Don't Follow Game Design Trends
There are two ways to approach game design: trend-following and trend-setting. On their own, neither guarantees success. Yet the AAA games industry has been stuck in trend-following mode for a while, and I’d argue it has significant drawbacks. In this article, I’ll make the case for trend-setting.
State of the Industry
Many AAA studios approach game design by looking at what sells. You’ll often hear games discussed in terms like net bookings, growth engines, top franchises, market share, established IP, and target earnings. These terms are emblematic of a trend-following mindset: figure out what the market is doing, then copy that.
But no matter what trends you spot, they reveal very little about how to build a good game. You might see that hero shooters thrive once they reach scale and network effects kick in – but how do you actually make a successful one? Even reverse-engineering design patterns gives you surprisingly little in the way of a recipe.
Industry thought leaders have offered explanations for why this fails: games are made for the wrong reasons, corporate greed has drained their soul, or studios no longer understand their audiences. What’s rarely acknowledged is that, from a market-analysis perspective, many of these companies are making all the "right" decisions – and yet the games still aren’t fun. So, what’s the alternative?
Trend-Setting
Instead of optimizing for the market, I propose zooming out and putting good design at the center. Forget analyzing trends for a moment and focus on what creates them – what actually satisfies players, builds demand, and generates revenue.
Most successful genres are built around activities that facilitate play and are inherently exciting: shooting, racing, flying, fighting, role-playing, building, creating, making music, cooperating, exploring, solving, traveling, and more. If we can identify what people naturally enjoy, it’s likely to lead to strong game design.
This also avoids the "chore list" design philosophy, where games revolve around completing tasks padded with artificial motivators. In contrast, a fun-centric approach doesn’t need to push players artificially – they’re already motivated. The game just needs to enable fun and allow emergent play.
This is how the industry was built initially: trend-setting before there were trends. Early designers started by asking, "What’s fun?" and built games around those ideas. They couldn’t ask what made the most money – who would they have asked in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s? At the time, no one had yet made millions from games. And yet, genres were born, and the industry’s auspicious foundations were laid.
So I propose returning to trend-setting: start with a fun core and build outward. Don’t launch massive productions hoping to stumble onto fun along the way.
Asset Hell
Looking at trend-setting vs. trend-following also highlights how trends emerge. Take Grand Theft Auto (a huge trend-setter): it began with 2D graphics and only a few dozen megabytes of assets, yet most of its primary and secondary loops were already there, and had the same kind of fun as its modern franchise instalments. The same is true for early shooters like Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake. Though not asset-heavy, they didn’t just spawn franchises – they helped create an entire genre by capturing a single fun activity: shooting. The Sims, Minecraft, platformers like Mario and Crash Bandicoot, RPGs, and later narrative-driven games all followed this pattern.
Today, however, many studios chase success by hiring massive teams and producing mountains of assets: models, textures, sounds, animations, props, environments, and more. A huge share of budgets disappears into this pipeline. It's a pipeline that more and more studios find to be a major cost center – major enough to make projects unviable, at least until generative AI might help trim these costs. But they don’t need to wait – trend-setting has never been about asset quantity. It’s about naturally fun play, wrapped in a game: an idea, a design document, and a simple implementation. Assets enhance a fun core; they don't replace it. And a fun core alone can go far.
Two Opposing Views
There are valid reasons why trend-following persists. It’s easier to convince investors with something "battle-tested." Established IP comes with proven formulas, and changing them is risky. Market inertia also sustains the pattern. But it wasn’t always this way. And in 2025, given the industry’s state, being a budget-savvy trend-setter might just be the winning strategy once more.