Algorithms built to surface content are increasingly rewarding volume, familiarity, and short-term engagement over quality or originality, concluded a workgroup at the Madeira Games Summit

At the Madeira Games Summit in May, Michal Bujko, senior business development manager at Modma Studios, asked a question: If we were looking back at 2026 five years from now, what should we have fixed when we still had the chance?

There was a unanimous answer from the workgroup he was leading: discoverability. The industry already makes great games, the group concluded. The problem is that almost nobody can find them. Yet despite years of being aware of this, almost nothing has changed, and the longer this problem goes unfixed, the more it becomes a structural threat to the long-term health and cultural credibility of the medium.

"Algorithms built to surface content are increasingly rewarding volume, familiarity, and short-term engagement over quality or originality," Bujko said. "Taste-driven decisions – the kind that once gave unusual games a fighting chance – have been quietly replaced by metrics."

The result is that genuinely distinctive games are being buried, because the system isn't built to uncover them.

The workgroup found that the reason why the discoverability problem hasn't been fixed is because the solution would be expensive, risky, and go against the short-term interests of almost every party involved. And there's a deeper issue underneath the discoverability problem: the industry may simply be making too much, and too little of it matters.

The ingrained habits of chasing proven formulas, replicating last year's hit, and optimising for day one numbers compound the noise.

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