Discoverability

tim-cain game-industry discoverability gatekeeping curation indie-games market-saturation

Abstract

Problem: The modern game market is so flooded with titles that both players and developers face a severe discoverability crisis — great games get buried, and players wade through mountains of bad ones.

Approach: Tim Cain traces the historical shift from a scarcity-driven market (a few RPGs per year in the 1980s) to today's oversaturated landscape, examining the causes and consequences of removed gatekeeping.

Findings: Free engines, asset stores, and digital distribution have democratized game development — enabling experimental and niche titles, but also unleashing a flood of low-quality releases with no editorial filtering. The same pattern affects books, movies, and online video.

Key insight: The solution isn't censorship but curation — on the creation side (having someone who gives honest feedback on scope and features) and on the consumption side (finding trusted reviewers whose taste matches yours).

1. The Market Then vs. Now

In the 1980s, a new computer RPG might come out once a month — sometimes only a few per year. Today, counting DLCs, expansions, and mobile, you could play a new RPG every single day. The sheer volume of available games has exploded beyond anything the early industry could have imagined.

2. Why There Are So Many Games

It has never been easier to make a game. Tim identifies the key enablers:

  • Free engines — Unity, Unreal, Godot, GameSalad, and more
  • Free tools — art, 3D modeling, video, and sound processing
  • Asset marketplaces — buy art, code, or scripts for the parts you can't make yourself
  • Digital distribution — Steam, Epic, GOG let you reach the entire world without a publisher

You're no longer competing just with experienced studios. You're competing with every person on the planet who can make a game and click "publish."

3. The Pros of No Gatekeeping

The removal of traditional gatekeepers (publishers, retailers, platform holders) has real benefits:

  • Experimental games with features you've never seen before
  • Genre-defying titles that mix, bend, or invent categories
  • Niche games for very specific demographics — you can make a dating sim set in a fantasy world and find your audience
  • Non-traditional settings and stories that would never have survived a publisher's risk analysis

4. The Cons of No Gatekeeping

The downsides are equally significant:

  • Discoverability is brutally hard — great games get buried in search results on Steam and storefronts
  • No editorial filters — nobody is telling developers to cut contradictory features or narrow their scope, which historically made games better
  • A flood of bad games — at every tier, not just indie. People rush to publish, skip polish, and plan to "fix it later"

Tim pushes back on the "AAA bad, indie good" narrative: there are plenty of terrible indie games too. Bad games exist at every level.

5. This Isn't Just Games

The same pattern affects every creative medium:

  • Books — self-published ebooks with no editor, full of errors and meandering plots
  • Movies — tiny production houses and iPhone-filmed features flooding streaming services
  • Video — YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo — you might watch ten bad videos to find one good one

And it's going to get worse. AI is already writing books and will eventually generate entire games from a feature list prompt.

6. The Solution: Curation

Tim is clear that the answer is not censorship. It's curation, applied at both ends:

6.1. On the Creation Side

Having someone who can have honest conversations with you about features to cut, scope to reduce, and deadlines to hit. If you spend ten years on your magnum opus when you could have shipped in two, gotten feedback, and made something even better — that's a problem.

6.2. On the Consumption Side

Tim has started relying heavily on trusted reviewers — people whose taste aligns with his. His method for finding them:

  1. Check what reviewers think about games he already has strong opinions on
  2. If they love what he loves and hate what he hates, they're a match
  3. Use those reviewers to filter future purchases

He notes that even friend recommendations fail — friends suggest games with features he knows he dislikes (pre-made protagonists, nonlinear stories). Curated reviewer lists are more reliable.

7. The Overwhelming Backlog

Even with curation, Tim admits his wishlists and watch-lists grow faster than he could ever consume. He thought retirement would let him play every new game — it can't. The flood is simply too large for any individual to manage, making curation not just helpful but essential.

Source: Discoverability — Tim Cain (YouTube)

8. References