Analysis: the state of F2P games on Nintendo Switch
An under-discussed topic. Also: a micro-indie breakout & lots of discovery 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.]
It’s the middle of the week, and we’ve returned to haunt your inbox with spooky sales estimates and creepy download calculations. Look, behind you, it’s a spider-web! Oh wait, that’s just some Excel worksheet cells….
And, switching up from ‘the state of the giant Steam market’ earlier this week, our two main stories are about… free to play Switch games and Apple Arcade? Is this a Treehouse Of Horror-style alt universe? (No, we just think they’re v. underdiscussed.)
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Nintendo Switch & free to play games: what’s up?
We’re not sure we’ve ever seen an article on F2P games on Nintendo Switch - which is fascinating, since the console has >125 million units sold lifetime. There’s likely two main reasons for this:
Horrible discovery for F2P games on the Switch eShop: whereas Steam has a ‘Free To Play’ hub which is actually listed top of all genres in navigation, Switch’s free to play views are largely obscure subsets of search. And none of the ‘top/discounted’ eShop charts - that drive the most discovery - include free games.
Nintendo and partners’ lack of transparency on numbers: other than a leak/data dump for Fortnite as part of the Epic/Apple lawsuit (below), we’re not sure there have ever been specific public download numbers or ranks for F2P Switch games.
Well, we can’t 100% pierce the veil. But GameDiscoverCo has been tracking U.S. and UK Switch eShop download ranks since March 2022. You can do this for all games, including F2P ones, if you know where to look.
We think the U.S. eShop is the best place to track general trends, since it can account for 30-40% of the Western sales of many Switch games. So here’s what our most recent chart says for top Switch F2P games, as well as a 6 month and 1-year-old chart:
Some brief comments on trends here, as follows:
Fortnite is incredibly dominant, and other Epic titles do well: given you have to name-search to find F2P Switch games, it’s natural that Fortnite dominates. But Epic-owned titles Fall Guys & Rocket League regularly chart. And Lego Fortnite - searchable under an alias, gives Epic 80% of the Top 5 in the most recent chart!
Just Dance and Pokemon UNITE also make regular Top 10 appearances: these titles don’t get discussed a whole bunch. Pokemon Unite is a TiMi/Tencent arena battler which has most of its downloads on mobile. And Just Dance is the Ubisoft dancing game which is bought standalone in yearly editions, but has a F2P GaaS version too.
Palia is the recent free-to-play debut standout on Switch: Singularity 6’s cozy life simulation MMO launched on Switch in December 2023, and was the #1 most-downloaded app on Switch multiple times during that month. It’s still hanging in there, too, ahead of its Steam debut later in March.
So sure, we have rankings. But how about actual download estimates? We have some ideas, but at the very top of the charts, it can be difficult to work out. (Did #1 do X or 3X?)
So - for Palia, we believe the game could have had 1.5-2 million Switch downloads so far. Which is a break-out F2P hit on Switch, but not incredible compared to iOS & Android install numbers?
And then, for Fortnite, which is clearly the most-downloaded F2P game on Switch times a lot, we have the following 2018-2020 data from the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit:
So as you can see here, there were 31 million Switch ‘accounts’ - which may be an overstatement of downloads, since you can use >1 account per download - compared to Xbox’s 53 million and Playstation’s 104 million. We also think this number is a (larger than normal) outlier, ‘cos Fortnite’s demographic maps well to Switch players’?
Anyhow, here’s our ranking estimate of U.S. F2P games since we started keeping more detailed charts in March 2022:
You’ll see a lot of titles that were also in the individual charts here. (Although some like car sim Asphalt 9: Legends and hero shooter Apex Legends pop a bit higher up the charts, due to consistency or better, earlier performance.)
Anyhow, our general conclusion on Switch F2P? It’s a tough road to travel, because you need name recognition & people to search for the game on-console. It seems to work best for big IP, long-established games coming to Switch, or as ‘bonus’ installs for games also on iOS & Android. So we’ll be tracking Palia’s progress with interest…
Apple Arcade: is it good for devs, players, neither?
Some of you may have seen MobileGamer.biz’s report earlier this week, ‘Inside Apple Arcade: axed games, declining payouts, disillusioned studios – and an uncertain future’. (The headline isn’t pulling any punches there!)
And MG’s Neil Long has some great, anonymously sourced reporting on the service: “The upfront fees Apple was paying for new Arcade titles have also been cut, we’re told, and on top of the decline in per-play ‘bonus pool’ payments, some developers are concerned for the future of the service.”
GameDiscoverCo is one of the few other outlets following the service - which is weird, because its reach is non-negligible. It’s used by 3% of those surveyed in the UK’s OFCOM Online Nation survey [.PDF], for example:
Our Plus service also has a U.S. Apple Arcade (by review count) chart we update monthly. So we at least have some idea of how newly added & evergreen games are doing. (Although some titles prompt for reviews in-game, and some don’t…)
Anyhow, we think Neil’s report accurately reflects the state of the service from a dev point of view. There’s just very little opportunity there for the average dev nowadays - especially since ‘licensing existing premium games over from the App Store’ became the majority of new platform releases.
So for developers, it’s either of the following:
'Get commissioned to do a bigger, often licensed family-friendly game', of which there are a very small number of slots - although some genuinely high-quality, standout winners like Hello Kitty Island Adventure. (This game is very good, folks.)
'Get a small amount of $ for your already-released iOS game to go on it, and fight it out with Solitaire for increasingly crowded bonus payments'. You allegedly have to be on the App Store for a year to even be considered for this, though. (And payouts for playtime are dwindling per-game, due to the larger amount of titles on the service.)
This wasn’t the case early on with Apple Arcade - they poured hundred of millions of dollars into its launch titles in 2019, many of which were ‘indie darling’-ish. But when we looked at AA a year in, we noted: “the auteur-led story platformers and adventures just aren’t hitting that hard… certainly not compared to the… nicely packaged, IAP-free versions of [highly replayable] titles that might otherwise be… full of annoying ads and upgrades.”
And when we analyzed the service’s ‘pivot’ in late 2021, we identified the following factors: “Apple Arcade can’t compete with consoles… Critical darlings don’t always make for replayable hits… All-original games were not a good Apple Arcade differentiator… The Apple One subscription has - and will - change the demographic of subscribers.”
It’s the last of those things that has had the biggest effect on the Apple Arcade catalog. Heck: we would be shocked if 5-10% of the current Apple Arcade users bought it standalone.
Why? Most receive it as part of Apple One, as an extra alongside Apple Music and Apple TV+ subscriptions and iCloud storage. (How many? Well, they have 1 billion paid subs, as of last August, but we have zero additional detail beyond that.)
And the demographics - especially with Family plans to the fore - are reflected in the most-reviewed Apple Arcade games of February:
As you can see, the most-reviewed games are littered with family-friendly IP (Sonic, Disney, Lego, Hello Kitty, Tamagotchi), super-casual titles like Solitaire and Blackjack, and original IP in that all-ages vein like the glorious Sneaky Sasquatch.
So when I replied to Neil’s LinkedIn post about the service, I didn’t disagree about Apple’s ‘distracted’ attitude to Apple Arcade, post-’pivot’. But I did add, on end-user value:
“I think Apple Arcade is doing what Apple needs it to, which is to be a decent 'bonus feature' for Apple One subscribers. I think if you're a dev who used to get a lot of royalties and don't any more because so many '+' games have been added, I would be irked. And there's less ‘work for hire’ opportunities making games for AA.
But I actually like the service and I don't think Apple should reboot it. The amount of good quality games they grabbed across from the App Store really fills out the service. (And to be clear: I like it largely as a value add, not a standalone thing.)”
But on the dev side, Apple Arcade is becoming a glorified Google Play Pass, which is not at all what was pitched when it was first started. Our conclusion? Quoting from Roman Polanski’s ‘70s noir classic: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Hello Kitty Island Adventure-town.”
The game discovery & platform news round-up…
Finishing things off for this week’s free newsletters, let’s take a look at a whole bunch of game discovery and platform news, as follows:
Looks like the big new discussion point of the week, according to ‘trad media’ mentions tracked by Footprints.gg, is the newly revealed Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC - it’s got poison swamps! (Also big: the freshly released FFVII: Rebirth and Nightingale.)
They’re a platform, so would be remiss not to cover PlayStation laying off 8% of its workforce, or 900 people. We covered Sony’s tougher road recently, as they back off the ‘live service or bust’ strategy, and sounds like a Twisted Metal GaaS prototype was one of the games canned. Good luck to all affected.
Steam has revealed its themed sales for the rest of 2024, also viewable on SteamDB: they include the Tower Defense Fest, Fighting Games Fest, Rhythm Fest, Space Exploration Fest, Planes, Tranes & Automobiles Fest, Steam Scream Fest 3, and the Cooking Fest. (If your game fits into one of those, congrats.)
We had a great question following Monday’s newsletter: how many of the 500 games that grossed >$3 million on Steam in 2023 came out that year? We can only find about 130 debuts in 2023 that earned >$3 million LTD, as of the end of Feb. 2024. So: we would say ~80% of those titles are older games.
Microlinks: PlayStation Plus Essential’s games for March 2024 are EA Sports F1 23, Sifu, Hello Neighbor 2, and Destiny 2: Witch Queen; Xbox is kicking off its ‘Indie Selects’ highlights - we couldn’t find any console featuring yet, besides a larger ID@Xbox sale; Deconstructor Of Fun gets gloomy about the future of mobile games.
Unity’s latest financials continued its major restructure, with shares down 17% as it said “it would only provide revenue guidance for its ‘strategic portfolio,’ which includes its engine, cloud and monetization business units.” (They’re throwing out a lot of the ‘kitchen sink’-y acquisitions, and selling all consulting services to Capgemini.)
Did you put up a nice custom dev page for yourself on Steam? If not, Matt Hackett has a handy newsletter explaining just how: “Got a game on Steam? Go to its page and click on DEVELOPER or PUBLISHER. Did you land on a boring search results page? If so, then you need to read this.”
The Meta Quest+ VR game subscription service “is introducing a new ‘games catalog’ from Friday… [featuring] Demeo, Walkabout Mini Golf, Onward, and more.” Previously, two games were redeemable per month in real-time (similarly to PlayStation Plus Essential.) Meta “says it plans to ‘rotate in and out’ titles regularly.”
The devs of Outbound, an “open-world [near-future] exploration game [where you] start with an empty camper van and turn it into the home of your dreams”, posted on Reddit about how they got 100,000 Steam wishlists in the first two weeks their Steam page was live. Spoiler: great hook, immaculate vibes.
Esoteric microlinks: why can’t gamers and devs agree on anti-cheat measures?; some great new game design reports from the Polaris retreat; Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg says a neural wristband for AR/VR input will ship “in the next few years”.
Finally, a hilarious new Final Fantasy VIII fansite (run by Video Game History Foundation librarian Phil Salvador) has discovered an ancient FF VIII magazine ‘troll’ perpetuated by GameNOW.
A letter-writer said: “If you are going to put the same [FF VIII] screen shot up again and again, at least put up a good one. Still, I know you will probably put it up again just to tick me off.” We’re definitely in ‘how did it end up like this?’ territory with the mag’s reaction:
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency 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 consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]