This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Many analysts and consultants give software houses the same advice: “look at the genres that sell, and make one of those.” If roguelites are exploding on Steam, ride the wave. If survival games are dominating the charts, build one.
What players actually evaluate
When I jump into a new game, I’m looking for something visceral: a feeling, a sense of stakes, a specific pleasure. I’m trying to live out a fantasy: that of the lone survivor, the strategist who bends chaos to their will, the hero who beats the impossible.
Genre is the container. What the player is buying is the experience inside it.
It’s not a new idea — the MDA framework (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) by Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek has been articulating this since 2004. But the convenience of taxonomic classification keeps winning out over actually studying player experiences. It’s much easier to put a genre label on a spreadsheet, after all.
Fantasies have a historical context
Fantasies don’t work in a vacuum. They’re rooted in the cultural moment they emerge from.
The survival game boom (DayZ, The Forest, Rust) grew out of a decade of economic crisis, political instability, and distrust of institutions. The fantasy of “starting over from scratch with your own two hands” resonated because it spoke to something millions of people were feeling in the real world.
The same goes for city builders and management games: they sell the fantasy of control and order in a world that feels chaotic. And when that collective feeling shifts, the fantasy that sells shifts with it — regardless of genre.
Identifying which fantasy is culturally ripe at any given moment is a completely different job from watching which genres are performing well on Steam. And it’s far more useful.
Where enormous budgets aren’t enough
Concord (Sony, 2024) is the textbook case. Estimated budget: over $400 million. Genre: hero shooter, going after the Overwatch and Valorant market. Everything looked right on paper — popular genre, quality studio, near-unlimited resources.
But players had no real reason to choose it over what they already had. It was pulled in under two weeks.
Skull & Bones (Ubisoft, 2024) followed a similar trajectory: eleven years in development, estimated budget around $650 million. Genre: naval combat with live service elements. The pirate fantasy — being a free-roaming corsair, master of the seas — was barely present in the actual gameplay, replaced by a hollow grind loop.
In both cases, the genre was “right.” The fantasy was empty.
The right question
Before asking “which genre is doing well?”, the productive question is:
What dream do players want to live out, right now, in this cultural moment, that nobody else has yet figured out how to deliver?
Answering that question takes empathy, a feel for the times, and the ability to connect culture with design.
Genre, for its part, is a handy map — but it’s not worth navigating by, because it was never built for that.