Your game competes with the player’s phone, not with other games

Nobody decides which game to play in the evening, they decide what to do. In that decision your game is not sitting next to another game, it is sitting next to the phone and a show left running. So your competition is not only inside Steam

According to DataReportal’s report this year, a typical online adult gives roughly 33.5 hours a week to online media, and 18 hours and 36 minutes of that goes to social media and video platforms alone. So your player is already sitting in front of a screen, and more than half of that time is handed out before you even join the queue. What you have to win is not getting them to the screen, it is turning them back towards you at the screen

Some people still think that playing games is a deliberate act, that the player will go and open a game when they feel like it. But that urge does not arrive ready made, it is won again every evening. By the moment the player opens their library they have already decided to play a game. Your game can only come into play after that decision

The cost of opening a game is also much higher than other media, especially on PC. The launcher has to open, an update has to download, the game has to load, the player has to remember the controls and, most of all, remember where they left off. It adds up to maybe two minutes, but those two minutes come out of the half hour you set aside for the game and give nothing back in return. Opening the phone costs nothing, and nothing there asks the player to remember anything. What you are competing with is not the quality of your content, it is those two minutes themselves

Then there is the shape of the session. Your game wants a certain shape of time, a forty minute run or a two hour sitting. The competing formats want nothing, three minutes if you have three minutes, two hours if you have two hours. When that block does not come, your game does not get opened because it does not fit, not because it is bad. And the fix is not shortening the game, it is the player being able to stop whenever they want and carry on from where they left off

Your game is also played alongside a second screen. A phone in one hand, a stream open on the side monitor, a podcast in the ears. If you made a game that collapses when attention is split, you lose that session, and the player writes it up to you as “boring”. They were not bored, they could not do something else at the same time. Play your own game once with the sound down and a video running next to it, and you will see how long it holds up. Sometimes the game itself can even be played on the second screen. That is why incremental games have got so popular in the last few years

Games that want your full attention still win of course, and they are the games that leave the most money behind anyway. But a game that wants full attention has to earn that attention in the first minute, not in the tenth hour. The competing formats pay out in the same second, and the player’s patience threshold has been set to those formats

Do not open your game for a week. Then sit down, open it and start a stopwatch. The time it takes you to remember what you were doing and make your first move is the cost the player pays every time they come back to your game. You cannot see it because you already know where you left off. And when you test, do not ask whether they liked it, ask whether they will open it again tomorrow evening. Because nobody is comparing your game to a game, everybody is comparing it to an empty evening