DigixArt's Yoan Fanise Says Story Games Struggle as Steam Output Grows
At gamescom asia x Thailand Game Show 2026 in Bangkok, DigixArt creative director Yoan Fanise compared Road 96 with Tides of Tomorrow. Road 96 sold well, he said, while Tides of Tomorrow fell short of hopes.
1 source 1h ago
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
Why it matters
Fanise's own numbers put the squeeze in plain view: Story Rich releases on Steam rose from 391 in 2017 to 670 in 2021 while median owners per game dropped from 23,313 in 2018 to 6,405 in 2022, so volume grew and the audience per title shrank.
Key Facts
- Yoan Fanise is creative director at the French studio DigixArt, which he founded in southern France in 2015.
- Fanise spoke at gamescom asia x Thailand Game Show 2026 in Bangkok on a talk comparing Road 96 and Tides of Tomorrow.
- Road 96, released in 2021, was a major commercial hit, while Tides of Tomorrow, released in 2026, did not sell as well as hoped.
- A slide in the talk showed 18,996 games released on Steam in 2024, rising to around 20,000 in 2025.
- Steam games tagged Story Rich grew from 391 in 2017 to 670 in 2021, while median owners per game fell from 23,313 in 2018 to 6,405 in 2022.
He pointed to a rising tide of Steam releases against a flat story-game audience, full playthroughs on YouTube and Twitch, and a studio habit of heavy real-world themes and passive play.
Fanise separated the problem into forces outside the studio and habits inside it. On the outside: more games ship each year, the number of people who play story-driven games is not growing, and many players watch a game on YouTube and stop there. On the inside, he named DigixArt's pull toward heavy real-world themes, games passive enough that a film would do the same job, and the end of lavish production as a guarantee of success, which he called the most serious of the three. His conclusion was not that story games cannot be made, but that standing out in a market of thousands means making something genuinely original that people want to play.
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