It started in basements. In cafés. On borrowed laptops. Over cracked screens and half-full coffee mugs. Niche tech and gaming startups were the loud little engines that could, unbothered by scale, obsessed with specificity, wearing their weirdness like a badge.
They weren’t supposed to win. And for a while, they didn’t. But when the money came knocking, they opened the door. And the door never closed again.
Now, we’re ankle-deep in the aftermath.
The Age of Cramming In
There’s no space left on the digital shelf. Everyone’s trying to make the one app that does that one thing better than anyone else, only to find 84 other people already had the same thought while scrolling at midnight. Niche stopped being niche a long time ago, it became a flooded alley full of abandoned side-projects with landing pages still live and Twitter (X) accounts that haven’t tweeted since 2021.
The people who once built games with soul now spend half their time tweaking onboarding flows and watching retention metrics rot in dashboards. The obsession with “users”, not people, just users, ate the fun right out of the code.
The New Shape of “Niche”
Some survive. But they look different now.
They partner early. They pivot fast. They hide the “niche” behind slick branding and investor-friendly acronyms.
The scrappy indie studio becomes a white-label tech provider. The ultra-specific productivity tool becomes a plug-in for something bigger. It morphs into a sleek platform that branches out and grows alongside its client base.
Betway casino is a good example of a company that expanded what it was doing to corner more areas of a competitive market. It added depth and combined both sports betting and casino. It did what so many niche players can’t: adapt.
Because the truth is, most niche startups don’t evolve. They fizzle. They get acquired and absorbed, or worse, ignored. Their last blog post says, “We’ll be back soon,” and then they never are.
The Indie Game Glut
Gaming was once the Wild West. Solo developers, two-person teams, small outfits with big dreams, all putting out games that glitched but still thrilled.
And then came the tools, Unity, Unreal, and GameMaker. Everyone had the means. Everyone had a story. But soon, every other game started to feel like one you’d played already. Pixel art. Synth soundtrack. Roguelike mechanics. Procedural something.
Steam became a landfill. The charts told one story: the top stays the top and the bottom’s endless. You can release a game now and be forgotten by lunch.
It isn’t about the quality anymore. It’s about oxygen. The big studios eat it. The indies fight for what’s left.
Platforms Close the Gates
You can build a thing. You can even build it well. But good luck getting it seen. App stores, marketplaces, search engines, they don’t want your little experiment. They want proven products with polished graphics and five-star reviews.
The platforms used to be egalitarian. Now, they’re bouncers. Gatekeepers with ever-changing rules, fees, and algorithms that punish anything experimental. A solo dev or niche founder might get in, but only if they crawl through glass.
And if your startup relies on another platform to survive, you’re a tenant, not a landlord. You can be evicted anytime.
The Audience Moved On
People change. Fast. One minute, they want hyper-local food delivery apps. The next, they’re back to using big-name services they claim to hate. It’s not even about loyalty. It’s about energy.
Users don’t want to test new things. They don’t want to learn a new interface. They don’t want to be your beta testers. They want it to work, now, perfectly, and without bugs. Niche startups can’t afford that polish. Their charm isn’t charming anymore. It’s inconvenient.
And in gaming, attention is blood. If your trailer doesn’t click in three seconds, they’re already gone. If your visuals don’t slap, they’re deleted. You don’t get second chances.
The Myth of the Next Big Little Thing
There will always be new players. Kids who don’t know how hard it gets after launch. Designers who still believe craft is enough. Coders with a dream and a GitHub full of broken ideas. Good for them.
But we need to stop pretending this niche gold rush still has gold in it. There are moments. Brief ones. But the system’s changed. The mood’s changed. And the game isn’t indie-friendly anymore.
It’s platform-first. Algorithm-fed. Market-validated. If your thing doesn’t scale, it dies. If it scales too slow, it dies louder.