Will the game industry find its way home? Can we look to the past and find lessons?
Laura Nauviaux Sturr, general manager of operations at Amazon Games, gave a talk at the Dice Summit 2025 event on what she has learned over time from different cycles of the game industry and how those learnings can be applied to the future.
She acknowledged learning a lot from teams over the years and noted, “We’re staring down the barrel of the PowerPoint heard around the world. Here’s looking at you, Matthew Ball. We need to do some serious retrospectives and evaluation of our path forward to unlock that next chapter of growth for our industry and our craft.”
Nauviaux Sturr noted that the beauty of the challenges now is that there are more gamers than ever – five generations of them, to be exact – who all have a voracious appetite for entertainment.
“But they want to be entertained differently. We’re going to need some big ideas to chart the next course. If we look back we’ll find a lot of relevance on how to shape the future,” Nauviaux Sturr said.
She noted innovation is important, but it’s a word that gets tossed around like it’s the ultimate goal in the industry. She said that innovation can actually come in the form of both reinvention and reimagination.
“In reality, success doesn’t always require that we deliver something brand-new,” she said. “The things that we’ve done before may still be very relevant, but they need reimagining, reformatting, repackaging in order to find new audiences and provide new growth factors.”
She said we can ask how we can assemble the different pieces of a past solution differently to address the problems of the moment of keeping players happy while chasing a bottom line. This takes careful callibration to fit the solution to the problem.
She noted that being first to market is thrilling, and it can create a lot of possibilities. But it’s hard to anticipate how audiences will respond and breaking through has never been harder. Steam reported that more than 18,000 games were released on the platform in 2024. Production costs are astronomical.
“Reinvention can come in new genres, new business models, and new marketing campaigns, usually powered by new technology,” Nauviaux Sturr said. “Right now, it feels like the industry is out of ideas. We’ve hyper-optimized against just a few business models. It feels like there’s this relief valve that needs to be released. The most successful innovative projects I’ve been involved in were those where we truly put the work in to understand psychology of our players.”
The birth of early access and virtual concerts
At Sony, she said the team invented the first incarnation of early access packs, which debuted in EverQuest II in 2004. It is now an entire category of games on Steam. But at the time it was just an inventive way to match offerings with player motivation and to operationally scale.
And she noted that in 2009, also while she was at Sony, the team earned a Guinness world record for orchestrating the very first simultaneous live and virtual concert. The Dares performed live at E3 while their avatars appeared online in Free Realms.
“For us it was just about connecting the real world to the virtual world in a novel way. But it paved the way for other virtual spaces in the future, and players responded,” she said.
Flash forward to today and Fortnite’s recent Remix: The Finale brought in 14 million concurrent viewers. Roblox has also seen a huge success by making its platform a stage for big artists like Lil Nas X and Twenty One Pilots.
“Virtual concerts are now commonplace. They connect Gen Z and Gen Alpha to an IP in a very relatable way,” Nauviaux Sturr said.
That idea was born 15 years ago, and it still works, only now it’s been taken to incredible new heights with modern thinking on the back of a juggernaut game.
“Our industry is so bright and brilliant at taking kernels of ideas and reimagining them in fresh and interesting ways,” Nauviaux Sturr said.
Riffing on battle royale
At Sony, the company pioneered the battle royale genre with the genius of Brendan Greene, along with the construct of what an invitational meant, and with influencers competing in tournaments in real life as well as online.
“That kept us at the top of the charts until there were new market entrants. They made a burgeoning genre better, more refined, and more mass-market, becoming the world’s largest genre today,” she said. “I was frustrated that we lost our player base, but we learned so much in that process. Today, developers and publishers are sitting on billions of dollars worth of assets. There are countless beloved game characters, game mechanics, modes, mods, production pipelines in existence today that are ripe to be reimagined.”
No longer chasing graphics quality
She also observed that neither fans nor developers are still chasing fidelity. Graphics is pretty good where it is, and it is quite possible the next stand-alone genres will come out of Roblox and Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). They’ll be made by small developers.
“But if you look at what’s at the top of the charts right now, they’re actually low-fidelity MMOs,” Nauviaux Sturr said. “Another great example of gameplay that has stood the test of time. Now it’s been reimagined through the lens of a new younger audience. This incredible content lays the foundation for what I see as the next phase of growth, where we bring fresh perspectives to reimagine and modernize for both new and existing audiences.”
She noted the power of player motivation and understanding your audience. Around 2010, Sony Online Entertainment converted its entire catalog from paid subscriptions to free-to-play, thinking it would open up new audiences to its games.
“We always got feedback from players that subscription was limiting our growth. Fans always wanted us to be placing Super Bowl ads so they could have more players to play with,” she said. “We didn’t listen to everything that they wanted, but we quickly learned that going free-to-play wasn’t necessarily the right call for older MMOs. There wasn’t a lot of newfound liquidity on the UA front. Our games had already established their core bases, what we now know as the golden cohort.”
The lone game that was a big success was DC Universe Online.
It was taking a popular model in Asia and applying it to the west. The teamed learned about the concept of cohorting, motivation and segmentation, which was not en vogue in the games industry at all at the time.
“We also learned a lot about in-game monetization. We were at the forefront of understanding player needs, like the necessity of a social contract, how to use an infinite supply of digital goods, and how that compares and contrasts with a finite supply of physical goods,” she said.
Where reinvention can go too far
Here’s a good example of where reinvention went too far.
“We were desperate to win players back to H1Z1, after PUBG and Fortnite had launched. We tried to get really creative,” she said.
The teams created Auto Royale. It was taking the core gameplay and applying it to something so new that it would attract enough attention to bring back virality. Auto Royale was a simple concept. It was basically duos with one person as the driver and one as the gunner. The last vehicle standing wins. But it turned out that battle royale players were competitive, and they weren’t quite ready for collaboration.
What Gen Z and Gen Alpha are embracing
In our interview, Nauviaux Sturr’s whole point was looking at where the industry goes from here, and how it learns from the past. People inherently haven’t changed. Human psychology hasn’t changed. Gameplay patterns haven’t changed. Companies that were on the cutting edge and loved to innovate and try new things, she said.
Many of the old ideas, 15 or 20 years old, are still relevant today. Younger generations, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are embracing them in ways that feel modern and unique and fresh.
“I painted a few examples of some of the places where we were on the cutting edge. It really laid the foundation of where the industry is today. Also, some of the places where we went too far on innovation and the player audience didn’t resonate with the changes, because we made some missteps,” she said. “Again, player psychology. And then the end was about, what does the future look like?”
She said she believes that the industry, while it’s been through some challenging times and that will persist for a bit, is on the cusp of a renaissance.
“But it’s going to require us to think about challenging every notion that we know today, whether it’s pricing or media or formats or lengths,” Nauviaux Sturr said. “Really pushing these games to where the players are, as opposed to the store-based mentality. They’re overly cluttered. They put the onus on the player, as opposed to bringing games to them in places they already are, like TikTok and Discord and Twitch.”
New business models
I brought up the story about Game Monument, where solo entrepreneur Nate Pacyga visited the abbey in Bath, England. He saw they had plaques all over the place for people who donated to restore the abbey. He said, “We should do that in games.” He thought, “We have Easter eggs. We have credits. Why not put the donors’ names in the game? Create a room in the game where you’re recognizing these people who donated.” It’s another business model you could tap into. Fans have shown through Kickstarter that they’ll pay for recognition.
She said that idea was similar to going after a segment of users, like the early access example she gave. MMO players always wanted to show up first, and that created a challenge in operationally scaling up servers. So the team monetized that moment via charging for early access.
“It worked brilliantly. Now it’s obviously more commonplace than ever. Many companies use it as their go-to-market strategy,” she said.
Games that are based on economies or player input and this user-generated content profile are concepts that the younger generations love.
“All they want is to be able to put their stamp, their hallmark, and experience the game on their terms. Immortalized forever,” she said.
Startup cycles in different eras
I noted that we saw a lot of the same kinds of startups happen in different cycles, like analytics and discovery companies following the lead of the first social game companies and then mobile game companies. They’re coming back now as discovery gets harder with Apple’s crackdown on privacy. In that way, it feels like we are repeating cycles with things like analytics for VR or analytics for blockchain games.
Nauviaux Sturr responded, “It’s this trifecta. You have to have the technology, the demand, and that timing of the market all coming together. The underlying principles of game-makers needing to find an audience have not changed, but how you go about linking those things together very much has changed.”
She noted that Discord’s quest system is like rewarded video in early mobile and social games.
“It feels so pertinent to the people on that platform and the way they respond,” Nauviaux Sturr said. “Is there a future state where, within one click, you’ve bypassed a lobby and your micro-community on Discord is now playing a game experience? It doesn’t need to be a 50-hour epic. It can be something custom and tailored to that. Maybe the cloud is part of that too.”
Learning from kids
She noted how people want to be able to play with each other.
“I’ve learned so much about this through the lens of my own kids and watching their play patterns. Particularly during the pandemic, where one son maybe over-played GTA role-playing servers,” she said. “But he wanted to go deep into this community of people he had met. It reminded me how fortunate I am to have spent so much of my early career working on MMOs.”
She noted the MMO companies were using the word “meme” in 2003. That was not commonplace. Or “NPC.”
“Now my kids will call the Target checkout person an NPC,” she said. “The people on the periphery of your life. All of these terms are part of our everyday vernacular now. They think about this blend of a virtual space and IRL, where there isn’t a hard boundary between them. Those intersect for them.”
I noted that this company Phynd raised about $10 million. It’s an ad-supported cloud gaming company started by Andre Swanston, a guy who sold his last company for $100 million.
He’s doing ad-supported cloud gaming. The cost of running cloud gaming is going down to the point where the money you can recover through advertising might match that. Ad-supported things didn’t make sense until they did.
Nauviaux Sturr said such firms can make a lot of sense now because they scale proportionately.
“Those business models need to be able to find reciprocity where everybody wins. If they all scale proportionately together, you’re in a position where everyone can thrive and succeed,” she said. “There’s a way to do ad-supported in a player-friendly way that feels more resonant. Understanding your cohorts and segmentation and the psychology of the player.”
If you look at any of the social networks, it’s clearly a model that works. You can bring creators into that mix, she said.
Where Amazon Games is going
I asked if there were ideas that Amazon Games was reinventing.
“If you think about Amazon’s DNA and what Amazon values and is good at, where our core competencies intersect with the game industry, there’s a lot of future potential,” Nauviaux Sturr said. “Amazon could play a very big role. If you look at the big rocks of where Amazon has succeeded and invested, some of the things that are happening in the entertainment category, the nexus of all of that that we just talked about is very real.”
Asked about game-related TV shows and movies, she said, “Exactly. Fallout was a huge success for us. How great would it be if one of those was an Amazon Game Studios property? We’re having a lot of those discussions. Tomb Raider has been announced on both sides. We’re at the precipice, the beginning of what that potential looks like in the future.”
Probing into Matthew Ball’s slide deck
Asked to probe deeper into Matthew Balls analysis, where he noted there were 10 things that drove the industry for a decade but they came to a halt. He also noted eight things that could have driven growth that failed, 15 current challenges, and 11 things that could bring back growth.
“I called it the Powerpoint heard around the world. The amount of time all of us have given it consideration, and what he outlined–I would look at it maybe even through a counterpoint,” Nauviaux Sturr said. “There’s everything that went bad, but there’s everything that went right. We had 10 years of unfettered growth. When I started in the industry, the target demographic was males 18-34.”
Now we have three billion gamers on the planet, five generations of them, more opportunity than ever.
“It’s almost like a relief valve, something that needs to come into the picture, because we’ve hyper-optimized a few business models. There’s no more growth that will come from those. It will come from new platforms and new mediums,” she said.
She noted part of her speech was on the “how.”
“We’ve been so focused on the ‘what,’ chasing fidelity or linear growth,” she said. “We make a game and if it works we make a sequel. But maybe what we should be considering is how people want to experience these, and how that has changed. Then we can take these old ideas in places that we’ve already been and reapply them, repackage, reimagine, or put the puzzle pieces together slightly differently.”
She said it doesn’t mean that the underlying foundations of the business are wrong. People love games.
“It’s why I love the industry so much. It keeps us on our toes constantly,” she said.
Changing rules of console cycles
I asked about some of the old rules that changed. I noted how consoles once launched every five years as that was the cadence at which new technologies came into the industry.
Now, according to some of these leaked documents from Microsoft, people expect them to launch every eight years at this point. The hope was to stretch the console cycle out so you’re amortizing over a longer period of time. The hardware startup costs–you wind up with a more profitable business the longer you stretch that out. The Switch went eight years. PlayStation 4 was a good 10 years.
But now it feels like the Xbox and PlayStation right now might be maxing out at five years. They probably should be replaced soon. Yet they might be hoping for eight years. I wondered if the factors like the pandemic and the supply shocks threw us off course.
“What the future looks like remains to be seen. Going back to reciprocity and things scaling in proportion together, it’s antithetical to think–yes, it might be good for platform holders to extend the life cycle for all of the reasons you stated,” Nauviaux Sturr said. ” It’s not so great for software providers who are reliant on those new platforms to drive growth, and the predictability of them. That’s part of what is broken.”
She added, “In a future where maybe we’re not as reliant on hardware in a box, those things don’t necessarily have to be interlinked as directly. I very much believe in the power of cloud. It’s always been a matter of when, not if. But it has to be done in a very unique, clever way that leans into what that medium represents, as opposed to yet another place to take the same games and propagate them in another medium. There’s a lot of unfounded potential there in a way that could be done with a player-first mentality.”
Blockchain gaming rules?
Asked about blockchain gaming, she noted she did a small stint at a cryptocurrency company, Robot Cache, founded by Interplay’s Brian Fargo.
“We were on the forefront of trying to figure out how you could resell games,” she said. “There would be this digital copy or footprint of the game, and if you resold it the original seller would get a portion. Brilliant on paper. Challenging to execute. At the time it felt like the prospects of crypto and blockchain in gaming were huge, and then it went out of vogue.”
I noted there are different strategies that seem to be going in and out of fashion there. One that I just heard described to me from Beamable was interesting. Jon Radoff runs this company that does multiplayer backend, offloads that from developers. He does it for them. It’s not so different from something like PlayFab, but in the specific area of live services.
He open sourced Beamable and its software so that if it goes down, then developers can still work with the software. They’d have to take it over, but they could do it. He’s also setting up a way for games to scale faster on it using blockchain to keep records. If a game takes off, it needs servers. You find the underused servers and you reward those companies with Beamable tokens. They can scale up fast. Another company called Aethir is doing GPUs as a service for AI and cloud gaming. These models introduce an interesting flexibility.
“If you combine that with ML, think about the possibilities and how quick it would be,” she said. “You have a transaction on the blockchain, and you have a machine learning component that helps to dictate the future. It’s the past and the future coming together. It seems like a perfect way to equalize the marketplace and distribute assets in a way that creates efficiency at scale.
