Christine Keshishyan

Everyone says studios want distribution — but be honest: what’s actually harder today, building a good game or getting operators to give it real visibility after launch?

The hard truth is that a good game does not automatically get noticed anymore. The lobby is too crowded for that, so if I had to choose, I’d say visibility after launch is the tougher part now. Building a good game still takes a lot of work.

Markets behave differently, players react to different themes and mechanics, and a title that performs well in one GEO can easily fall flat in another. So research, localisation and operator feedback are not optional anymore. But even when the game is good, operators see new releases constantly.

Without proper support, a strong title can lose attention very quickly. For us, launch is not “the game is live, good luck.” If the title lands in the lobby and there is no support to help the operator position it, promote it, or adapt it to the market, the launch is already half-lost.

If you had access to affiliate demand data before building a game, what would genuinely change in your roadmap? Or do studios still mostly build based on instinct and internal assumptions?

There is already a lot of data in the industry. The problem is not getting another dashboard, but understanding which signal is actually useful before everyone else sees it too. So yes, affiliate demand data would affect what we build next.

Not in a dramatic way, but in a practical one — because most established studios are already working with several inputs at once. There is market research, operator feedback, performance data, and a lot of watching how different markets behave. But things move fast.

A theme can look strong now and feel tired by the time the game is ready. For ABXplay, affiliate data would mostly help us make sharper calls: which themes are easier to promote, which mechanics have real interest, which features make sense for a certain GEO, and when a release has a better chance to land. Still, data shows what has already happened.

You need judgement for what comes next.

What’s a broken part of the current studio–operator ecosystem that nobody wants to admit publicly? Too many releases? Weak distribution? Fake launch hype?

Partnership has become one of those words everyone uses but not everyone actually practices, and that is one of the biggest issues in the studio–operator ecosystem. The industry talks about partnership, but many operators still receive the same pitch, the same promo ideas, the same launch materials, just with a different logo. At that point, you have to ask: are we really building a partnership, or just sending another package and hoping it lands?

Every operator is dealing with a different audience, market, budget and pressure. What works for one partner can be useless for another. And yes, content saturation is real.

Operators are flooded with releases, so another “big launch” does not mean much unless it is actually supported. More games will not fix the crowded lobby problem. The studios with an edge will be the ones that understand the partner properly: the market, the audience, the pressure, and the kind of launch support that actually keeps a game visible.