Leveling the Gaming Field: Indie Cooperatives and Personalized Curation
by Topper Bowers
In the gaming industry, indie games, despite their immense popularity, often struggle for visibility. This imbalance is driven by advertising dollars, which heavily favor high-budget titles backed by large publishers. However, by banding together into cooperatives and employing personalized curation, indie games could flip this narrative.
The Marketing Imbalance in Gaming
Currently, the gaming market is heavily skewed towards big-budget titles from large publishers. These publishers can afford extensive ad spend, ensuring their games secure prime spots on distribution platforms. This economy of scale creates a marketing imbalance that puts indie games at a huge disadvantage.
Large publishers, owning multiple titles, enjoy an economy of scale. By spreading their marketing costs across a portfolio of games, they make each dollar work harder, further entrenching their dominant position and limiting the exposure of indie games.
The Future is Indie Cooperatives with Personalized Curation
To counter the marketing imbalance, indie games should form cooperatives to cross-market and compete collectively against the behemoths. They should share marketing costs (time and money), increase their market presence, and broaden the potential audience for each game.
Indie cooperatives should focus on personalized curation. Leveraging smarter recommendation systems, they can match the right game with the right player, enhancing player engagement and monetization.
These advanced recommendation systems, powered by conversational AI and traditional systems, should consider a player’s gaming history, preferences, and play style to suggest games that align with their tastes.
This personalized approach will not only increase the chances of indie games finding their audience, but also significantly improve the player’s gaming experience.
Faced with a marketing imbalance, indie games have the potential to unite and leverage the power of personalization. Through indie cooperatives and smart recommendation systems, they can deliver a curated gaming experience that benefits both developers and players.
This cooperative future promises better opportunities for indie developers and a richer, more diverse gaming landscape for all. It’s a future where every game, regardless of its budget, has a fair chance of reaching its audience, and every player gets to discover games that truly resonate with them.
Leveling the Gaming Field: Indie Cooperatives and Personalized Curation was originally published in gam3on on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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