In a recent interview, Benoit Clerc, the Head of Publishing at Nacon, a French publisher and gaming tech company, spoke about the state of the games industry and how it’s far too oversaturated. He touched upon the requirement for games to have a strong position before they hit the market, optimising their marketing to target the gamers with ‘a passion and expertise’ for a product to be seen among the cacophonous sea of indie titles and AAA blockbusters.
He believes that there are simply too many games to play these days.
Both Ends of the Spectrum
In the interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Nacon’s Benoit Clerc spoke damningly about the flood of games pouring into the market with reckless abandon:
There are too many games currently on the market. We’re seeing today the results of investment made after COVID when the market was bursting, and every game was making a lot of money so there were a lot of investments being made. This is two or three years after that, so the games we’re seeing now on the market were financed in that time and there are simply too many for customers to be able to play them.
Clerc suggested that some games are being lost in the noise, missing out on their ‘day one’ because marketing efforts are being wasted – or not applied in the first place. He’s not wrong, though. Last year, there were a whopping 14,532 games released on Steam – that’s around 39 games every single day, and that’s just one platform. It’s an exponentially increasing number that is presenting gamers with far too many options for their own good.
In the last year, Nacon has sat at both ends of this troubling spectrum. It saw a boom during the November release of Robocop: Rogue City, which turned out to be much more of a hit than was earlier anticipated. It currently sits on Steam with a 9/10 rating from 5,500 reviews.
At the same time, Nacon was left reeling following the implosion of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which was developed by Daedalic Entertainment, a then subsidiary of Nacon. This quickly became regarded as one of the biggest failed games in recent years, and it forced Daedalic to cancel a follow-up title and close down its game development arm.
Do you think the weight of all these games is putting unnecessary strain on the industry? Is there too much of a wild race for indie developers and AAA studios to constantly innovate and throw money at projects to stand out from the crowd?
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