Nacon exec says industry's problem is "too many games"

10.01.2024 - 16:55 / gamesindustry.biz / Many

The industry is starting 2024 in much the same way as it spent most of 2023, with news of layoffs and "for sale" signs and closures arriving alongside charts showing modest sales growth for the industry.

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz before the holiday break, Nacon head of publishing Benoit Clerc acknowledges the frequency of setbacks coming alongside less-than-dire news for the industry, and points to a specific culprit for the seeming mismatch in events.

"There are too many games currently on the market," Clerc says. "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."

The key for publishers now is to have a strong positioning for each game being released, Clerc says. He points to Nacon's November release of Robocop: Rogue City as an ideal example of what a game might have – "a big mainstream brand with a product that is super high quality" – in order to reach its target audience.

As a mid-tier publisher, Nacon can't compete head-to-head with AAA blockbusters, Clerc acknowledges. But if the company can effectively reach audiences in a niche that isn't being fully served by the AAA set, the company had an opportunity to succeed.

"I'm not spending $200 million on promotion, so I need to target gamers that have a passion and expertise for off-road racing when I'm doing WRC, that have an expertise in rogue-like games when I'm doing Ravenswatch, or that have an expertise in sports games when I'm doing Cricket 24. They know the sport and game mechanics very well, and I need developers in front of that who have the same expertise and share the same passion in order for those two groups to talk together."

A niche audience also has to be appropriately sized to accommodate the amount of competition going after them, with Clerc saying he wouldn't feel great if he were trying to launch a handful of deckbuilding games in today's market.

"You're in a different situation in the market currently when you have games that have nothing super specific to say to a specific group of gamers," Clerc adds.

Of course, one thing we've seen in the past when there's an abundance of competition for a market is that