Discoverability is a problem that will never be solved | Opinion
15.03.2024 - 12:35
/ gamesindustry.biz
/ Will
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It's almost twenty years since Steam evolved from being an automatic patching system for Valve's games into being a digital storefront for third parties, heralding the true arrival of the digital distribution era that had been forecast for years prior. We're now all living in the future that Steam ushered in, for better or worse.
Digital distribution is now essentially the default for games on all platforms; it's the only way to get games on smartphones and tablets, and some PC and console titles never get physical releases at all. There are even digital-only editions of consoles in this generation, flagging a potential future in which physical media will be dropped from game hardware entirely.
When this future was still on the horizon, there was immense optimism around its possibilities – and especially about the extent to which it would democratise the games business, eroding the authority of publishing gatekeepers and opening up market access to a much wider range of creators. It's fair to say that while the manner in which this has been achieved is deeply imperfect, digital distribution has more or less lived up to that goal; compared to the time before its introduction, when the very concept of an 'indie' game seemed rather wild, we now have vastly more open markets and accessible platforms, leading to a much wider variety of games from a far more diverse set of creators than would have been possible before.
Discoverability is a battle that never ends. There are areas that could be improved, but there's no magic wand to be waved
One big problem, however, emerged in the early years of digital distribution and has never been satisfactorily solved – not by any of the myriad platform holders on any of the devices in which digital games now hold sway. That issue is essentially the problem of too much success; there are too many games competing for consumers' attention, and this creates an enormous challenge for discoverability.
How to deal with this – how to present consumers with the games that will interest them the most, while keeping the playing ground fair and open for developers releasing games on these platforms – is a thorny multi-faceted challenge that has been worked on now for literally decades, with everything from better UI design through to smart learning algorithms being applied to try to improve things. We are still, however, impossibly far from any kind of perfect solution – which may be simply because no such solution is possible.
This week brought a fresh reminder of how tricky the problems around discoverability can be, even on platforms that have worked very hard on this issue.
A short while ago, Electronic Arts