The industry makes great games, but nobody can find them

At the Madeira Games Summit, a workgroup led by Michal Bujko (Modma Studios) named discoverability as the problem the industry should fix while it still can: the games are there, the audience simply never sees them.

Algorithms built to surface content increasingly reward volume, familiarity and short-term engagement over quality or originality. Taste-driven decisions — the kind that once gave unusual games a fighting chance — have quietly been replaced by metrics, and genuinely distinctive games get buried.

The group pointed at every link in the chain: platforms hold the most structural power and the least accountability, publishers greenlight on comparables and wishlist velocity, and developers rarely have the runway to build an audience before launch. Nobody is financially motivated to fix the system as a whole.

Their recommendations: platforms should open up with real attribution and analytics plus human curation; publishers should commit to a lane and build a community around it, the way Paradox Interactive did; developers should treat community-building as part of the creative process from day one, not a marketing phase before ship.

Our takeaway at Lev3lUp: own your audience. Direct channels — your own store, your Discord, your mailing list, your press relationships — are the only discovery surface a studio actually controls. That is exactly what our Starter Pack and Media Mailing services are built for.