The death and reincarnation of game discoverability | Opinion

Guy Ulmer leads platform partnerships at Plarium, which is part of the Modern Times Group. Plarium develops and publishes mobile, browser, and PC games such as Raid: Shadow Legends and Stormfall: Saga of Survival.

There is an ongoing narrative in our industry, echoed in conference roundtables and LinkedIn posts alike: “Organic discovery is dead.” We hear that curation is broken, the App Store model is outdated, and that even with AAA marketing budgets, developers are trapped in an ever-escalating ad-bidding war, an endless Red Queen’s race.

This is supported by a recent games marketing survey which found nearly a third of developers expect discoverability to be their biggest challenge in 2026. And it’s easy to see why when looking at the sheer volume of daily releases across all platforms. But speaking as someone who has spent the past ten years managing platform partnerships, discoverability is not dead. It has simply evolved into something more complex, more social, and entirely more demanding of your game. And if applied wisely, your efforts will be rewarded.

The social reality

Developers relying on major storefront placements to propel a global game launch are fighting the last war. The “holy grail” of receiving a major featuring nomination from Apple or Steam carousel placement from Valve is still valuable, but the landscape has fragmented. Developers must meet players where they actually find games and gaming news today.

According to recent data, 64% of players discover new titles via YouTube, followed closely by TikTok (38%) and Instagram (36%). Even word of mouth (34%) outpaces most of the traditional and modern outlets like online store promotions (29%).

This means the battleground has expanded beyond the storefront and into the social feed. Studios that invest in social traction, creator ecosystems, and player advocacy are better positioned to sustain visibility and momentum in a crowded market.

The storefront transaction

This brings us to the thorny subject of the much-debated store cut. While new opportunities are emerging in this area, developers should consider how they can get the most out of their storefronts: from the tech stack to analytics tools to, perhaps most importantly, audience exposure.

Tapping into that store audience requires more than just uploading a build: It requires understanding the “update cycle” of the store. Storefronts are partially algorithmic and partially fed on “New,” “Updated,” and “On Sale” items, with shifting internal priorities of what they deem as important.

For example, it’s a safe bet that in 2026 Google Play will emphasize games that cater to their new “You tab” features, Apple will promote its dedicated Games app as a complementary re-engagement and discovery channel, Valve will double down on the Steam Deck Verified program with compatibility for the upcoming Steam Machine, and Microsoft will push developers to offer Xbox Play Anywhere support. Developers should take advantage of the additional exposure gained from these not-so-silent partners, assuming such programs are in the best interests of both the game and player base.

Every game is now effectively a game-as-a-service, where developers must be in a constant cycle of sales events, content updates, and optimizing for new platform features and requirements if they wish to maintain visibility and deliver healthy revenue.

Baking discoverability into design

The successful developers of 2026 will probably design their games for marketing instead of just marketing their games. And from recent years, we can already see the emergence of “discoverability hacks” that are changing the equation.

Incentivised referral. PC/console devs are beginning to understand what mobile giants have known for years: that players can be incentivized to become marketers and ambassadors.

The Raid: Shadow Legends player referral program has been so crucial to its success that when bringing the game to new platform partners, we require this capability to be supported before launching the game. When games don’t encourage players to bring in their friends, they are leaving the most potent form of organic discovery – word of mouth – up to chance.

Stream integration. In 2025 we saw the rise of friendslop, the vague new category describing indie hits focusing on social gameplay, which naturally translates well to streamability. The next step is to design games that directly integrate with platforms like Twitch and Discord.

Sentinel Games, a new studio from the industry veterans behind StreamElements, is a pioneering concept. Their debut Early Access title, Cure, is a co-op hospital simulator that uses Twitch APIs to help audiences affect a streamer’s game session. This helps to build interactive relationships with fans even before the players download the game.

The GenAI accelerator. The rising importance of platform discoverability tools and external social channels (each with their own text, asset, and localization guidelines) is a lot to deal with. Fortunately, generative AI offers a lifeline for small and large teams that need to feed this content beast.

Developers who are already utilizing a native GenAI pipeline for game development can simply extend that approach to adapt the assets needed to promote the game externally. Myth Maker, a game in which each adventure is generated on-the-fly based on player choices, is a shining example of this practice. With their GenAI native approach, it was trivial for the studio behind it to take the next step and create from each adventure a shareable, short-form video to automatically promote on social platforms, as well as an interactive “booklet” of each player’s chosen story that they could share with friends.

The long journey

Of course, being discovered is only the beginning of the potential player journey: developers still need to build an amazing game to make that journey worthwhile. But at the same time, discoverability has transitioned from maximizing eyeballs at launch to an ongoing optimization marathon spread across your game’s entire life cycle. To have a fair chance, developers must view discoverability as a core design pillar instead of a marketing hurdle: Tailor games to the discovery channels that work best, and use the platform discovery tools at your disposal.