4 great graphs - and 1 new feature - from Steam's GDC presentations

Also: a 2D zombie game that's taking off, and lots of news.

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

And we’re back, battling through a mini late-Spring heatwave in NorCal (just after GDC ended, ironically), while we pore through documents and data and other things starting with the letter D. So let’s do it, delightful GameDiscoverCo dumbos…

Before we start, what’s Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley up to nowadays? Oh, not content with allegedly baking bread with 4,000 year old yeast, he’s planning to make a chocolate company with cacao trees grown in Los Angeles. (Hey, at least it’s fanciful and not malevolent. Unless he’s intending to turn somebody into a giant blueberry.)

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News: inZOI, Schedule I, Atomfall hit launch hot…

So let’s take a look at the notable news since last Friday, thanks to GameDiscoverCo’s infinitely expanding bullet-point list of death:

• Here at GDCo, we took a look at ‘trending’ unreleased Steam games, March 17th-24th, and this week is hot - Krafton's life sim inZOI (#1) is absolutely surging, continuing buzz on drug dealer sim Schedule I (#2) is super-hot (wow, that CCU!), and British survival-action-er Atomfall (#3) is also picking up speed and interest.

• New on Steam and in these charts: Genshin Impact-ish Asian F2P title Wuthering Waves (#6) now has a Steam page, and is due out in 5 weeks, 'age of piracy' survival MMO Crosswind (#8) is cuing up a playtest, and the Painkiller FPS franchise reboot (#9) is also grabbing interest.

• The EU is going after video games targeting kids with IAP, & we thought this EU lawyer take was helpful: “the action originated with a complaint by the Swedish Consumers' Association to the CPC Network… It reads like a text book list of elementary misdemeanours, so Star Stable ought to have no difficulty in providing written responses.”

• The brand-new The Game Business newsletter & videocast has dirt on the great ‘late 2025’ Grand Theft Auto 6 release date exodus: “Three major video game publishers… are ready to delay their games to avoid [GTA 6]. ‘Rockstar games always suck a lot of money and, more importantly, time out of the market,’ said the boss of one of the world’s biggest game publishers. ‘We don’t want to be anywhere near that.’”

• Fortnite is continuing to license custom third-party assets for its UGC: “Starting today you can build your own zombie apocalypse as a number of Walking Dead assets — including buildings, weapons, and walkers — are now available to users in Creative and UEFN. The walkers join assets from TMNT and Lego in the burgeoning creative space.”

• People keep asking us about the best lists for third-party Steam sales & Festivals your game can enter. So, a reminder: this Google Drive spreadsheet curated by smart folks from the HowToMarketAGame Discord, and The Indie Houses’ list of Steam festivals are both very useful!

• Further to that Razer x World ‘human verification’ announce, they did a neat survey on cheating in games: “9% of gamers reporting that they regularly encounter unauthorized, third-party bots in games. ~7 out of 10 gamers say such bots are “ruining” multiplayer competition (71%) and making it less fun to play certain games (74%).”

• Digital Foundry did a useful report on which games are ‘too powerful for Steam Deck’, noting: “a large contingent of recent AAA fare runs extremely poorly on Steam Deck, to the point where I'd deem the games broadly unplayable”, including Final Fantasy XVI, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Star Wars Outlaws & Indiana Jones.

• ICYMI: this rundown of most-downloaded Netflix mobile games has GTA: San Andreas atop it at 39.7m downloads (apparently it’s huge in India!), followed by Squid Game: Unleashed (free to all, 18.8m), Storyteller, Bloons TD6 & Spongebob: Get Cooking. (Storyteller is Top 10 in the last 30 days too - big on TikTok!)

• At GDC, Xbox confirmed that its ID@Xbox division (i.e. not the obvious big publishers) has paid >$5 billion out since it was set up in 2013, including to recent games like Phasmophobia, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, etc. Also: “As announced last week, over 1,000 titles are now supporting Xbox Play Anywhere (XPA).”

• StreamElements’ & Rainmaker.gg’s state of Twitch streaming for Feb. 2025 confirms daily hours watched steady at 57m. And StreamElements’ Or Perry says: “Marvel Rivals stayed in the top 10 for a third consecutive month - an achievement, given that most debut games fade after one or two once the launch hype dies down.”

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4 graphs & 1 new feature from Steam's GDC talks!

As you might know, the folks at Valve presented an extensive set of ‘Deep Dive’ talks off-site at GDC last week, including in-depth looks on playtesting on Steam, Early Access, marketing, Next Fest, preparing for release, localization, and more.

The talk slides were given to event attendees. But they lack context if you’re just gazing at the PDFs. However, good news - Valve confirmed to GameDiscoverCo that they will be recording versions of the talks which will appear on the SteamWorks YouTube channel in the next few days. We’ll link them at that point.

And in the meantime, new first-party data is, of course, catnip to us here at GDCo. So here’s the most interesting ‘real Steam data’ graphs from the presentations, plus brand-new confirmation of a feature we haven’t seen before:

Firstly, this data on ‘primary language set for Steam users during 2024’ was used a couple of times in Valve’s talks, and is one we’ve never seen before. Our big takeaways are:

• 2024 was the year of China’s ascendancy on Steam: we did not expect to see Chinese language ahead of English (33.7% compared to 33.5%), although titles like Black Myth: Wukong legitimized ‘Steam global’ culturally in China in 2024.

• Seeing ‘primary language’ is different to seeing ‘% of owners in country’: this is probably the most intriguing part of the data. We think the median % of German players on Steam (lifetime, >100k units sold) is 5.3%. But only 2.5% of players had German as their primary browsing language in 2024. (France is closer in %, tho.)

• This view helps you understand which languages really need translation: we ran into this with some data we published on Slay The Princess - some countries are more comfortable with browsing or playing in English than others. And, duh, it’s Simplified Chinese that all Western devs should be translating to.

Other than this data, there’s a few other charts we wanted to whistle through. This, from Valve’s Steam Early Access walkthrough, is a useful number:

But what we thought was more interesting is that the percentage of new games that are Early Access has been between 13% and 19% constantly since 2013, when the EA format was first introduced. We’re def. wondering what 2025 will be, too:

On this front, Valve said that around 14,000+ Steam games are currently still in Early Access on Steam, and 28% of 2024’s top releases were Early Access. So it still seems like it’s a favored launch style, if you get it right.

And here’s a clean, internally sourced graph of the amount of time games spend in Early Access on Steam. We’re slightly surprised that over 50% games are in EA for less than a year - our view on a best practice is probably 1-2 years. But anything can work, if you explain it to your player base correctly:

Finally, we mentioned a new feature! Last week’s talk on Steam playtesting confirmed that a ‘Steam Playtest exclusively via friend invites’ feature - as used successfully for Valve’s own game Deadlock - is shortly available in Beta to third party Steam games:

Valve tells us that they’re still selecting the first few games that will try out the feature and give feedback. And ‘invites from friends in the know’ is an emerging trend for game launches - Supercell is using it for their mobile game launch Mo.co, for example. So we’re excited to see it roll out - though it’ll only make sense for certain type of games.

Anyhow, that’s the sneak peek of some neat Steam data. Now - please wait patiently for the context-filled talks to be recorded back at Valve HQ, and we’ll post ‘em when they pop up. Avanti….

Long Gone: why it’s going big, and its challenges..

Over in our GameDiscoverCo Pro/Plus-exclusive Discord, somebody recently drew our attention to Long Gone, a long (haha!) in development solo-dev title that just put out an alluring teaser video (above!) that’s surged to 579k YouTube views in ~a month.

And indeed, the game has ~70,000 Steam wishlists now, up from around 25,000 a few weeks ago, and the dev at Hillfort Games, has an entertaining devlog up on YouTube saying he’s been emailed by 5+ publishers since it went viral.

Besides looking pretty surprised - “I was not expecting this… so much for ‘no pressure’.” - we think there’s some interesting takeaways from the interest in this so far:

• People love zombie games, even meditative and pixel-y: the title isn’t overtly an action game, but it has some gorgeous 3D environments, lushly decorated with pixel art and undergrowth. The wonderful art direction is what’s selling it.

• Expectation management and decoding genre is difficult: at one point, creator Vin - who is an ex-AAA dev who worked on Assassin’s Creed & Watch Dogs - says: “I was becoming concerned that the game was coming across as too ‘point and click’-y…” That’s what the teaser ‘reads’ like to us, too… not bad, but it does.

• The final game needs to ‘nail’ gameplay as it has done atmosphere: in the end, Vin says, “it’s meant to be a retro-styled adventure game” - with running and jumping, and “full platforming sections between the [rundown, zombie-infested] houses and the streets.” This might - or might not - be tricky to pull off.

So this is a classic example of what happens in today’s market! People can get enchanted from early footage alone, and now Vin will need to ‘thread the needle’ and deliver a finished game that fans of the teaser can vibe with, genre and gameplay-wise.

But obviously, having YouTube commenters say things like: “As someone who grew up with pixel art and point and click adventures of Lucasfilm, it is wonderful to not only see this style of game revived, but to see it enhanced to such a degree”? That’s still good!

(BTW, the ‘Joel from The Last Of Us’ main character look for the teaser was apparently a bit unintentional. And so the main character now has a hoodie and some slightly different pixels. Not that this harmed things hype-wise, of course..)

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]