Saturation doesn't exist
Can players have too much of a good thing or are we just making excuses to fail?
There is a particular theory around genre in games that has seemingly been doing the rounds since Early Man first carved crude dice out of a mammoth femur and rolled for initiative (note: probably didn’t happen).
It goes like this: the more games that are released in a genre, the harder it is for new titles to break in. The genre becomes a “red ocean” and novel entrants dive in at their peril - far better to seek the open waters of a completely original design space.
I end up talking about familiarity / originality constantly so I won’t rehash that here. Instead, let’s take a critical look at the saturation conversation to see if it provides any sort of useful lens for development or publishing choices.
This whole thing smacks of genre
The first issue with saturation theory is that it is predicated heavily on the conceptualisation of genre. As I’ve discussed here, this is problematic to begin with - genre in games particularly tends to be a messy broad heuristic: does anyone know what “roguelike” actually means now? What mechanics can I expect in a “horror” or “wholesome” game?
Let’s wrench open a truly cursed crypt: the “soulslike” genre, which many are keen to characterise as “oversaturated”. Here is the Eternal Arbiter of Vague Human Consensus (or Wikipedia, to use the old name) on the matter:
A Soulslike (also spelled Souls-like) is a subgenre of action role-playing games known for high difficulty level and emphasis on environmental storytelling, typically in a dark fantasy setting.
While the description is typically applied to action role-playing games, the core concepts of high difficulty, repeated character death driving player knowledge and mastery of the game world, sparsity of save points, and giving information to the player through indirect, environmental storytelling are sometimes seen in games of very different genres, the mechanics of which are sometimes described as Soulslike.
There have been significant debates around even these fundamental points, with arguments focussing on difficulty, stamina mechanics, bonfires, bosses and the minutiae of RPG elements…that’s before we’ve even got to “soulsborne”. It’s a mess.
Recent souls-ish slam dunk Black Myth: Wukong has reignited these debates all over again. Here are just a few choice Steam reviews:
The combat I would say is more akin to something like God of War rather than a soulslike
Black Myth Wukong is a soul-like game that adds some interesting elements to the genre by incorporating new ideas into its gameplay through the legendary tale of Sun Wukong.
It has some soulsborne influences, but doesn't lean too heavily into it
It's a souls-like game despite it not having that tag on the steam store page
At first, I thought this game was gonna be another Souls-like, but after playing and getting my first death, I didn’t lose any XP or anything—it all stayed with me. Feels more like a Chinese version of God of War
If you're a fan of soulslike games and appreciate the art of a well crafted challenge, I can't recommend Black Myth: Wukong enough.
I don't know why I was expecting more like a Darksouls, but that's my bad, game is good.
Gameplay wise this isn't a soulslike it's more of a hack'n slash game,
The combat system feels great and no it isnt souls-like at all
"It's not inspired by the soulsbornes, it's their own thing" was uniformly propagated. Well guess what - it's another soulsborne game with some minor twists
So is it a soulsborne or action RPG or something else? Well in my day, “action RPG” meant Diablo and Path of Exile, so that’s hardly clearer.
At first glance, with a hero rolling around a white focal point pinned to a boss while they dodge sequenced attacks and drink potions to heal themselves…it’s giving souls. But the difficulty curve, the checkpointing, the behaviour of regular enemies and many other factors diverge from the formula - it’s hard to pin down.
What is clear, however, is that even The Gamers themselves are struggling significantly with categorisation. So given this ongoing context, surely the popular discourse around the genre should at least hedge its bets when it comes to making emphatic claims about it? Here’s just a few examples from a quick Google…
However, attempts to create Soulslikes have become a little too frequent and oversaturated now.
Holy shit, the videogame market is over saturated with souls borne clones.
The fairly new Souls genre is now simply oversaturated with content, as well
So, we’re left with the following situation:
Nobody knows what a “soulslike” really is…
…but we’re relatively certain there are “too many” of them
That’s not a great start.
In the room with us right now?
Let’s say we move beyond the typical ontological problems here and just accept prima facie that “there is a concrete type of game called a ‘soulslike’ and there are some demonstrably troublesome number of them in the market”- how do we think about the state of the market in that context?
Market saturation is present when “the volume of a product or service in a marketplace has been maximized” (Investopedia). This usually manifests as a tangible reduction in new demand - the entire possible customer base for a product has been fully satisfied. It is often characterised by a small number of providers operating at low profit margins to defend against new market entrants.
The gaming market in general is tough to evaluate against those criteria. Games within a genre are not fungible - they are differentiated by default. Anything short of a perfect, full asset-rip clone represents some form of differentiation, so games developed in a normal manner are always passively dodging the pitfalls of saturation. We simply don’t have a good test.
For a genre to be meaningfully saturated it would need to be true that:
No additional players can enter the genre
Every current player in that genre is fully satisfied by a game they are currently playing
On the first point, there are countless examples of games blowing open the appeal of a genre - take Hearthstone, for instance, which Blizzard-ified the somewhat impenetrable CCG space and annoyed various subsectors of hardcore Magic: The Gathering fans for years. This makes it extremely hard to insist that overall demand in a broad genre is ever truly bounded. Also, many games do not offer infinite playtime - once a player has exhausted a game they love, “more of the same” definitely has at least some appeal.
It is possible, however, that a large playerbase in a particular genre can stick with a single game for a very long time - we’ve seen recent data in live service games to this effect. MOBA’s are also the classic “saturated genre” example, with many new entrants failing and the “MOBA gold rush” petering out while players largely stuck to LoL and DOTA. This feels much more like a traditional saturated market, with strong differentiation needed to create a breakout product.
However, this is a very rare occurrence in very highly specified genres - additionally the overwhelming majority of game developers do not need to concern themselves with these issues unless they are operating at the highest cost, highest stakes macro level of the industry. If you need “all the players” to make money then true TAM becomes very important to you - if your sights are set slightly lower, then this becomes much less of a concern very rapidly. Take BattleBit Remastered in the “oversaturated” military multiplayer shooter genre, for example - no, it’s not going to put a dent in Battlefield but $30m-ish revenue isn’t to be sniffed at. Could a smart indie dev do the same for the MOBA eventually?
Returning to soulslikes, with many of the “genre’s” biggest success stories in the form of Black Myth, Elden Ring, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Armored Core VI, Lies of P and so on releasing in the last few years and an increasing number of successful indie-scale titles (let’s call this approx < $5m revenue for the sake of argument) like Another Crab’s Treasure, Death’s Door and Blasphemous 2 emerging as well, it feels difficult to make a concrete argument that - even if you could define it precisely - the total market is being adequately addressed here. If you’d like to prove me wrong with some more detailed data, please go ahead!
The Oversaturated
So the (in my view) unwarranted saturation conversation is present in select large-scale controversial genres but what about elsewhere? Well, unfortunately it appears to be endemic…
Has the open world survival genre run its course? (2015!)
And so on.
To my mind, this is clearly a broad perception problem with the audience, and those always come back to haunt the industry in some form with particular impact on indie devs who may not have access to more detailed data. But are there any cases where there is a true saturation issue?
On Steam particularly, there are some traditionally “dangerous” genres but we need to be very careful about how we discuss them. The wonderful HowToMarketAGame (whose work I quote constantly when writing about Steam) declared puzzle platformers to be “over saturated” in 2022, and as general advice this was sound, but then new publisher Bigmode had a huge debut PC hit with Animal Well in 2024. Action platformers also were held to be a no-go zone (including by me) but subsequently Pizza Tower happened and leveraged a load of interesting secondary factors to great effect.
My strong feeling here is that perhaps again these are not saturation issues at all but simply strong genre preferences for a PC audience.
Get Good
A common conclusion to saturation-related thinkpieces is “just make good games” and - while fundamentally correct - this is trite and unhelpful. Instead, I offer the following (perhaps equally trite and unhelpful):
Genre is a Wide Angle
Think of genre as a wide shot - it takes in the scenery and the ambience, locating the main characters in the broader context of their world. There are expectations and preconceptions (more of that in a second) but no hard definitions. Arguing over the bounds might be a fun sport for online contrarians but it’s often not that productive for people who actually do things. Be extremely wary of hyper-specific declarative statements made in this context.
Categorised and Compared
Your game will be compared to other things it vaguely resembles and you will be “held accountable” by an audience who see any suggestion or allusion as a “promise”. Be aware that if you are leveraging against a genre, pivoting from it or incorporating elements of it, those nuances will be lost on a large number of players. Do it, but do it consciously. Understand their expectations in advance by looking at data, reading what they say about other games and including genre fans in your testing even if you think they may not be your precise target audience.
Traits Not Genre
I believe the conversation for devs should move beyond broad genre buckets to traits: what are these games doing for the player? Roguelike games provide procgen content in an accessible form; grand strategy games provide emergent system-building located in a concrete sociopolitical - often historical - context and so on. If you can get beyond “I am making a strategy game” to “I am providing, specifically, this type of experience” then things tend to flow more readily.
Ocean Blues and Genre Maturity
Even if they are not “saturated”, genres can mature - it would probably be challenging to make a classically styled 1990’s 16-bit platformer and achieve the level of buzz that Sonic 2 achieved back in the day. If a genre has a lot of entrants, then consciously understanding recent developments and riffing on them, rejecting them, embracing them or altering them in interesting ways can pay dividends.
A feeling of saturation in an area should push you creatively - what is the meaningful, novel step which can be taken here that still retains the exciting elements which drew people to the genre in the first place?
Does it Matter?
It is good to be wary of conversations which are predicated on restricting your creative possibility space and / or explaining away failures. If tell a dev (as I sometimes have) that something is a “tough genre”, my favourite response is for them to come back at me immediately with “yes but here are the specific, demonstrable reasons why my game will interest an audience”. Nothing shuts down that conversation faster than clear data about player engagement and retention, for example. It should be a challenge you have already considered, not cause to give up.
“It’s a saturated market” is a wonderful reason to fail as it relates to an implacable intangible force which is entirely out of your hands. Not your fault! Many of the benefits of failure come from gaining a concrete understanding of ways in which future efforts can be improved - “the market did it to me” (even if partially true) doesn’t really help with that.
When players say “soulslikes are oversaturated”, I believe what they often mean is “I feel bored because several new third-person action games have seemed too similar to me personally”. There is nothing that The Gamers love more than to take their own subjective opinion and then project it out into the market as if it were globally true - see also games that “failed” (which oscillates between “the game did not make money” and “the game did not meet my arbitrary personal standards” depending on the weather). Handle gamer opinions with extreme care and limited attention - as with a lot of feedback a problem is being highlighted but not correctly identified.
Clip to Zero
In future, I’d like to see the burden of proof placed on those who are declaring saturation - show us that games in a well-defined category have clearly hit an upper bound of demand. A reduction in the number of profitable titles in different strata would be a good tell, so if that’s present then the conversation can gain more traction.
I think saturation can exist - in very specific times and places - but as the overall gaming market continues to increase, it should almost never be the most significant factor in our thinking. For 99% of devs, it may not even matter at all. Ultimately, successful game dev is always about carving out your own space - the space you need, and its context, is up to you to determine.
Bang on! Here’s an interesting analogy:
When I worked in retail we were in an area with a couple of similar stores nearby (outdoor equipment, in this case). You might think this would be bad for business, but it made our area a destination. If you needed a sleeping bag you made your way to that part of town. It might seem that it would be better to be placed somewhere with no “competition” - but your “captive” audience is offset by far fewer customers.
Where having competition nearby *is* bad is if your neighbouring store does the exact same thing you do, but much better. But it turns out that there are a lot of different customer types/niches/interests in the outdoor market.
I think this comes to your point of “what are these games doing for the player”. If you are making a worse version of Dark Souls (maybe more accurately, a game with marketing/screenshots/reviews that is perceived as a worse version of Dark Souls) that is coming out on the same day as a Dark Souls sequel, yeah, you’ll be in trouble. If you’ve made something that communicates its own vision I think having an established audience in the “genre” can be beneficial. Familiarity is valuable.
Context: not a developer, just a person with an opinion on everything