While watching some of the game trailers and announcements from the different showcases these past few days, I thought again about how there are so many games out there that you come across but never play, let alone all the ones you don’t even hear about. And I particularly had this thought when I saw yet another multiplayer or party-like game that I will probably never play.
It made me ask, if there are so many different options for party games for example, don’t the games suffer from that? Its seems less likely that individual players will be willing to buy, learn, and play a large number of these games especially since they rely on having a group to play with. I find it more likely that people will find their favourites and stick to them. Obviously, I know that there are groups of people who love a genre like this and will together try many of those games, but I am speaking more generally.
But on the other hand, games that are single-player, have a clear end, and are shorter might benefit from there being so many options. You might play one game, and upon enjoying and finishing it, looking to get that experience again, be led to another game that is similar. In this case, the games are benefitting from each other’s existence. Perhaps this is because games like this demand a smaller and (importantly) fixed amount of attention from players.
So I guess the big question is: what genres benefit from the competition? Which ones suffer? Is it even a question about genres, or is it something else?
I haven’t really spent much time on the question, but I’m interested to see what you all think. Do you see a pattern in it?
I really doubt any genre benefits from it. Some genres are definitely worse off than others, though. For example, visual novels are in a really rough spot in my opinion because it’s too easy to generate slop that looks passable on the surface. There’s no way to tell what’s good anymore, so people have to resort to just playing the most popular games or games by a handful of devs they know to be safe. New and lesser known devs are kind of shafted because of that.
I don’t know if it’s fundamentally that much about the genre, tough. No matter the genre, you need to make something that looks so unique that people will easily recognize it and so high quality that it makes it to the top most anticipated games of the genre lists or something. Because top rated or most anticipated is pretty much the only way for players to find games anymore.
Well, not that you could make too generic games in the past either and expect them to succeed. Need to bring something new to the table or people will just be like why play this instead of the 100+ other Dark Souls clones.
It’s an interesting idea, that some genres can benefit or suffer more from competition than others. However, I don’t think the facts line up with your hypothesis if we check the revenue estimates on games-stats.com.
Tag
Game Count
Average
Median
$100k-1m
$1m+
Multiplayer
18,002
~$2,400k
~$990
11%
11%
Singleplayer
87,887
~$610k
~$690
7%
4%
Nonlinear
3,378
~$200k
~$920
6%
2%
Linear
11,977
~$54k
~$290
2%
1%
Multiple Endings
10,443
~$400k
~$1,600
9%
3%
Short
2,612
~$220k
~$960
8%
3%
Party Game
761
~$650k
~$1,200
8%
4%
Visual Novel
11,643
~$130k
~$2,100
8%
2%
(I included visual novels for comparison, since @LezLiz brought it up.)
Multiplayer games make more than singleplayer ones and nonlinear games make more than linear games. By the same coin, while there are a ton of singleplayer games and only a handful of party games in comparison, a similar percentage of them make more than $100k: 11% of singleplayer games and 12% of party games. Just as well, the median revenue for almost all of the tags are abysmal, ranging between only $600 and $1,600. I think this data makes it clear that games don’t necessarily benefit or suffer from their respective saturation levels.
I think a big part of marketing has more to do with having good market research to know what will have the best chances of selling, seeing how others in your space advertise their game so you know how to advertise your game (see how to market a game for some great info on how to do this), and how high your quality bar needs to be in order to be successful.
I don’t like these videos, and there are certainly aspects of them that I disagree with, but at least when it comes to market research I think they make good points overall:
The genre not being a big factor likely still holds, but the stats might be quite noisy due to them using Steam’s tags, so I wouldn’t draw too big conclusions on the profitability of the genres. More than a few RPGs are tagged visual novel, for example. Disco Elysium the second highest revenue “Visual Novel” and the second highest in LGBTQ+ is a plain ol’ soccer game. I’d gladly take $2k median revenue for queer games, but it’s likely not meant to be.
That’s interesting, I figured genre wouldn’t be a huge factor, but seeing that actually it seems to go in the opposite direction than I thought. I do wonder if the revenue stats are being influenced by things like in-game purchases, expansion packs, DLCs etc. and whether they would look any different if you’re only considering copies sold. Then again, there isn’t a perfect way to measure the success of a game.
Most likely the revenue stat is just the review count and follows multiplied by the the price and some constants. For my one Steam game, the number the site displays is more than twice higher than the real revenue, so I guess it’s not very accurate in all cases.
Sorry, I should have been more clear: the data I cited earlier are estimates, not hard facts (I’ve gone back and edited my post accordingly). To my knowledge, no data has been made available to the public concerning sales and revenue figures for games on Steam. If I remember correctly, there’s also no way to even check how many copies have been sold on Steam for a particular game, so the revenue numbers you see anywhere for game sales on Steam are all estimates – unless they’re coming from a developer or publisher openly sharing that information for their own game.
I personally don’t think that the genre has much affect, and more how unique a game’s concept is relative to other popular and recent titles. I don’t have any data to back up this but I think that people will still be interested in a unique concept even if the genre is over saturated. A good example of this is the numerous fantasy RPGs such as Elden Ring, Clair Obscur Expedition 33, the Legends of Zelda series, etc.
There is also a point to be made that benefits can be seen outside of purely sales and popularity. Competition in certain genres may push technology improvements such as optimisations and better graphics in both the engines and the games themselves.
Despite what I have just said, a few genres that I like to think benefit from competition are RPG, Sandbox, and Simulation games as people who are interested in those genres especially tend to play more of them. Many Factorio players will also play Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Planet Crafter, and so on.
I would argue competition in the multiplayer competitive genre is good especially when it comes to live service games. I am not a huge fan of the whole live service part when it comes to their vicious monetization but you know how it goes… greeeeedddd. Anyways I think proof that competition is good in that genre can be shown through the different updates and changes quite a few long standings games have been making to get the edge over others. Overwatch was pretty much stagnating in their update cycle of new hero, new map, maybe a seasonal event every other season. Then we saw Deadlock beta come out and people were like oh man look at this broken new thing that’s not even out and jumped ship. Then we also saw Marvel Rivals come and that took some market share as well as got a lot of marvel fans into the multiplayer scene as i know it blew up on console. Now the Overwatch team has some serious competition and they definitely, despite what interviews say, scrambled to start kicking it up a notch with Stadium, new maps (plural) and a bunch of tie ins (yay more microtransactions on skins).
I also think the competition can be good from a perspective of weeding out games that were designed poorly ie Concord that died in 14 days after launch. The others in the space just did the combat, visuals, and overall gameplay better and it really felt like they were just trying to cash in on the success of the genre. Also the put a $40 price tag on their game in a market saturated by FTP which means entry price was too high for something you could experience for free in other games.
On a slightly different front we have competition between Fortnite, Apex, PUBG, Warzone, possibly Marathon if they don’t mess it up. Arguably each of those used experience from its predecessors/ competitors to really amp up their own games and drive that genre forward. The whole driving forward does only seem to coincide with competition releasing new games it seems though…