Titanfall 2 had almost everything. A big budget. Top-tier talent. Fast, fluid gameplay that critics praised and early testers loved. However, none of that mattered when it launched between Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1, two heavyweight titles fighting for the same audience with the same price point.
At that moment, Titanfall 2 never stood a chance. It stepped into a crowded market, perfectly built but completely misaligned. And in game development, that’s all it takes. Misalignment in product, placement, or pricing can turn a great game into a forgotten one.
Pline was developed to discover the right data fast, so you can make decisions faster. With a fast and easy web data extraction solution, you can access real-time product market data, competitive placement insights, and pricing trends quickly to set direction before development, powered by automation.
Product: Create With Confidence and Clarity
Game development projects often require a significant amount of time, effort, and dedication, so you can’t afford to build on guesswork and hope. This process usually starts with a shift in mindset from “building the next big thing” to “building the next right thing.”
Now to understand the next right thing, you need to validate the idea from multiple sources, including trending genre, potential competitors, market history, and with Pline, it’s as simple as building a workflow all within your browser.
This enables you to:
- Validate Demand: Test game concepts against actual search and trend data.
- Measure Saturation: See how crowded the genre or subgenre already is.
- Explore Subgenres: Uncover emerging spaces worth investing in before they peak.
- Reduce Risk Early: Spot potential pitfalls before investing months in development.
- Unify Creative and Business Goals: Align the game vision with market viability.
With Pline, you extract and build on actual data, not assumptions. Demand is validated more quickly across multiple websites. Direction is set, allowing you to focus on developing an efficient distribution strategy for success.
Placement: Distribution Can Make or Break You
‘Content innovation grows audiences, and distribution innovation creates enterprise value.’ ( Mitch Lasky, Former Executive at Activision).
Even great games can miss their moment, not because of the product itself, but because of an inefficient distribution strategy. Too often, such a strategy is developed in isolation, where different professionals work with various data sources and tools that introduce misalignment and slow down momentum.
Pline brings it all together with the launch of the world’s first collaborative platform, which provides a standard, shared space for web data extraction, empowering teams to build an efficient distribution strategy together. This introduces:
- Smart Release Timing: Identify optimal launch windows by analyzing competitor and seasonal data.
- Early Access Strategy: Compare similar game outcomes to guide early access versus full release.
- Platform Prioritization: Focus on platforms with the highest potential based on past performance data.
- Cross-Team Sync: Align marketing, dev, and product using a shared data foundation.
- Global Launch Planning: Adjust the release cadence by region to maximize visibility and impact.
With Pline, the team can collaborate more effectively to introduce an aligned growth strategy with streamlined execution.
Pricing: The Most Powerful Lever You Have
Even with a flawless product and perfect placement, pricing remains the single most powerful variable that can change everything. Set it too low, and you lose the value of the effort and dedication that went into the product. Too high, and even loyal players hesitate.
We have seen it happen before. NBA 2K21 and Call of Duty Vanguard were backed by massive franchises and still stumbled because players could not justify the $70 price tag, especially when microtransactions remained.
Meanwhile, games like Elden Ring, even at $60, were praised for offering immense value, supporting a positive reception that pricing is more than just a simple number, but a big difference between a hit and a headline for the wrong reason.
To make sure your game doesn’t trend for the wrong reasons, Pline helps you price with confidence, based on data, not instinct, and this enables:
- Launch with Confidence: Use similar games data to validate pricing decisions.
- Microtransaction Insights: Understand the monetization models and player spending behavior of comparable games.
- Regional Optimization: Price per country using local trends and demand data.
- Launch Window Trends: Align pricing with proven seasonal and genre-specific timing.
- Sales Timing: Use past data to plan high-impact discount campaigns.
Great games deserve pricing that rewards the creator and respects the gaming community. Data extracted from multiple sources with Pline enables you to ensure that pricing reflects both the value you have built and what the audience expects.
Easy Steps to Extract Data
With just a few clicks, let’s explore how Pline instantly extracts any data you need, such as top emerging game titles from game distribution platforms like Steam.
- Install the Pline extension, open the Steam listing page, and select Automated Data Extraction Mode.
- Click “Build Workflow,” choose “Vertical List,” and group similar items, such as “product_titles,” to help Pline recognize patterns.
- Now, select the fields you want to extract, such as game titles, descriptions, and tags.
- Set up Pagination by choosing the Load More button, as Steam uses it to display additional game listings.
- Click Save and Run to start the extraction.
Save the workflow and use it anytime. The exact process applies to other similar websites with slight adjustments. Once Pline completes data extraction, export it for further analysis.
Conclusion
A game can be beautiful, immersive, and built with passion, but without alignment, it can easily get lost in a crowded market. Titanfall 2, NBA 2K21, and others remind us that misalignment in product, placement, or pricing can erase even the most substantial efforts.
Knowing what to build, when to launch, and how to price is more essential than ever. Pline brings that clarity faster by extracting data from leading game platforms, streamlining research, and accelerating smarter decisions through collaboration.
Build with Demand. Launch with Direction. Try Pline Today.
