In todays market, the only way to succeed is to exceed expectations or surprise and delight

Game releases in the past few years have become a Russian roulette experience. Established studios releasing games that perform poorly and out of nowhere indie titles taking over the world.

There’s a lot to be said about the multitude of factors causing this. Greedy shareholders wanting games to be forever cash cows, risk adverse investments, and chasing trends that have passed.

However, it’s a complicated equation, and looking back on the past few years I think I’ve accurately deduced what the current equation for success has become.

Ten years ago it was somewhat of an even playing field. Games existed for a temporary time, like movies. They came out, had their splash, and the player base looked to the next thing. Nothing was holding their attention for long periods of time. This meant someone like Bioware could consistently put out game after game under the same conditions and marketing strategies and still find the same success.

Now in 2024, the most played games are seven to ten years old. The attention and interest has been captured and locked in. The masses are used to their staple of live service game(s) and it consumes a lot of their time and attention. The more they invest the more resistant to try something new they become.

This means any new game has to be enough of an enticement to draw players away from their established games. Not to mention, as i’ve previously written about, competition for entertainment time is also coming from places like Netflix and Twitch.

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This massively uphill battle has led me to categorize successful games into two buckets.

1. Surprises and Delights.

2. Exceeds Expectations

To be a successful game in 2025, or even 2026, your game must achieve one of the two categories.

Surprise and Delights

This one is easy. It’s the Balatro’s, the Hades’s, the Vampire Survivors, and the Stardew Valley’s of the world.

Games so unexpected and fresh that when the hype train starts, it doesn’t slow down.

The fact that everyone already starts talking about one of these games, and that the games seem to come from out of left field, not from the traditional video game mold, is enough to pull established gamers away.

There’s no history, rarely any pre-marketing, so gamers are able to approach one of these games fresh. They don’t remember how they felt about the studios previous games, they haven’t been watching six months of pre-release marketing, and they haven’t been consuming a tirade of analysis and ‘critical commentary’.

It makes it easy for gamers to step away from the games they are comfortable with because its so hyped, and its often perceived as a small experience, so they know they’ll get back to playing COD, Fortnite, etc shortly.

But it’s not that simple. Around 300 games are released every week on Steam, and 37% of purchased steam games don’t get played. The vast majority of small, unique, indie titles don’t get this successful.

It becomes a double edged sword. For a game to surprise and delight, it needs to snowball. It needs to be ‘perfect’ from the very first play, more accurately it needs to be addicting.

With its lack of marketing, it needs for the very first handful of people to like it enough that they review and recommend. It needs to reach the ears of the industry’s influencers who in turn, need to love it enough to advertise it to their platform.

But this is a double edged sword. Most of these titles are releasing in early-access, unfinished, buggy and cash strapped. This reduces the likelihood that the those first players are going to shout from the rooftops about how amazing the game is. Whilst, conversely, a AAA studio would have the money and expertise to release a small game that was well polished from the get go. But they don’t, for many reasons.

It’s very much threading the needle. Not every game concept can be small and perfect to start with. Not every developer can hone in on what players find fun, studios with ten to twenty plus years experience also struggle hone in on what makes a game fun.

Whist its clear to see in hindsight why these games surprise and delight, its not easy to sit down today and say, right i’m going to make the next Balatro. It’s not how games work, it takes time, and you don't know what else is being developed out there, not to mention the whims and interests of the gaming population change wildly.

If you are a smaller studio, you can make something great, something that surprises and delights, but it may not be what you want to make, what interests you. So it may not be in your wheelhouse.

But if you are to take away something from those who have succeeded before you, it’s that you need to bring something fresh and enjoyable (read addicting), that a player can get into quickly. So that the snowball can start from the first player.

Far easier said than done, but with no expectations from the industry it’s the sneak attack that’s going to do the most damage.

Exceeding Expectations

There’s a saying made popular by Ted Lasso, “it’s the hope that kills you”, for video games, it seems far more apt to say '“Its the expectations that kill you.“

Gamers expect two things when a studio is releasing another game;

1. That the game’s mechanics and features have improved in a linear, expected fashion.

2. That their wildest dreams have come true.

As you can imagine, number two is nigh impossible to achieve, and so for a seasoned game studio to make enough people happy, and be exceeding expectations, it needs to be delivering on point number one.

This means that the story, the pacing, the mechanics, and the rest of the gameplay needs to both be great and improved from previous games / other games in the genre.

We expect that established seasoned game studios should have this stuff down pat by now, but time and time again it’s not the case. We have a general sense of why, given all the behind-closed-doors reporting about how some games are restarted multiple times or spend too long in ideation but the expectations don’t change. Players have a mental map, they often can’t describe, as to how a game should have improved. We expect every new AAA/AA game to contain the learnings and features of all the other games in the same genre that came before it. Players are resistant to any noticeable step backs and vocal when new game, doesn’t feel new enough.

For me, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, it perfected the open world experience, with so many features and details that made the world feel realistic and immersive. I mentally expected that every open world game that came after, for example Cyberpunk, to be just as immersive an open world, but I was wrong and disappointed. Through no fault of the developers.

Baldurs Gate 3 has had a similar effect, it’s set a high bar for other fantasy role playing games. Games like Avowed, Dragon Age, and Dragons Dogma 2, were instantly pitted against the game, lamenting how Larion Software was able to do something, more experiences developers couldn’t.

By no means am I condoning this thought methodology, it leads to problematic commentary and criticism. However, we as a cohort tend to lump cohorts of games into buckets, and expect that bucket to grow linearly. Even though we know that two games being developed at the same time are in a vacuum, neither studio sharing what they are up to with their competitors, we expect game releases to be additive in the genre. That they must include the improvements of those that came before, and improve on them some more.

Negative expectation is also a key factor here. When a studio wants to release something that the target audience doesn’t want, there’s almost no coming back from it. Fans of Warner Brothers, wanted another Batman game, but got Suicide Squad. Fans of Fallout wanted the next big RPG in the series and got a multiplayer skunk-works spin off , 76. Fans of Sony wanted another story heavy sad-dad game, and got Concord.

In the same vein, zero expectations are just as dangerous. A company like Ubisoft has created such malaise in the industry with their products people are generally apathetic. In the past decade they’ve pumped out Assasins Creed games until the population got bored, but when they branched out into something new, Pirates, Avatar, Star Wars Outlaws, these games were met with even more apathy. I’m not saying these were bad games, I enjoyed them, but with so much apathy towards Ubisoft, it’s hard to see how they turn this around and get people excited for their games. (Note: Ubisoft games still sell millions of units, the apathy I speak of is in the games criticism space)

Within the expectations is a resources mindset. Players see the collective resources as the industry as a precious commodity and shouldn’t be wasted. We create expectations of what the industry should work on, and given the cost and time to create a game, we expect that the resource shouldn’t be wasted.

Studios spending their resources on things that aren’t expected, such as Crypto games, live service games, or premature ports, receive a negative sentiment as the players would prefer that the limited resources be put on what is expected.

To be a successful AAA/AA game in this age, you need to be aligning to expectations. So many of the less than stellar AAA releases that have occurred in the past few years haven’t aligned with expectations. Granted, in most cases the developers themselves didn’t set those expectations, they were crafted as part of the hive mind. But at the end of the day, you do need to meet your consumers where they are at. Some studios will be able to defy expectations and still reach success but they will be the exception not the rule.

With the likes of GTA 6, Skyrim 2, Witcher 4, Mass Effect 4, and so on, coming in the future, these games need to be markedly improved and refined to be seen as a success. They can’t ever step backwards, against the grain of expected improvement. They really can’t afford a rocky start nor a lackluster preview cycle. Because in order to exceed expectations, an uphill climb, they can’t afford any step backs early in the piece, else the negative narrative will outweigh the positive.

I don’t enjoy any of this, I’m not happy with the state that the industry has found themselves in. I’m simply making an observation. Granted that observation can be boiled down to “the moody people on the internet control perception and in turn the success of a game.” But I don’t see how we change this. As much as the court of public opinion is wildly out of control, we’re also in an unprecedented time where our industry is in deep depression. It feels like no one knows what to do, studios retreading the same steps wondering why they ain’t getting anywhere. But until the industry changes, for the foreseeable future, your game needs to be in one of those two buckets to find ‘success’.