Last night, a colleague asked me how I analyze the market potential for a game’s gameplay. I told them that most people over-focus on trying to predict the game genre’s core appeal. Novel experiences become smash hits and create *new* genres after all, so there’s something else going on.

I told them this: “You always start with accessibility. How accessible a game’s great experiences are determines how wide the market potential is.”

Elden Ring and Hollow Knight are hard to beat, but they’re also highly accessibile. It’s easy to experience what makes them special from minute 1 with minimum information and pretty simple controls.

Both games are “Action-Archaeology”, exploring fallen civilizations that have little interest in your comprehension. They’re simple to understand: you’re in a hostile yet strangely beautiful environment, and it’s time to explore. Everything about the world feels scary and threatening, and it’s supposed to. You’re supposed to learn how to survive and traverse this dangerous environment at your own pace, turning the unfamiliar into the familiar.

There’s minimum barrier to entry for the experience, because you don’t need to know much to feel LOST.

The controls for Elden Ring are also simpler than many mainstream action games. Ghosts of Tsushima makes them look simplistic by comparison; asking you to weave in kunai and other special weapons, swap stances mid-combat, use heavy attacks to break guard then light attacks to follow up, remember combo chains… That’s before we even get into the stealth mechanics. It’s a lot.

ER has complex elements, but most are somewhat optional. You need to understand what stats to increase when you level up based on your build, and you need to know where to get upgrade materials – plush where/how to upgrade your equipment… And that’s kinda it.

And it doesn’t hold a candle to Minecraft.

Minecraft is a wildly complex game in terms of crafting and progression, but it’s also enjoyed by children – because the core “live inside a lego-set” experience is fundamentally accessible. You hit stuff, pick up stuff, and place stuff. Core navigation is simple.

Deaths are punishing, but they are in the original arcade games too. The vast majority of arcade games still made sense to you the moment you picked up the controls. They had to. You could enjoy what made them special from minute one.

How accessible is your game’s core experience? If it takes a while or a lot of learning to get to the good part, try to make something else about it satisfying from minute one. Learn from puzzle games. Portal is a 3-hour tutorial for a 30 minute game, and everyone loves it.