Every time you change genre you start from zero

I see a lot of teams whose second game has nothing to do with their first. A roguelite gets made, it does not land, they move to survival craft, and when that does not work either they try horror. Everyone thinks the thing changing each time is the game, but what is really changing is the audience. On the launch day of the second game you have nothing left from the first.

As long as you stay in a similar genre your followers grow, your review history stays with you, the space you occupy in the tags gets bigger, the people you gathered on Discord take an interest in the new game more easily, and the person who bought your first game sees your second one next to the first in the store. The day you change genre all of that resets, even if your Steam account stays the same. So your second game does not start as your second game, it starts like somebody’s first game.

Alex Hormozi has an order of priority for this, and it holds exactly the same in games. Who you sell to matters more than what you sell, and what you sell matters more than how you describe it. Translated into games, your genre is who you sell to, your game is what you sell, and your trailer is how you describe it. So the genre decision sits at the very top of that order, and it is the decision you make fastest and change most easily.

But Hormozi’s method for picking a market does not work for you. Before entering a market he looks at whether there is a real pain point there, and he counts health, money and relationships as the three markets that will always exist, because a gap in any of the three hurts and a person in pain gets their money out. There is no pain point like that in games. Nobody needs your game, nobody loses anything because your game does not exist. What that costs you is this, when you pick your genre there is no question you can ask to check whether you picked right, you only get the answer after you ship the game.

The second place it breaks is price. Hormozi says the more you niche down the more you can sell the same product for, up to a hundred times, a generic time management course is 19 dollars, the same content packaged only for sales teams is 499 dollars. There is no such ladder in games. Your price is set by the store’s price bands and the games standing next to you on the shelf, not by how narrow your audience is. Narrowing down does not win you a price, the only route left is to sell more.

There is a mistake Hormozi calls the niche slap. A guy tries one single thing in a market, and when it does not land he decides the market was bad and jumps to another market. Both of them were normal markets, the guy just had not yet found the right thing to sell in that one. And every jump forces him to start from the beginning.

If you are saying “I can’t spend ten years in a genre I don’t like”, you are right, but that is not the point. The genre is your market, the game is the thing you bring to that market. You can bring dozens of different games to the same market. As long as you learn from your mistakes, staying in roguelite does not mean making the same roguelite a second time.

Do not take from this that you should never change genre. In Hormozi’s example a friend of his sells digital advertising software to newspapers, the product is good, the guy is a born salesman, but the newspaper market shrinks 25% a year and the business shrinks with it. The same guy switches to masks during COVID and within five months is making millions a month. That market really was dying and staying there would have been stubbornness. But the difference is a measurable difference, is your genre shrinking, or are you leaving before you got anything back. The first one is visible in the data, the second one is just impatience.

Write the genre and the tags of your last three projects side by side. If any two of them do not share at least 10 tags, you have started from zero at least twice and you will do the same on the fourth.

You do not pick your market, your games pick it on your behalf.