If Standard Oil tried to take ninety per cent of a market today, Congress would riot. It took the United States less than a decade to dismantle Rockefeller’s empire once it controlled nearly nine tenths of American refining. When AT&T owned more than eighty per cent of all telephones, regulators split it into seven companies. Meta cannot acquire anything of consequence without triggering antitrust alarms.
The pattern is simple. Whenever one entity dominates an industry, the state intervenes.
Except in gaming.
Here, the strongest monopoly of the modern internet has been allowed to grow completely unchecked. Not a monopoly of ownership. A monopoly of time.
According to tracker data from 2024, nearly 19,000 games were released on Steam in that year alone, marking the highest number of new titles ever published on the platform by a wide margin compared to previous years. By late 2025, the flood continues: releases remain well above historical norms.
Despite the tidal wave of supply, most of that volume has no chance. The majority of these games never draw meaningful attention. Roughly half of recent releases get fewer than ten user reviews…many get none at all. That suggests nearly half of the 2025 output is effectively invisible, a graveyard of undiscovered titles.
At the same time, players keep returning to the same handful of long-running giants. According to Newzoo, annual series like Call of Duty and online titles like Fortnite absorb around ninety two per cent of gaming time, leaving just eight per cent for every new project on the planet. That concentration of time and behaviour constitutes a cultural monopoly.
When Steam released nearly 19,000 titles in 2024, it produced one of the largest bursts of supply the industry has ever seen. That surge stands in contrast with the stagnation—or even decline—of discoverability for smaller releases. The ratio of supply to attention has become insane. The store is completely saturated. It’s not as if there’s been an influx of players to keep up.
This market isn’t just punishing small, indie developers. Everyone from mid-tier to the biggest names in the business are launching polished, high-quality games and watching them flop. In fact, it’s the bigger names who are hit the hardest. They’re the ones pumping millions into development to see little return. Because they keep forgetting that the issue isn’t craft, it’s structural.
The attention market is completely occupied. The established giants occupy the calendar, the group chats, the friend invites, and the habitual login times. They are the default.
For a new game to break through, technical quality and production value are no longer sufficient. Studios must ask deeper questions: what kind of attention are they really competing for? What kind of world are they building? Who gets invited? What becomes memorable? What becomes communal?
The flood of new releases shows how cheap, easy, and accessible it has become to build and ship games. The barrier to entry is low. But the barrier to survival is sky-high. When roughly half of new games launch into virtual obscurity (never reviewed, rarely played), releasing a game is the world’s least likely gamble.
That reality changes how you think about ambition.
The giants dominate not because they spent more. They dominate because they own the culture. They designed worlds that behave like institutions in players’ lives. They turned games into habits, routines, default spaces, social scaffolding. Those worlds earned attention at scale, then cemented it. It’s not that they’re popular. They’re habitual. Like Diet Coke. No one says it’s their favorite drink, but it’s on every menu.
If a studio wants to pull players away, they must build worlds that feel necessary rather than optional. That means building games with personality and identity. Not IP abstraction from a film series.
When I started ENVER, I realised we weren’t competing with studio giants for quality. Or mega partnerships. We were fighting a cultural battle. Every game we created had to be something that actually resonated with the gamers playing it. That meant we focused on fast-paced, accessible and viral characters. World-building.
If I were a betting man, I would wager that the competition is only going to get fiercer. The barrier to entry is getting lower as tools become more accessible and AI speeds up development.
The need for distinct identity is becoming more and more urgent. The cultural monopoly is powerful, structural and behavioural. But importantly, it’s breakable.
Attention behaves like a scarce mineral now. Either your world extracts value from it or it evaporates. The next generation of studios will not win by shouting louder. They will win by building worlds players choose to live in.
