It’s tough to find an audience that will appreciate your work, especially in game development. When your brand lives and dies by how many people know about you, releasing games that catch people’s eye is a very tempting prospect.

But how do you make a game that will take prospective audiences by storm?

Learn how to spot the trends in gaming and know how to cater to your audience.

Keep Up with Popular Games

The easiest way to know the trends is to know what games are currently popular!

Games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are pretty much guaranteed always to be popular, but break-out hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 can change how audiences feel about a genre in the blink of an eye.

Baldur’s Gate 3

If games like the original Doom gave way to future gaming trends like Half-Life and other Half-Life-inspired clones, so too do gaming trends shift and change at a moment’s notice. Keeping an eye out for what people actively talk about and play is a great way of knowing what’s currently popular.

Take Note of Influencer and Their Interests

Keeping up with influencers also helps a lot when discussing game trends. Influencers cater to their audience and play the games their audiences want to see. If they’re ever playing something, it’s usually a good idea to note what it is and what it can do.

Don’t underestimate that these YouTubers can also propel genres into mainstream attention. When Markiplier and PewDiePie brought FNaF to the public eye, it was a wake-up call to take what they do seriously. They don’t just play popular games—they can also make games popular.

Markplier FNaF Playthrough

Browse Steam Wishlists and Trending Steam Games

Steam has a handy store detailing discounted games, upcoming, and more importantly, new and trendy games that are hot off the market. Checking it from time to time will give you enough of an idea of what kind of games people want to play.

Steam Trending Page

While these metrics tend to shift daily, they provide valuable insight into the types of games people buy and play.

Anticipate Big Game Releases

Of course, you should also keep in mind that brand recognition plays a big part in what’s currently trending. Upcoming games like Age of Mythology: Retold can single-handedly shift an audience’s interest and make certain genres and trends more appealing to the wider audience.

Age of Mythology: Retold

Keeping this in mind will let you plan your releases better and give you the chance to see if interest is maintained. If people tend to stick to a series or a genre long past its release date, maybe it’s best to check if it’s not a fad but an actual upcoming trend to take note of.

Know Your Audience

Of course, this is meaningless if you don’t know what kind of audience you want to appeal to. Are you going for an audience that loves action games? Maybe you want to cater to the slower, more deliberate turn-based game enthusiast. Do they like retro games or not? You need to ask yourself these kinds of questions because knowing the trends is half the battle. Knowing what your audience likes is winning the war.

Courtesy of Eugene Chystiakov

We at Mega Cat Studios take this to heart. As retro game developers, our games cater to the avid retro gamer. The titles we develop and the works of others we publish are made with their enjoyment in mind, so the trends we look out for are the ones we know they will enjoy.

These are just some ways you can keep up with gaming trends. You can do many other alternatives, but these starter steps will keep you aware and set you on the right track for video game development.

For more tips like this, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter and follow our social media channels for updates. We love helping budding developers find their own way in the sun and would like nothing more than to see you through your game development years.