There was a period when a good game could be found simply by being good. A store featured it, search surfaced it, and players arrived. That period ended, and not because games got worse.
What changed structurally
Supply exploded. Millions of titles compete for a results page that shows roughly six. The maths alone ends accidental discovery.
Paid placement moved to the top. Search ads sit above organic results on both stores. The top of the page is now bought rather than earned.
Editorial featuring narrowed. It still happens and it still works, but it favours studios the platform already has a relationship with.
Installs became expensive to buy. The paid route that replaced organic discovery got worse at the same time, for the reasons that ended hyper-casual.
Where attention actually is
- Short video. Gameplay clips reach people who were not searching for a game at all. This is the largest shift of the last few years.
- Instant-play web. Portals have their own traffic and their own discovery, and there is no install step between seeing and playing.
- Creators. One streamer with the right audience outperforms a store feature for some genres.
- Cross-promotion. If you have a portfolio, your own players are the cheapest audience you will ever reach.
What is still worth doing on the stores
ASO has not stopped working — it has stopped being enough on its own. The listing is still a conversion surface: people who arrive from a video, a link or a friend decide there. Icon, first two screenshots and the opening line of the description do most of that work. Treat it as a landing page, not a discovery channel.
This is what we do day to day — app store optimization at Factorial Studio.
