01 · Briefing · what happened

The industry makes great games. Almost nobody can find them

Gaming 4 min 14 sources

A games-summit workgroup named the same crisis it has named for years - discoverability. Roughly 2,000 games now launch on Steam every month, and the algorithms built to surface them reward the familiar over the good.

~2,000

new games a month on Steam

up from about 20 when hand-curated

750,000+

wishlists for one unreleased indie

ReStory, before it even launches

EUR 56m

Atari annual revenue

its highest in over a decade, off old catalogue

12

staff Cyan laid off

about half, after Anglerfish went unfunded

At a glance

A Madeira Games Summit workgroup named discoverability the crisis to fix; the industry makes great games nobody can find.
Steam now takes roughly 2,000 new games a month, up from about 20 when the store was curated by hand.
Most come from tiny teams; each sells little, but together the niche titles are the bulk of what gets made.
Recommendation engines reward volume and familiarity over quality, so distinctive games get buried.
Depth pays when discovery works: Hell Is Us became a Game Pass sleeper hit; Atari hit decade-high revenue off its back catalogue.
The mid-sized studio still drowns: Cyan shelved a new Myst game and cut half its staff after a dozen publishers passed.

Forces in play

Catalogue flood High↑

roughly 2,000 games a month land on Steam, far more than anyone can sift

Discovery failure High↑

recommendation engines reward familiarity, so distinctive games get buried

Subscription surfacing Building↑

Game Pass and giveaways put unknown games in front of new players

Mid-tier squeeze High↑

the double-A game like a new Myst can no longer find funding

In play Madeira Games Summit workgroup — named discoverability the crisis, again Steam / Valve — the endless shelf where 2,000 games land monthly Xbox Game Pass — subscription library that surfaces buried titles Atari — decade-high revenue off a deep back catalogue Cyan Worlds — shelved a new Myst, cut half its staff

Where this points

Watch whether any storefront rebuilds discovery around taste rather than engagement metrics; without it, the deeper the catalogue grows, the more of it stays buried.

Full briefing

At the Madeira Games Summit in May, a workgroup was asked one question: looking back from five years out, what should the industry have fixed while it still could? [1] The answer was unanimous - discoverability. The group’s verdict was blunt: the industry already makes great games; the problem is that almost nobody can find them. [1]

The shelf lost its edge

For most of history a store could stock only so much. Shelf space cost money, so a shop carried the hits and little else. A digital storefront erased that limit. Engadget’s editors remember when Steam was curated by hand, with around 20 titles added in a month. [2] Today roughly 2,000 games go live on Steam every month, and that does not count console, mobile, or VR. [2] The catalogue stopped being a shelf and became an ocean.

Most of those games come from tiny teams - solo creators, artist collectives, small studios with no marketing budget. [2] Individually each sells little. Together they are the bulk of what the industry now makes. The demand is real: one unreleased indie, ReStory, has already been wishlisted by more than 750,000 people on Steam. [8]

When the map breaks

An endless shelf only helps if players can find what is on it. That is where the system is failing. The workgroup found that platform recommendation engines are “built to surface content” but increasingly reward volume, familiarity, and short-term engagement over quality or originality. [1] Genuinely distinctive games get buried because the system was not built to uncover them. [1]

The workgroup’s leader, Modma’s Michal Bujko, reached for Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. [1] Marketers chase store rankings and wishlist velocity; publishers greenlight games by comparing them to last year’s hit. [1] The safe choice wins every time, and nobody is paid to fix the system as a whole. [1]

The tail, when it works

The catalogue’s depth still pays off when discovery clicks. Hell Is Us, a 2025 action game most players missed at launch, became a sleeper hit after landing on Xbox Game Pass. [4] A subscription library puts unfamiliar games in front of people who would never have bought them. Fields of Mistria, a small farming game riding the decade-old wake of Stardew Valley, found a devoted audience the same way. [5]

Old catalogues pay too. Once-bankrupt Atari reported annual revenue of about 56 million euros, or 65 million dollars. [6] It was Atari’s highest in more than a decade, as games revenue rose 67.7% to 46.1 million euros. [6] Much of that comes from owning a deep back catalogue and buying more: Atari paid 29.3 million dollars for Crossy Road maker Hipster Whale. [6] A pile of old niche titles, each selling a trickle, adds up.

The chaos underneath

An open shelf is also gameable. An 18-year-old, Michael Major, priced a joke game at 200 dollars - the Steam maximum - expecting no sales. [3] It briefly showed 1.3 million dollars in sales, almost all from China, before thousands of instant refunds cut the real figure to 2,045 dollars. [3] Another developer’s tower-defense game, Tangy TD, quietly made 31,942 dollars in its first 30 hours. [3] The long shelf produces both flukes and quiet successes.

The stores know discovery is now their real product. Polygon runs weekly “what to play” roundups; Steam gave away the 2018 indie Moonlighter free for a week; the Epic Games Store hands out free games to pull players in. [10][9][11] Game Pass keeps adding titles to cheaper tiers, including the new game from Pokemon’s creators. [12][13] Two Point Studios, a small British sim maker, has quietly kept Sega in profit for a decade. [14] A niche can be a durable business when players can reach it.

What the depth cannot save

The tail cannot rescue everything. The mid-sized “double-A” game is being squeezed from both ends. Cyan Worlds made Myst, a game that sold more than 6 million copies in the 1990s. [7] It pitched a new entry, codenamed Anglerfish, to more than a dozen publishers and came home with nothing. [7] It shelved the game and laid off 12 people, about half its staff. [7] “If we were pitching that game just a few years earlier, it would have been a no-brainer,” a former staffer said. [7] An ocean of small games and a handful of giants can still leave the middle to drown.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Why the small games only matter when someone can find them

Remove the shelf's edge and niche games pile up by the thousand, but a pile is not a market until players can find it.

How it works

A digital store has no shelf limit
So the catalogue swells with niche titles
Each sells little, but together they rival the hits
That only pays if players can find them
Discovery, not shelf space, becomes the scarce thing

The twist

Unlimited shelf space does not make the hits matter less by itself; it makes the thousands of small games collectively matter more, but only if there is a map to reach them.

Where you've seen this

Streaming video

a giant back catalogue of niche films is worthless without a recommendation feed that finds them

Online bookstores

millions of slow-selling titles together outsell the bestseller wall once search surfaces them

Music apps

the deep tail of obscure tracks earns real money only through playlists and algorithms

The catch

A fat tail does not save every seller: the mid-sized studio can be squeezed between an ocean of cheap small games and a few giants.

Full lesson

The shelf used to have an edge

Think of an old game shop. The wall held maybe a few hundred boxes. Rent set the limit, so the shop stocked what it was sure would sell: the hits. Anything odd, slow, or niche never made it to the shelf at all. Not because it was bad, but because space was the scarce thing, and space only went to safe bets.

A digital store threw that limit away. Steam went from around 20 new games a month, when it was picked by hand, to roughly 2,000. There is no wall to run out of. Every strange, small, personal game can now sit on the shelf next to the giants.

The tail gets long and fat

Picture the whole catalogue as a chart. On the left, a few tall bars: the blockbusters everyone knows, each selling millions. Then the bars drop fast and stretch off to the right in a long, low line - thousands of games each selling a little. That low line is the tail.

Here is the part people miss. When the shelf had an edge, the tail was cut off - you only ever saw the hits. When the shelf has no edge, the tail runs on and on. And a very long line of small numbers can add up to as much as the few tall bars, or more. A farming game for a few thousand fans. A horror game made by one person. A decade-old management sim that quietly keeps a studio alive. None is a hit. But together they are the bulk of what the industry now makes and sells.

Cheap copies are not the point here

It is worth being clear about what this is not. Yes, a digital copy costs almost nothing to make, and yes, that changes how games are priced. But that is a different idea. This is not about the price of one game. It is about the shape of the whole market - how many different games can exist and sell at all. The old shelf allowed a few winners. The endless shelf allows a thousand small winners, and their combined weight is the story.

Which means finding becomes the hard part

An endless shelf has a catch. If a store can hold everything, no one can look at everything. When space was scarce, the shop owner did your filtering - only the hits reached you. Take the limit away and the filtering job does not vanish. It moves. Now the scarce thing is not shelf space. It is attention, and the map that leads you to the game you would love.

This is exactly where the industry is stuck. A games-summit workgroup this year named the crisis they had named for years: great games get made, and almost nobody finds them. The recommendation engines that were supposed to guide players reward what is already popular and what holds you longest, not what is good or new. So the tail is stocked, and buried at the same time. The pile exists; the map does not.

Who is inside this

You are somewhere in that tail every time you open a store and feel there is too much. Or you scroll past a game you would have loved and never knew existed. So is the solo developer who spent two years on something real and watched it sink on day one for lack of a marketing team. So is the studio in the squeezed middle: not a giant, not a scrappy hobby. The makers of Myst could not fund their next game and cut half their staff.

And notice the quiet arrangement under it all. The store’s feed feels like a neutral window onto what exists. It is not. It is a set of choices - what to rank, what to hide, what counts as “relevant” - built by people, tuned to keep you scrolling. It looks like plain fact. It is somebody’s design, and it decides which of the small games get to become the ones people find.

The tail is only worth its length if there is a road to it

The lesson is not that variety won. It is that variety can win, and only does when finding works. Where the map holds, the tail pays. A subscription library hands you a game you would never have bought. A store gives one away. An editor points at five worth your weekend. Where the map breaks, the same games sit unreached, and the endless shelf becomes an endless place to get lost. A market of many small things is a genuinely different world from a market of a few big ones. But only if you can find your way across it.

03 · Lab · your turn

Stock the endless shelf

Rehearse how unlimited shelf space plus discovery lets a long tail of niche games collectively overtake the hits.

04 · Hope · carry this

The great games are already made and waiting. The harder part - helping people find one another's work - is a problem people keep solving, with a friend's tip or a list someone bothered to make.