The head of Nacon Publishing believes that there are “too many games on the market”

Benoit Clerc, head of publishing at Nacon, told Gamindustry.biz that there are “too many games currently on the market.” In his opinion, this is one of the reasons why there are so many layoffs and closures in the industry.

“There are too many games currently on the market,” Clerc says. “We’re seeing today the results of investment made after [COVID] when the market was bursting, and every game was making a lot of money so there were a lot of investments being made. This is two or three years after that, so the games we’re seeing now on the market were financed in that time and there are simply too many for customers to be able to play them.

He also drew attention to the fact that 50 or 60 games can be released on Steam per day, which makes it difficult for developers and publishers to draw attention to their project. According to him, a publisher should have a strong position for each of its games and cited Robocop: Rogue City as an example of what a game should have to reach its audience.

He also spoke about the peculiarities of Nacon, which does not have the financial ability to compete with AAA publishers. Benoit believes that in order for the company to succeed, they need to effectively reach a more niche audience that AAA projects have not yet fully captured:

“I’m not spending $200 million on promotion, so I need to target gamers that have a passion and expertise for off-road racing when I’m doing WRC, that have an expertise in rogue-like games when I’m doing Ravenswatch, or that have an expertise in sports games when I’m doing Cricket 24. They know the sport and game mechanics very well, and I need developers in front of that who have the same expertise and share the same passion in order for those two groups to talk together.”

Benoit also commented on the failure of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which is considered to be one of the worst and most failed games of 2023. According to him, the company learns better from its mistakes. He also noted that Nacon took into account the mistakes made when creating the game in order to better organize work in the future.