platforms operate. Recommendation systems that were designed to help users discover new content have evolved into engines that prioritize different metrics entirely.
"Algorithms built to surface content are increasingly rewarding volume, familiarity, and short-term engagement over quality or originality," explained Bujko. "Taste-driven decisions – the kind that once gave unusual games a fighting chance – have been quietly replaced by metrics."
This shift has fundamentally altered what succeeds in the marketplace. A game's merit no longer determines its visibility; instead, success depends on how well developers can game the system through strategic marketing and algorithmic optimization.
⚖️ Goodhart's Law in Action
The situation perfectly illustrates Goodhart's law, which states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
In gaming, this manifests when wishlist numbers, social media engagement, and platform-specific metrics become the primary targets rather than indicators of genuine player interest. When these metrics are gamed effectively, any product can rise to prominence regardless of actual quality. The result is a marketplace where discovery reflects marketing skill rather than artistic merit.
Key Consequences of Metric Gaming
- Quality disconnect: The best games often receive less visibility than heavily marketed mediocre titles
- Risk aversion: Publishers avoid innovative projects in favor of proven formulas
- Creative homogenization: Games increasingly resemble each other to satisfy algorithmic preferences
- Developer burnout: Small studios struggle against well-funded competitors with superior marketing budgets
🏢 Who Holds the Power?
The workgroup identified a troubling power imbalance in the ecosystem. Platforms possess the most structural influence over discoverability while maintaining the least accountability for outcomes.
Platform Responsibilities vs. Reality
What platforms control:
- Algorithm design and transparency
- Featured placement and curation decisions
- Data access for developers
- Revenue sharing models
What platforms provide:
- Minimal visibility into performance metrics
- Black-box recommendation systems
- Limited support for independent developers
- Optimization requirements that favor large publishers
Developers and publishers operate with minimal visibility into how their games actually perform within these systems. This information asymmetry means that optimization efforts are largely based on guesswork and trial-and-error rather than concrete data.
💰 The Financial Disincentive Problem
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the discoverability crisis is that nobody is financially motivated to fix the system as a whole. Each stakeholder group benefits from maintaining the status quo in the short term, even though everyone loses in the long run.
Stakeholder Analysis
Platforms benefit from high-volume content that keeps users engaged, regardless of quality. Their revenue models depend on maximizing time-on-platform rather than ensuring user satisfaction with specific titles.
Publishers reduce risk by greenlighting games based on comparable titles and wishlist velocity. This approach favors safe bets over creative innovation, perpetuating a cycle of similar-looking games.
Developers, under pressure to ship products and survive financially, often lack the runway to take creative risks or build audiences organically before launch. They must optimize for immediate visibility rather than long-term reputation.
Investors demand fast returns, pushing the entire ecosystem toward quick wins rather than sustainable growth. Changing this dynamic requires investors willing to support longer development arcs and patient capital.
🎯 What Business Leaders Must Stop Doing
The workgroup provided clear guidance on practices that need to end immediately:
- Building marketing plans around platform features - Relying on algorithmic luck rather than building genuine audience connections
- Greenlighting based on comparables alone - Using past successes as the sole criterion for new investments
- Treating curation as someone else's job - Assuming platforms will handle discovery without publisher involvement
- Living in the past - Applying outdated strategies to a rapidly evolving digital landscape
✨ What Business Leaders Must Start Doing
Conversely, the industry needs to embrace new approaches:
Owning Your Marketing
Rather than depending on platform algorithms, companies should develop direct relationships with their audiences. This means investing in community management, transparent communication, and authentic engagement from day one of development.
Bringing Taste Back Into the Room
Decision-makers need to trust their instincts and expertise rather than deferring entirely to data. Human curation and editorial judgment played crucial roles in discovering great games in previous eras, and these skills remain valuable today.
Making Fewer, More Meaningful Bets
Instead of flooding the market with numerous similar titles, publishers should focus resources on fewer projects with genuine creative vision. Quality over quantity should become the guiding principle.
Taking Genuine Creative Risks
Innovation requires accepting failure as part of the process. Companies need to create environments where experimental ideas can flourish without immediate commercial pressure.
Fixing the Information Asymmetry
Transparency should become a competitive advantage. Sharing data, insights, and performance metrics openly can help the entire ecosystem make better decisions.
🌱 Community Building as Creative Process
One of the most significant recommendations from the workgroup involves rethinking when and how community building occurs. Rather than treating it as a marketing phase that begins near launch, community engagement should be integrated into the creative process from conception.
Benefits of Early Community Integration
- Authentic feedback loops: Developers receive input during development rather than after release
- Organic advocacy: Early supporters become natural ambassadors for the finished product
- Reduced marketing costs: Built-in audience reduces dependency on paid promotion
- Creative validation: Real-time testing of concepts ensures alignment with player interests
This approach requires patience and long-term thinking, qualities that are increasingly rare in an industry focused on quarterly results. However, studios that successfully implement early community building report higher retention rates, stronger brand loyalty, and more sustainable business models.
⏰ The Window Is Closing
"The gaming industry has spent years diagnosing the discoverability problem," concluded Bujko. "The diagnosis is no longer the hard part."
What makes this moment critical is the irreversible nature of the damage accumulating daily. Every week that passes sees promising studios close their doors, talented developers leave the industry, and potential audiences never form because they never encountered games that would have resonated with them.
The Five-Year Warning
The workgroup issued a sobering prediction: in five years, the consequences of inaction will be permanent.
- Games that deserved attention but never received it will disappear forever
- Studios unable to survive the noise will have shut down permanently
- Audiences that might have developed passionate communities will never materialize
- Cultural moments that could have defined generations will be lost to obscurity
"That's the thing worth fixing this week," emphasized Bujko. "Not because it's easy, but because in five years, 'we knew and did nothing' will be the hardest sentence to say out loud."
🔮 The Path Forward Requires Collective Action
Solving the discoverability crisis demands coordinated effort across the entire ecosystem. No single company or platform can address it alone, but every participant has a role to play.
Immediate Actions for Different Stakeholders
For Platforms:
- Increase transparency in recommendation algorithms
- Invest in human curation alongside automated systems
- Provide better data access to developers
- Create dedicated spaces for innovative, non-mainstream titles
For Publishers:
- Develop clear brand identities around specific genres or styles
- Support longer development cycles for ambitious projects
- Share performance data openly with development partners
- Champion diversity in game design and storytelling
For Developers:
- Begin community building at project conception
- Focus on creating distinctive experiences rather than following trends
- Collaborate with other studios to cross-promote quality titles
- Advocate for industry-wide standards and transparency
For Investors:
- Accept longer return timelines for creative projects
- Support studios committed to innovation over imitation
- Fund infrastructure that benefits the broader ecosystem
- Recognize cultural value alongside financial metrics
💡 Conclusion: The Choice Is Clear
The gaming industry stands at a crossroads. It can continue down the current path, where algorithms dictate success and marketing budgets determine visibility, or it can choose to prioritize quality, creativity, and genuine connection with players.
The tools and knowledge exist to fix discoverability. The barriers are not technical but cultural and financial. Overcoming them requires courage, collaboration, and a willingness to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term sustainability.
As Bujko and his workgroup made clear, the time for action is now. The medium is still growing, the damage is still reversible, and the opportunity to shape gaming's future remains within reach. But that window will not stay open forever.
The question is no longer whether the industry understands the problem. The question is whether it has the collective will to solve it before it's too late. In five years, we will know the answer. Let's make sure it's one we can live with.
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