Have you been feeling overwhelmed with how many things there are to play these days? You aren’t alone. Nacon Head of Publishing Benoit Clerc recently interviewed with GamesIndustry.biz and had a lot to say regarding the current state of the video game industry and what it takes to successfully market a title.
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According to Clerc, the overwhelming volume of games on the market is the issue currently:
There are too many games 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.
When you look at Steam some days, there are 50 or 60 games released in one day only so it’s more difficult to get enough traction to expose a game. We’re seeing releases that are without a day one, to use the old retail expression, without any exposure of a title that has been properly marketed.
So what’s the solution? If you want to get a game out there and make sure it has eyes on it, what are you supposed to do? Well, Clerc’s strategy is to publish games with consistent core audiences that he knows will flock to the titles Nacon puts out. For example, the WRC games target fans of rally car racing, and RoboCop: Rogue City combines “a big mainstream brand with a product that is super high quality.” This sort of focus can help a game get seen, which is increasingly important in the modern day.
Clerc also spoke to the increasing pressure of the gaming industry as of late, particularly emphasizing the difficulty of required budget increases. Games simply aren’t as cheap to make as they used to be, and Clerc knows that:
There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up. And our medium is waiting for innovation, so we do need to invest more than we did in the past, like any other mid-tier publisher.
We’ve seen the increasing budget requirements and decreasing exposure hurt plenty of companies in the last year. If we could pick one word to describe the industry as a whole in 2023, it’d probably be “layoffs.” It’s an especially difficult time to enter the game development world. Nacon knows that too, having recently closed their subsidiary Daedalic’s development studio following the commercial and critical failure of Gollum.
Despite all the difficulties, Nacon is still pushing their hardest to publish quality products. Robocop: Rogue City is a great example–fans of RoboCop thoroughly enjoyed stepping into the boots of Alex Murphy and living in that world, our reviewer included. You can check out our review here, where we gave it an 8/10 and said, “A good-length campaign with solid voice acting and a genuinely entertaining story all add up to a violent, cinematic first-person shooter that doesn’t overstay its welcome.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
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