Roadmaps to Better Games

Four Recent Titles Prove the Possibilities

All games pictured above are the property of their independent developers and publishers.

Where a game's user experience is concerned, three types of gamers exist. Those willing to tolerate jank; those unwilling to do so; and those willing to tolerate initial jank for the promise of a long-term payoff.

Given the profitability of gaming for developers and publishers (more on that below), one might expect consistent, top-tier products upon a game's release. However, more-and-more, major publishers are falling victim to the same pitfalls of 'good-enough' thinking and monetization as their older siblings in the entertainment industry.

And yet...

Four recent games from 2023-2025 (Black Myth: Wukong, Clair Obscur Expedition 33, Metaphor Refantazio, and Baldur's Gate 3) prove that the best games eschew hasty construction, respect the fans, and put the power of creation and final product into the hands of those actually building a game.

The Revenue Numbers

Non-gamers or those with misunderstandings of what gaming is may not truly grasp the scale and scope of the gaming industry.

Gaming is far-and-away the largest entertainment industry in the world. Forbes compared major entertainment industry revenues from 2022. Gaming generated $184.4 billion. Music and movies combined equaled only $52.2 billion with ~$26.2 and ~$26 billion respectively. Per the Association of American Publishers and other international publishing associations, the book market generated approximately $137 billion in the same year.

Music and movies together did not equal a third of gaming revenue. Book publishing falls $47b short. All three combined only win out by ~$5b.

With this type of money in play, one fact should be obvious: gaming doesn't fit into tired, old stereotypes. It's not simply a hobby for nerds, weebs, loners, or the unathletic. Gaming offers something for anyone and everyone.

In some cases, gaming provides a more profitable career than some white-collar jobs. Esportsearnings.com ranks the highest paid gamers in the world. You have to reach the 200th person on the list to drop below a million dollars in earnings. The rankings go to 1,000th place, where Chinese gamer, "Beautiful" shows earnings of ~334k (as of Dec. 2025).

Problem One: Chasing Mass Appeal

When cooking a custard-based pie (e.g. pecan, pumpkin, etc.), a lot of things can go wrong even if you've made the damn thing a hundred times before. An unfamiliar oven, an experiment with ingredient substitution, overbaking, underbaking, a bad recipe in general--which might be why you don't get asked to make the pies anymore.

Video game development can be thought of the same way... with a much higher cost for getting things wrong.

To extend my metaphor, you can make the best pecan pie on planet Earth, but if someone is allergic to pecans, they ain't eating your pie. Or maybe they just don't like pecan pie... heretics. You're not going to appeal to them just by dressing the thing up a different way. And if you're going for pecan pie and end up with chess pie, you've a whole 'nother issue entirely.

This is the most glaring problem with major game publishers right now. They want every game to have mass appeal beyond a genre's intended audience. In doing so, they sacrifice the performance and quality of legendary IPs and new, original content alike.

Each of the four games above stuck to their genre roots without compromise and ended up pulling in players from across the gaming spectrum. They addressed this first problem by knowing what their game should be and ensured the delivery of a unique, premium game. Were they for everyone? Absolutely not. Did they still manage to attract a more-than-usual amount of gamers from outside the genre? Absolutely yes.

But, getting the recipe right wasn't the only thing that propelled these games to almost instant legendary status.

Problem Two: Cheaping Out

I built my current desktop from the ground up. Decided on every part and patiently put those parts together. I went with future-proofing and quality at the top of my list. My budget inflated (blew out), but the end result has been a rock-solid machine with a lot of life left.

Black Myth: Wukong was in development for six to seven years. While the exact budget isn't known, most industry experts put it at ~$70M. A price tag decisively smaller than almost any AAA game with such a long development cycle. In less than 24 hours, Wukong reached 2.22M concurrent players on Steam (second-most ever). Hardly more than a year post-release, the game has earned well north of $1B (with a 'B').

This is a game developed by a relatively no-name studio from the notoriously shaky game industry within China. Yet, the low price tag wasn't the result of cheaping out but of great fiscal management and attention placed exactly where it needed to be.

By contrast, CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 (~five years actual development) cost between $300M - $450M to make. The game earned out with the last reliable figures showing upwards of $750M in revenue as of early-2024 (four years after release).

CD Projekt Red became an incredibly known, celebrated, and funded studio following the dizzying success of The Witcher 3. A collision of unfortunate incidents and bad, intentional decisions led to Cyberpunk's initial (literal) failure to launch. But the biggest reason is also the second biggest problem in game development today:

Studios are cheaping out on quality. From the quality of time and pay given to workers to the quality of the games they desperately need to sell. Most recently, this can be seen in the move to adopt AI for the creation of art, the voicing of characters, and the localization of games.

Problem Three: Love of THE Game

In the education field, teachers often complain about principals not understanding the day-to-day frontline struggles of the classroom. This complaint holds much merit. In many cases, principals have either never been a classroom teacher or have forgotten what it's like.

The same can be said of many chief executives for gaming publishers.

Strauss Zelnick is perhaps the most well-known example. The chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive came from the world of law and finance. Less than a year ago, he stated to CNBC: "I'm not a gamer... It's not that I don't play a lot; it's that I don't play at all. I'm not the consumer-in-chief... I'm the manager."

This from the man running the conglomerate which publishes Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Borderlands, Civilization, and the 2K games to name a few. All of these are legendary IPs which have walked a rocky road over the past several years.

Zelnick is a lawyer and venture capitalist. A very successful one by the metrics used for those positions. He is not, by his own admission, a gamer. Zelnick has no love for the game.

And it shows.

When non-creatives take over creative endeavors what's left is a mish-mashed slop of half-baked goods. If they've no connection aside from the gamer's wallet, they'll never understand passion projects turned success stories like the above. Worse, they'll likely never produce them.

A great contrast to Zelnick is Swen Vincke of Larian Studios. Vincke epitomizes the gamer as CEO and demonstrates how to walk the harder path to actual success with games made by and for gamers.

Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 proves that such a labor of love can payoff big in the end. It saw early access sells of ~2.5M copies and as-of the latest reports has sold roughly 35M copies. Larian continues to support the game (nigh on three years later) with the same launch-day enthusiasm.

Reset, Recover, Renew

Perhaps the root problem of all the above is stockholder satisfaction.

Stockholders of such major gaming publishers want to reap a massive year-over-year profit for their own portfolios. For them, gaming isn't viewed as a long-term investment like ETFs, real estate, or Roth IRAs.

To be fair, this hasn't been a bad strategic play over the past couple of decades. But, it's not the smartest play considering the potential for so much more.

Yet, as market volatility increases and consumers become much more selective about how to spend their 'extra' money, the gaming industry is feeling the contractions. Promising IPs and affiliate studios are being dumped in order to maximize profit.

Again, some level of this is expected in any industry, but can be alleviated with less rote responses.

Across the board, major gaming studios need to perform a hard reset. Take an introspective look at what consumers want to see (Hint: originality, solid gameplay systems, ready to go at launch, long-term support, and soul). Don't just listen to the criticism. Embrace it and build out from there. Give root to new IPs. Refresh those with promise. Play off of winning strategies but bundle those in a unique experience.

Metaphor Refantazio is a prime example. The game is unmistakably an ATLUS game. The skeleton of their previous games can be seen like an x-ray. Despite this, they played jazz with the muscles, organs, and skin of the game. It became something unique and appealing to an unexpected many and has now stamped its place in gaming history.

Clair Obscur rose from the minds of junior developers and more senior ones who'd become disillusioned by major players in the industry. Forming Sandfall Interactive, they took a love for sophisticated narrative RPGS and the most enjoyable aspects of such games to create a masterpiece.

They adapted what fans like, breathed a soul into it, and came out with a game not only beloved by fans. But one that won nine awards of thirteen nominations (including Game of the Year) at the 2025 Game Awards and six awards at 2025's Golden Joystick (also Game of the Year).

Four games. Four passion projects. Four games now become legends. Four games laying out a blueprint for others to follow.

Video game development and publishing needs chief executives who, to flip Zelnick's words, are also consumers-in-chief. People with a love of the game, who refuse to cheap out, and chase zealous engagement over mass appeal.

Not everyone can be Hideo Kojima, but they can try.