At the Madeira Games Summit in May, Michal Bujko, senior business development manager at Modma Studios, asked a question: If we were looking back at 2026 five years from now, what should we have fixed when we still had the chance?
There was a unanimous answer from the workgroup he was leading: discoverability. The industry already makes great games, the group concluded. The problem is that almost nobody can find them. Yet despite years of being aware of this, almost nothing has changed, and the longer this problem goes unfixed, the more it becomes a structural threat to the long-term health and cultural credibility of the medium.
“Algorithms built to surface content are increasingly rewarding volume, familiarity, and short-term engagement over quality or originality,” Bujko said. “Taste-driven decisions – the kind that once gave unusual games a fighting chance – have been quietly replaced by metrics.”
The result is that genuinely distinctive games are being buried, because the system isn’t built to uncover them.
A difficult problem
The workgroup found that the reason why the discoverability problem hasn’t been fixed is because the solution would be expensive, risky, and go against the short-term interests of almost every party involved. And there’s a deeper issue underneath the discoverability problem: the industry may simply be making too much, and too little of it matters.
The ingrained habits of chasing proven formulas, replicating last year’s hit, and optimising for day one numbers compound the noise. The question the room kept returning to wasn’t just how do players find great games, but are we still making games worth finding?
Platforms have built recommendation systems that serve engagement, not discovery, while publishers greenlight games on the basis of comparable titles and wishlist velocity in order to reduce risk. Developers, under pressure to ship and survive, often don’t have the runway to take creative risks or build audiences before launch.
And crucially, the group found that nobody is financially motivated to fix the system as a whole. If success depends on feeding the algorithm, the safe choice wins every time.
Marketers have always chased the algorithm through app store optimization, store ranking manipulation, and now, increasingly, through visibility within AI-powered recommendations and LLM-driven search, all in an effort to game their way to the top. But that approach has a fundamental problem.
Bujko quoted Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” When the metric is gamed, it stops measuring what it was meant to measure, and the result is that any product – not necessarily a great game – can rise to the top if its marketing is sharp enough. Hence discovery stops reflecting quality and instead reflects optimization skill.
One platform veteran with decades of experience put it plainly: cracking the code of this industry may be fundamentally difficult because the vast majority of the audience operates on instinct. Rather than research or reviews, they rely on immediate gut reaction. But that isn’t a reason to give up – it’s a reason to take the problem seriously.
How can discoverability be fixed?
The workgroup was clear that when it comes to discoverability, platforms have the most structural power and the least accountability. They control discovery at scale, yet operate largely as black boxes. Developers and publishers have minimal visibility of how their games perform, meaning optimization is based on guesswork.
The group concluded that platforms need to open up, providing proper attribution tools, granular analytics, and a genuine commitment to human curation alongside algorithmic recommendations. Platforms need better editorial placements, more of them, and commercial terms that incentivise a diverse publishing ecosystem rather than concentrating attention on titles that are already visible.
Publishers, meanwhile, need to stop trying to be everything to everyone, the group decided. Those publishers that consistently cut through noise share one trait: a clear identity and a committed audience. Paradox Interactive was the example the room kept returning to – a publisher that built a self-sustaining community around a specific type of game, and made that community its most powerful discovery engine.
In other words, the workgroup concluded, publishers should commit to a lane and build genuine expertise within it. The alternative – a broad catalogue with no identity – is essentially invisible in discoverability terms.
The group recommended that developers should treat community-building not as a marketing phase, but as part of the creative process, starting from the moment the game is conceived, not the moment it ships.
In addition, the group advised that the games that get found are almost always the ones that are genuinely different – echoing the conclusions of Rami Ismail’s workshop at the Madeira Games Summit. Taking creative risks, the group argued, such as unexpected mechanics or an unconventional structure, is no longer just artistically worthwhile, but strategically necessary. You cannot outspend the major players, they concluded, so the only remaining leverage is to outthink them.
Finally, investors and service providers remain largely absent from the conversation, the group said, which is itself part of the problem. Funding structures that demand fast returns push publishers and studios toward safe bets, and changing that will require investors that are willing to back a longer arc.
Dos and don’ts
The workgroup concluded that business leaders in the games industry should stop:
- Building marketing plans around platform features. A feature can amplify reach, the workgroup said, but it cannot replace a strategy, so counting on it is a gamble rather than a plan.
- Greenlighting based on comparables alone. If a game doesn’t look like something that already worked, that’s not a red flag, it’s potentially the point.
- Treating curation as someone else’s job. Editorial instinct, taste, and the ability to recognise something worth backing are business competencies, not luxuries.
- Living in the past. The workgroup recommended leaders should stop doubling down on formats and mechanics that worked five years ago, when the audience and medium has since moved on.
Conversely, the workgroup recommended that business leaders should start:
- Owning your marketing. The workgroup said leaders should build direct relationships with audiences through their own channels independently of any platform, and they should start before the game is finished.
- Bringing taste back into the room. Metrics are a tool, not a decision-maker, said the group, which recommended reinvesting in editorial judgment – people whose job is to recognise great work and advocate for it.
- Making fewer, more meaningful bets. The answer to a saturated market is not more output, the workgroup found. Instead, it’s more deliberate output: games with a clear reason to exist and a clear audience to reach.
- Taking genuine creative risks. Not as an exception, but as policy. The industry cannot discover-optimize its way out of a creativity problem, the group said.
- Fixing the information asymmetry. Platforms should give developers and publishers the data they need to understand what’s working and why, the group said, noting that opacity helps nobody in the long run.
No future regrets
“The gaming industry has spent years diagnosing the discoverability problem,” concluded Bujko. “The diagnosis is no longer the hard part.”
What the workgroup agreed on, with unusual clarity, is that the window to act is now, while the medium is still growing and the damage is still reversible. “In five years, the games that deserved to be found but weren’t will be gone. The studios that couldn’t survive the noise will have closed. The audiences that might have been built never formed.”
“That’s the thing worth fixing this week. Not because it’s easy – but because in five years, ‘we knew and did nothing’ will be the hardest sentence to say out loud.”
