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GDC 2025 Postmortem

Reviewing our trip to GDC this year.

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🎯My goals and top level results

Meet developers, hear first hand their pain points (10/10)

As discussed below, I’ve gotten a solid understanding from small to big developers of what the challenge of releasing games is like, how the industry changed over the years and everyone is purely concerned with discoverability - they’ve all identified that as the key reason for game failure, above any issues with their products / positioning. Before coming onboard here and GDC I had a ‘how are things an issue if there’s more people playing than ever?’. Feels like gaming trickle down economics...

Meet marketers, learn of them their pain points (6/10)

I managed to get 3 good conversations with marketing people when I was out and about. They were very interested (continued below) and their main question was ‘How do I get on it? How much control of the content can I have?’, cost didn’t factor into it - they saw a medium and were engaged. They were the most pushy for audience size. I intend to follow up with them and engage more in the next couple weeks to get a larger audience size; an I need to connect with someone in the AAA space.

What do platforms think? (8/10)

From talking with Sony, Valve and the ex-Meta lady, its clear they are worried at an individual level and haven’t worked out a solution, but some of the older guard at these companies are very skeptical about conducting discovery on their platforms. None of them seem to be considering doing their own off platform ideas, but I sensed a hunger for something like what we’re offering. All of them are interested in following our progress. I would like to continue my discussions with them; the ginger Sony guy has added me on LinkedIn so I plan to start there.

Test out the feed (9/10)

I can’t remember how many times I had the feed on my phone and in other people’s hands. Very happy that we landed the bright look in time for the event, I think looking different aided it greatly.

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📃Reception to feed

Positive

Absolutely positive. Both the looks and the features went down very well and I was charmed at how many people tried to tap at the content that they read on the feed.

The content mix

Going with 10 different types of content worked well - I had concerns it would dilute what people would enjoy, but the mix went down very well - when building the feed we should understand which types of content are short engagement and which are long in order to consistently get the mix correct.

The concept of gamertainment

The content we put together by hand was received well, the humour we mixed in really made people want to continue to scroll. My takeaway is; how do we make GenAI content consistently funny while making sure it doesn’t get dull / repetitive over time?

I wonder if we can develop a mix of funny personalities behind each post type that requires a lot of copy (Articles, Interviews, Lists…) to keep things fresh? It’s like a comedy night with a range of stand up comedians? Each is funny but has a distinct voice / way of delivering jokes.

We don’t need these to be visible personalities, just different approaches to being funny for each post.

One thing I tried to do was talk with people who didn’t know it was you behind the project, I was worried about their positive opinion of you clouding their perception. Whilst I did find my scepticism to the concept (‘so its AI Tumblr’ hit hard), once they saw the feed they quickly let their guard down. So the Ichiro effect isn’t clouding our feedback!

‘Negative’

This was tricky and I want to talk about the criticisms we got from the Meta lady (my memory is a bit fuzzy, long day!) but I did get one big question:

Great product, why should gamers care?

The biggest bit of feedback I got was ‘This is great, how do you get gamers on it? Do they even want this product? Do they need discoverability?’

Something I might have said out loud when we were together is: having an awesome product isn’t a guarantee to success - that the end user audience needs to be able to understand these features AND see their personal needs accounted for or it’ll flop.

The example I have from the Hub:One at Swarm - it literally would put £40 in a user’s pocket per month, but delivering both evidence of that AND communicating the need for it was left way too late into its development, leading to a fantastic product that no one knew they needed.

What I take away from this and from chatting to developers in gamer mode is that we need to build up a cause for the gamers to understand, one that they can relate to and one we can solve for them. From chats with developers at GDC with their gamer hats on and my own personal thoughts:

Losing interest in games in general after a few stinkers; there’s a fatigue that builds up from let down expectations - this is likely what pushes gamers to sink back into older games or stick with one that scratches their itch.

The risk associated with the high cost of games; £20 is a high price for disappointment and with only 2 hours to decide if they like a game, there’s a new barrier in gaming - is this going to be a financial waste?

Being able to say ‘I LIKE THIS’ and have it mean something; a lot of feeds and algorithms are black boxes, with users able to have an effect on what they see but not . TikTok is annoying for this as it takes a view into account when learning what you enjoy - but a couple views on what you don’t like and boom your feed is a X, Y and Z, with no real way to back out and say ‘actually I don’t like that’ or even ‘my tastes have moved on’. The only place that really serves this is Reddits frontpage as you can switch subreddits on and off.

Brewing this down I feel like we need to develop a position that;

This is yours, you control it, you shape what you see

We’ll find you the perfect games that fit your niche tastes

We care about your tastes, time and money - we don’t even want your money.

From this I’m thinking that the gaming psychologist (

Akinator⁠

for games) would be a great in for new users

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🧠Reception to GenAi usage

Developers

Overall: very positive - I think they appreciated the need for AI to work its way through the mass quantity of games. So long as we stay away from media generation and focus our use of AI on curation and presentation we should be safe and not need to hide behind ‘procedurally generated’

A side question I was asked was “will this not lead to problems in discoverability on your platform, how do you surface so much content for so many games?” the answer is related to the targeting abilities of the feed and showing content to only to those subscribed to categories, though I think we should look into a solution that helps cater to a wide mix of tastes that a user might have

Marketers

Absolutely no concerns from the marketers, though I believe we would be best placed to have a portfolio of content that tells a story about a brand/game so that they can understand the vision - on top of the examples we’ve already produced.

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🫂Audiences

Developers

Pain points

Discoverability;

A part of this was hearing the woes of the Discovery queue - it felt exactly like SEO did 5 years ago - the big players have enough resources to game the system in their favour and surface far more regularly on what is considered a free medium.

Knowing what to do: I had assumed this was the case with the plethora of ‘how to market your game 101’ courses I saw before going to GDC; developers (indie in particular) have been able to succeeded through trusting built in systems and creating good games - the Steam was good at rewarding and promoting a quality games and AAA developers still focused on ‘mainstream’ genres, keeping the space quiet.

As the space filled up, developers suddenly needed to be able to compete against a wider range of games, indie’s with marketing support and AAAs moving into spaces that we’re usually indie niches.

So this leads to the vibe I got at GDC, that no one was sure of what the route to success is anymore and that making a great game is no longer enough. For ourselves, I think this means we’ll want to clearly differentiate our organic and paid offerings - some developers may be happy to let the passive effect of our site help them. On this point, we should (eventually) build stats showing the added effect of paid advertising through our site.

Positioning and how we help; Developers know their games, they know who they’ve made them for and they (to an extent) know how to position it for them. The problem up until now is that this knowledge hasn’t be rewarded by mediums; YouTube (as an example - with no ‘taste’ targeting) doesn’t think how they do and other time neither has Steam (genre’s and discovery tool does nothing for them now).

Marketers

Pain Points

Zero targeting opportunity; the only way to reasonably connect with the right audience is to use influencers, but two of the marketers I talked with were concerned with their returns from this approach; that the audiences of influencers (even in niche spaces) weren't guaranteed to wholly be their targets.

Outside of influencers their targeting options were limited to YouTube adverts (targeting watchers of relevant content) but one marketer mentioned how this felt like having to tread on already walked paths - that they relied on content from creators to succeed first before they could then

When asked, they all agreed that there was a risk involved with influencers and a that they were at risk impact from controversy

Overshadowed content; I was also asking into the formats of their advertising - how ‘easy’ was it for a user to watch what they were putting out there. Due to YouTube advertising and Infleuncers, most of their content felt overshadowed / sidelined to a main event, and often tied to long form content (such as a 30 minute video) where they felt that users would forget to action any interest.

Funnily they had this concern for gameplay footage of their games, that even after watching the 30 minutes of their games, gamers would just move on to the next entertaining thing before checking out their games.

Lack of visibility; marketers like stats, and all they get from most platforms are total views - no clarity on how many of their ideal audience saw the content, no idea of impressions per audience member and no idea on their engagement.

This points towards us needing to build a reporting suite that shows these values;

Impressions of content

Engagement of content

Average views per gamer

Views of game page

Positive exit clicks

Steam page views

External content views

Budget; the other side is that being able to show budget effectiveness - the current visibility is spend -> sales, with no idea on the stages between that (they could use sponsored content views) build up their overall audience. Linked to visibility above, we could do with being able to tie spend into overall funnel effectiveness.

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🥚EGG

I don’t intend to review the EGG evening’s format, but I think the bigger value to me was the few conversations before the presentations - the room emptied out very quickly after they finished.

I’ll track down Dmtry’s contact details, he showed interest in the GenAI approach we were using and is linked to VC funding.

I’ll draft two followup piece of content relating to the event;

A post on LinkedIn detailing the night, Olya gave me her phone number to reach out for content but it’s not working when I try to text it (even though she called me from it), do you have her email address?

Sharing out the article; I’ll grab the round up that [find website name] did on us, it's good 3rd party proof of our concept out in the wild.

Could you invite as many relevant people to it on LinkedIn as possible? We should have 250 invites to use every month, we’ll try and max those out with industry related contacts and friendly faces (easy likes for the algorithm).

The night did make me think; should we be looking for future funding from non-gaming sources? Will we see the tech industry understand what we’re doing more closely?

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🤖Understanding the values of the tech we’re building

Definitions

Something that came up in chats was an interest in the genre+ technology we’re likely to develop in this process. Studios see it as a way to actually connect with their audiences but I think the biggest value add from this feature is what it offers to gamers.

We've been focusing on the entertainment value of the feed when people question ‘do gamers need discoverability?’ - an early way for us to prove value to our gaming audience, something that can pull users in, I’d been seeing games via their categories,

Games media engine (the feed)

THE way to be able to place your games content in front of gamers that match have self identified tastes that match your game; built to boost a game’s discoverability and start gamers on the funnel towards your game’s Steam page.

Through repeatedly seeing your game and linking out to offsite content created by content creators, WeLoveEveryGame.com serves as the starting point for gamers eventually playing your game.

Genre+ category system

The Genre+ system identifies the themes that gamers enjoy between vastly different games; think what Pokemon and Elden Ring share? Gated progression behind a difficult boss. This approach will allow us to help gamers truly understand what it is they like behind the games they play, which gives us a unique draw for gamers and an even more detailed way for studios to connect with their audience.

Genre+ Technology

Discussed below at

Challenges⁠

below.

Genre+ Name

Fooled around with ChatGPT to get some starting points on name for the genre+ system;

Name

Rationale

Flavor Tags

Familiar to food/drink lovers. Suggests nuance, variety, and discovery. “What’s your flavor?”

Game DNA

Feels foundational and impressive. Suggests you're decoding what makes a game feel like it does.

Echo Tags / Gameplay Echoes

Evokes subtle shared vibes. Soft and poetic, especially useful for narrative/emotional overlaps.

Play Tastes / Tastes

Short, punchy, and intuitive. Suggests personalization and preference.

Vibe Tags

Very Gen Z–friendly. Could pair well with social media or personalized feeds.

Game Texture

A bit artsy — how a game feels to interact with, beyond genre.

Spice Levels (or Flavor Notes)

Could be fun in onboarding, if you lean into playful metaphors.

Core Loops

Game design term that investors and devs will nod at. Can be abstracted for players too.

Affinity Tags

Clean, useful. Feels like a categorization system or relational network.

Mechanic Mirrors

A little jargony, but could work if you’re drawing parallels between systems.

Fingerprints

Mine

Genre+

Mine

There are no rows in this table

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I like Vibe Tags (easy to understand), Gameplay Echoes (cool sounding, though a bit ethereal) and Play Tastes (easy to understand)? None have made me think I’ve found the one however, but I think coining a term for this layer that exists beneath and across genres would add a lot of value in discussions with stakeholders.

Sub-genre Product feels key, but a lot of AI processing is needed

The meal that is Genre+ will require;

Understanding games at a far greater detail

Absorbing everything from a Steam Page

Understanding the reviews in a different way than before

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💡Thoughts and ideas

Structured funnel messaging

When we chatted with Sony, the idea of having multiple exit points from WLEG solidified live and proved itself - the concept of having mid funnel content on game pages as well as links to the product page.

Marketers love a funnel, 1) because they work, 2) because they can point to other numbers that are positive when their end results aren’t hitting target (“We got 443,000 impressions on content on WeLoveEveryGame.com and then saw JackSepticEye’s coverage of our content get a 200,000 impression spike afterwards!”).

For the future we should adapt this into our messaging - we’re the top of the funnel and we’re building lots of slides for gamers to make their way further down it.

Popular feed

I think there’s a part of everyone where they want to know what the big thing that’s happening is. Whilst this on paper sounds like the opposite of what we’re trying to do, I think as long as the core recommended Feed is solid enough, the Popular feed becomes a beacon of the hottest content on the site in a given time period.

I use Reddit this way, I start on my custom feed, then hop to All to see wtf is going on. This gives us an added position as the home of ‘what’s hip today in gaming’ too.

Content / Campaign Ideas

Some ideas that came to me whilst there.

Guess that title

An untitled micro trailer plays, viewers guess what the game is.

YourFront

Steam built for you using WeLoveEveryGame’s matching technology to build you a storefront of games that are perfectly linked to your taste, with each listing offering both content to review and a direct route to purchase (we can probably deep link to the cart on Steam?).

Semi Interactive Web Content (Inspired by ‘Consume me’)

I saw this game at the exploratory games expo and it go me thinking, what could we do in a similar way to make some part of our site similar?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2359120/Consume_Me/⁠

- everything is achieved by just clicking, and the UI is easily repeatable

Second screen games

A big way of consuming games that I’m not sure is catered to (there are games for it but they’re usually split into different categories - From Glory to Goo is a perfect RTS for this), could be a new category on the website - another cross-genre theme linking tool.

Sharing ‘tastes’ with friends - Via Ezra

“Blend playlists to find a middle ground between multiple people for multiplayer” - I’ve used tools in the past that compare games in Steam libraries to find games both people own and can start playing, but I think there’s a huge opportunity in some system where people can compare tastes to find games to enjoy together (with a toggle to hide/show multiplayer games).

Video Game Club - Via walking about

“Video game book club, per genre, available for sale” is the short pitch, but I think there’s something in this. I think to not devalue it we’d want to limit it to ‘core’ categories? This ties back to the hierarchy of categories I think we may want to develop - though the best solution may be to base it on popular genres

Tug of War - Interactive Content

“Pick a game, click to help your game win VS others in the listings” - maybe this is something for the popular feed only? Or to determine the ‘best games’ of a category? Where users would be able to vote or maybe even tug on a rope to help their game win.

Apparently it's popping off! We should allocate time to investigate it, it is gif friendly so we can repurpose other content for it.

Reacting to trends (Rising Stars?)

How do we feed the ‘I want to know about the biggest next game’ hunger that drives YouTuber content? “Being the first to know: hot topics (i.e. lethal company clones, supermarket Sims…)”

Is there activity on Steam we can watch in order to spot rising stars?

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