Game Dev

5 Takeaways from Gamescom 2025

Gamescom 2025 happened last week (were you there? I'd love to go one day!) and there's an interesting post on LinkedIn talking about 5 takeaways from talking with publishers and developers about where the market is heading. These are all very important and also matches with what I see myself when I analyze Steam.

1. Streamer Friendly Projects are hot. Think PEAK, REPO, Schedule 1, etc. These are definitely super hot recently and will continue to get millions of players and millions of YouTube views for a long time to come. The main thing about these games is "shareability", whether it be through content creators or just amongst friends. Multiplayer can help make this work but remember how multiplayer is always a high-risk high-reward strategy.

2. Some games are built to test the market. As the market gets tougher and tougher it becomes even more important to test and validate your ideas before comitting to a 2+ year dev cycle. So some devs are building the game just enough to have a trailer with perhaps a small demo, and then they test that to see how players react to it. If they get a lot of wishlists and buzz then development continues, if not then they just cut their losses early. This is a very good strategy that allows you to minimize risk.

3. Sequels are king but also need to evolve. Sequels can give you an advantage by having a built-in audience, but if you don't evolve in any way you can alienate fans of your first game. And on the other hand if you innovate too much you might lose what made the original special, so this is a very tough balancing act.

4. Nostalgic IP in new genres. Publishers are actively looking to license old recognizable IP rather than try to build something completely original. If you're pitching to publishers perhaps there's a 10-20 year old IP that might help your pitch.

5. Traction matters more than originality. This is definitely one I've noticed myself a lot while browsing Steam. Every month I do my Top New Games videos, and every month I see lots of games selling thousands of copies by just being an interesting idea, not necessarily an original idea. One genre that is very hot is the Simulator genre, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR1HFAj2v-Y and in that genre you don't need to be original, just pick a new different theme and go for it. There's no need to come up with completely original mechanics that might or might not work, something interesting is all players want to have fun. And in terms of publishers they really want proof of interest in the form of wishlists or demo data.

These are definitely interesting takeaways that do match what I see myself on Steam. If you're making games just for fun then just build whatever you want. But if you're trying to make game development as a living then you need to pay attention to these topics, and these 5 points are very important for you to find success.

Fun

Games with 0 Reviews

If you're the developer of one of these game then this probably isn't "fun" but it's certainly interesting. Here is a website that keeps track of games on Steam that have 0 reviews, meaning they probably sold less than 40 copies.

This serves as a way to see two things:

1. How much competition there is on Steam, getting just 1 review is a challenge.

2. How most of these games are clearly hobby projects so if you're making games seriously you shouldn't be competing on this level.

Although it's definitely sad to see that a handful of these actually look like they are at least "decent" and yet they sold near zero copies. If I had to guess I would say lack of marketing is probably the cause. If you do 0 marketing and launch with 0 wishlists then you get as much visibility as a hobby game which will lead to 0 sales.

So if you are trying to do game dev in a serious manner, I highly encourage you to also take marketing seriously! Check out my videos with Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski.