Don't Follow Game Design Trends
There are many ways to talk about game design, but what I often like to think about are two completely different approaches: trend-following and trend-setting. On their own, neither guarantees success, neither guarantees failure. Yet the AAA games industry has been stuck in trend-following mode for a while, and I’d argue it has significant drawbacks. So, 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.
For example, you may de-construct the market and realize that e-sports hero shooters are doing quite well. And you may think of a few ways you'd improve the popular products. But sit down with a blank game design document in front of you and you'll soon hit writer's block. Reverse-engineering game trends doesn't offer much inspiration for the vast majority of a game's design. Copy trends and you'll find that what you have is rather uninspired. And recent market data in this niche of games might suggest that uninspired doesn't sell all that well.
Industry thought leaders have offered many other explanations for why this approach fails, too: 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 it's not enough to make their games fun. So, what’s the alternative?
Trend-Setting
Instead of optimizing for the existing 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 through hours of gameplay with quirky game design tricks of the trade. Players love a fun activity, they will love the game. All it needs to do is allow play - enable people to do what they already love.
This is how the industry was built initially. Early designers started by asking, "What’s fun?" and built games around those ideas. They couldn’t ask what made the most money and what the hot new trends were – who would they have asked in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s? At the time, no one had yet made millions from games. And yet, all our classic game genres were born, and the industry’s auspicious foundations were laid. Their approach worked, and it worked very well.
So I propose returning to trend-setting: start with a fun core - a core that doesn't have to convince the player, a core that the player is already searching for, a core that is perpetually and eternally in demand - and build outward. Of course, be savvy - consider the market trends, too. But don’t launch massive productions from trends, hoping to stumble onto fun along the way. Start with what is already fun, and build outward.
Asset Hell & Boring Market
If you take away just what I said so far in this blog article, I think you got the gist of my philosophy here - thanks for reading. But there's a lot more you can do with this philosophy. Like, you could analyze the existing market.
For example, looking at trend-setting vs. trend-following teaches us how market trends emerge. Take Grand Theft Auto (obviously a huge trend-setter): it began with 2D graphics and only a few dozen megabytes of shipped 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 (especially by today's standards!), they spawned legendary franchises and helped create the entire FPS 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. Generally, a huge portion of the game's budget is sunk into this pipeline. In fact, it's a pipeline that more and more studios find to be the primary cost center – large enough to make projects not feasible, at least until generative AI might help trim these costs. But they don’t need to wait for AI – trend-setting has never been about asset quantity. It’s about naturally fun play, wrapped in a game.
I would argue that much of the video game market inefficiency and trend of the 100+ gigabyte, $100+ million boring game arose precisely because, consciously or not, the market shifted towards trend-following. The game makers looked at what the market does, and thought "let's do that, but more, and with higher production cost... err, value". Many other predictable things happened, too. Corporate games became commodified, uniform, substitutable, some would argue – less fun, less appealing, less in demand, others would argue – less soulful, less artistic, and yet others would say – less profitable, too fatiguing for the player to consume. At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, if you always look at what sells well and copy that, you'll build a market full of copies that only compete in cost and superficial details. A corporate games market that sells less and less, because the buyers already have some version of everything it offers. And you probably won't build hits, even in a hit-driven industry.
Two Opposing Views
Even with all that said, there are good reasons why trend-following persists. It's easier to convince some investors with something "battle-tested." Established IP comes with proven formulas, and changing them is risky. Besides, all of us working on game design want to be more creative than we are, and sometimes it's so nice to just rely on a "trusted" and grounded mechanic that (probably) will work. Market inertia also sustains the pattern – many understand the trend-following approach and not the other. 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.