The ground is shaking—shift your balance
Why traditional stability in games is gone, and how developers can adapt.
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The old cycle is broken: Games once launched, peaked, and cleared space for the next wave. Now successful titles persist while new releases compete with years of back catalog.
Five pressures compound: Competition is cumulative, demand fragmented, spending concentrated, discovery volatile, capital requires proof. Together, they’ve compressed profit margins and increased the cost of being wrong.
New leverage is emerging: Owned player relationships beat fleeting attention campaigns, smaller teams achieve more, technology compresses costs, validation happens continuously, and creation/distribution boundaries are blurring.
The shift is structural: Traditional assumptions about “getting back to normal” no longer hold. Teams that rethink fundamentals now can still find footing; those waiting for stability are stumbling for ground that no longer exists.
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“When will things stabilize and go back to normal?”
It’s a question I’ve heard repeatedly over the past year. It’s often framed as a reaction to the industry’s rapid growth during COVID—as if what’s going on now is simply a correction back to baseline.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening. The underlying shift we’re seeing is the consequence of a maturing industry.
For a long time, the games industry operated on a quiet assumption: players move on. A title would launch, spike, taper off, and eventually make room for the next wave. Competition was largely release-window driven.
But over the past few years, our reality has shifted dramatically.
The competition has never been stronger. Funding conversations have changed tone. Projects are harder to justify. Discovery is increasingly less predictable. A small number of games and platforms absorb a disproportionate share of attention and spending, while the rest of the market operates under increasing margin pressure.
At the same time, the tools and practices for building games are evolving just as quickly. Teams can be smaller without being less ambitious. Early access, live playtesting, and open development have turned validation into an ongoing process rather than a late-stage gamble.
The defining tension today is clear: the bar is rising for teams that try to operate as they always have, even as new capabilities emerge that can restore leverage to those who adapt deliberately.
Structural pressures
The current market pressure on game studios doesn’t come from a single source. It emerges from the interaction of several dynamics that reinforce each other.
Competition is cumulative
Games do not age out of the market as they used to. Successful titles continue to attract players and spending for years. New releases therefore compete not just with their peers, but with an accumulated back catalog of readily available products, often sold at steep discounts or included in subscription libraries.
Demand has fragmented
Player tastes have diversified across genres, formats, platforms, and play patterns. While this creates more niches, it also means fewer games can rely on broad appeal, making it harder to amortize large production costs for anything but the largest blockbuster franchises.
Consumer spending has concentrated
A relatively small number of games and platforms capture a disproportionate share of consumer spending, driven by live-service dynamics, social gravity, and platform economics. Titles like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft retain player attention over long periods. For the rest of the market, competition happens at lower and more volatile price points, with thinner margins and less room to absorb production risk.
Discovery is volatile
Distribution platforms increasingly control visibility through algorithmic systems. While these systems can surface relevant content, they also introduce volatility. Small changes in platform behavior can have outsized effects on traffic and revenue, making discovery less predictable. This volatility is further compounded by accelerating content supply: more games, updates, and experiences competing for the same finite attention.
Capital follows evidence
Funding decisions have shifted toward projects that can demonstrate traction, data, or clear comparables. This reduces risk for investors, but raises the bar for new teams and original ideas. Entry into the market increasingly requires proof that, by definition, is hard to obtain without already being in the market.
What’s changing now is not just the shape of the market, but the speed at which these dynamics compound.
Shifting sources of leverage
The pressures shaping today’s market are real, structural, and unlikely to reverse. But they are not the whole picture. Alongside them, a different set of forces change how games are built, released, and sustained.
Owned relationships reduce discovery dependency
As platform-driven discovery becomes more volatile, direct relationships with players grow in importance: mailing lists, communities, social presence, and ongoing dialogue. This is attention that compounds over time and provides a more stable foundation for launch, iteration, and long-term engagement. Increasingly, these relationships are built not just around products, but around visible creators. Public development, individual voices, and recognizable authorship turn teams into followable entities.
Team size is no longer a proxy for success
The historical link between team size, scope, and production value has weakened significantly. Smaller teams can now ship games that previously required far larger organizations. This changes the cost structure and lowers the threshold at which projects become viable.
Technology compresses creation costs
Engine maturity, asset marketplaces, procedural tools, and AI-assisted workflows continue to reduce the cost of production in many areas. This increases room for creativity, by making iteration cheaper in every phase of development.
Validation has moved earlier
Early access, open development, playtests, and soft launches allow teams to generate real player data long before full release. This shifts decision-making from prediction to observation and provides the evidence capital now requires. Projects no longer need to rely solely on internal conviction; they can be shaped, corrected, or stopped earlier, while the cost of change is still manageable.
Creation and distribution are converging
The boundary between making a game and bringing it to market is increasingly blurred. Creation tools, analytics, community management, and distribution infrastructure are becoming more integrated. This lowers some barriers to entry, but also rewards teams that think holistically about production, marketing, and operations from the start.
What this means for developers
In a market where competition accumulates, attention compounds, and capital follows evidence, success depends as much on where risk is avoided as on where it is taken.
We need to let go of practices that were once sensible defaults: building to fixed scopes before external validation, staffing for peak production, and treating marketing as something that happens at the end of development rather than alongside it.
The core questions are now how to:
attract and retain attention continuously without overcommitting capital upfront;
treat validation as a continuous process, not a gate at the end of production;
build direct player relationships as strategic assets, not marketing byproducts;
design teams, scopes, and budgets around adaptability rather than maximum ambition.
These are not easy transitions, and they represent real departures from how many teams have historically operated. Nonetheless, the market remains unforgiving, and the bar continues to rise.
The ground is shaking because the industry forces are fundamentally changing. This is not a comfortable shift. But it is happening, whether we like it or not.
This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.