Analysis: why some Steam wishlists won't make players hit 'buy'

Also: platform & discovery news, and the most-watched games of October on streaming.

[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.]

Listen, no bones about it, we’re releasing this newsletter on a bit of a cursed day, if you live in the United States. (You know, it’s that ‘presidential election’ thing?) So good luck to the non-cursed side, and we’ll go about our normal business, hm?

Before we get started, here’s a fun LoD bug that surfaced in the (smash hit) Monster Hunter Wilds beta for PC: “many creatures currently sport low-poly models that make them look like they just hopped straight of a PS1 game.” Click through for some chonky dudes!

[REMINDER: you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus right now. You get base access to our ‘core’ Steam data back -end for unreleased & released games, full access to a second weekly newsletter, Discord access, eight game discovery eBooks & lots more.]

Game discovery news: hi, Showa American Story?

We’re starting - as we do nowadays - with the most interesting game platform and discovery news since late last week. And here’s what we’ve got for you:

• GameDiscoverCo’s latest ‘trending unreleased Steam games’ chart - sorted by new followers in the last 7 days - is topped by MonHun (#1), but sees the graphically impressive Chinese-developed 3D action RPG Showa American Story (#2) surging, due to a bizarre new trailer. (GDCo Plus subs can see the ‘live’ chart here.)

• Elsewhere, This War Of Mine-ish 2D zombie survival sim Into The Dead: Our Darkest Days (#4) also made a push, thanks to a new demo, Bungie's Marathon (#9) got a Steam page added, despite scant new info on the game, and zombie 'machine base builder' Survival Machine rode a new demo to #13 on the charts.

• Late-breaking Nintendo results news - Switch hardware sales were down 31% and the company lowered its fiscal year hardware sales estimate to 12.5m from 13.5m. And the company re-confirmed that it’ll make an announcement about a Switch sequel at some point before the end of March 2025.

• Former Netflix Games boss Mike Verdu has confirmed his new gig there, ‘VP, GenAI for Games’, targeting “creator-first vision for AI”, and wags his finger: “Pay no mind to the uninformed speculation in the media about the changes in Netflix Games. What you've seen over the last several months was actually a planned transition.” Nuhh!

• PlayStation has released a list of games that’ll be PS5 Pro enhanced for the console’s November 7th launch, including the Marvel’s Spider-Man series, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Apex Legends and more. (GDCo’s Discord is wondering if GTA 6 will be Pro-enhanced - surely yes?)

• Microlinks: Netflix appears to be removing its interactive TV series from watching & playing, as of December 1st; November’s ‘free on Amazon Prime Gaming’ titles include Guardians of the Galaxy, Mafia, Dishonored & more; another useful take on avoiding Steam press/curator key scammers.

• Some excellent analysis of October’s Steam Next Fest by Chris Zukowski. Some highlights: “The biggest reduction in visibility was towards top-performing games”, and “most Steam Next Fest shoppers are just wishlisting games as they see them. It is not about playing the demo.” (Though many do try the demo too!)

• Console sub announces: PlayStation Plus Essentials for Nov. 2024 are Hot Wheels Unleashed 2, Ghostwire: Tokyo, and a brand-new social deduction title, Death Note Killer Within; Game Pass’ early November additions include Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Metal Slug Tactics, Goat Simulator Remastered & more.

• Across other media & games, a good view on the “explosion of content” that Clay Christensen “called a low-end disruption.” Specifically: “New entrants come in with a low quality product… the incumbents ignore it, but it keeps getting better and eventually it challenges the incumbents." (Think: YouTube, indie/hobbyist games, etcetera.)

• Fortnite’s Discovery 2.0 algorithm just launched for first and third-party UGC levels, which includes “Game collections, Browse subtags, and more... Changes to the algo for better individual discovery coming next.” There’s also a major new ‘skilled interaction’ feature for UEFN, allowing you to make mini-games in your levels.

• Here’s a neat piece on Nintendo Music & the future of media, re: augmenting a fan flywheel: “Think about the day in the life of a Nintendo fan: you wake up to your Nintendo Alarmo clock. You throw on a playlist from Nintendo Music while biking to school. You trade Pokémon with your friends using your Nintendo Switch at recess.”

• Esoteric media microlinks: the future of music festivals is niche and artist-led; why anime is blowing up big in popularity, but is “also facing an existential crisis”; the progenitor of all pop culture zombies in America helped create the modern undead, but also… ate human flesh himself?

Some Steam wishlists don't make players hit 'buy'.

Look, we all know the drill for PC & console games - which sometimes remind us of the movie industry, in the sense that they can be unpredictable and hit-driven. You announce a title, you drive a bunch of interest and Steam wishlists, and you launch!

The issue is the (lack of) reliability of knowing how you perform. When we last surveyed this back in April, the median for games with >10k wishlists on launch was 0.17x Week 1 sales compared to wishlist balance. (So: 20k wishlists, 3,400 Week 1 sales.) But the variance is huge - as low as <0.02x, as high as 1x or more. Fun times.

This is why a lot of people are talking about trying to understand ‘wishlist quality’ better. (We’re working on some metrics around it.) But we also thought it’s worth zooming way out, and re-describing what happens on Day 1 of a launch, as follows:

• Pre-release, a player hit the ‘I want to wishlist this’ button on a game: could be a casual ‘bookmark’, could be ‘damn, i can’t wait for this to come out’. Can’t tell.

• Immediately at release, the player gets notified the game’s out: if they notice the email, and if they’re interested, they click through and look at the game’s price, its genre, any reviews and forum comments to date. And then buy! (Or don’t.)

This may seem self-evident, but (at least for non pre-orderable games), people are making that buying decision ‘in the moment’, based on what they’ve heard or seen about the game. You’re not banking wishlists, waiting for them to convert at 0.17x. You’re banking eyeballs that you then have to push over the line to buy…

We know a lot of the reasons that games do better than expected, in today’s market: they are exceptionally good or replayable, they’re in an under-served market, perhaps a lot of influencers hop on and play them, they have a ‘je ne sais quoi’ virality.

But looking at games that under-performed - and why - is also worth our time. And we’ve been tracking great-looking Unreal Engine first-person, solo-dev “heavy metal horror indie game” The Axis Unseen as one of those titles.

Just to break down the stats: the game launched on Steam on October 22nd with - GDCo estimates - >150k Steam wishlists, a good total. But it maxed out at 86 concurrents (CCU), and we’re estimating it’s at a 0.02-0.03x Week 1 conversion rate - so perhaps 10-15% of ‘expected’. (We’d have ‘expected’ it closer to 500-1,000 CCU.)

We’ve actually mentioned the game before when it comes to ‘look what solo devs can do nowadays, technically!’ It’s resonating with a certain player base - the reviews are close to Very Positive, and the game’s dev - Nate Purkeypile - told us “the people who sunk time into it and resonated with it have started leaving more and more [positive] reviews.”

For a solo dev, we reckon the title will work out fine, $-wise for Nate. But it just didn’t have the ‘pop’ out of the gate that we expected. Can we work out why? Some thoughts:

• First-person fantasy RPG games come with high expectations: unlike certain niches, if you have a first-person fantasy game with good looking graphics, you start to get compared to games like Skyrim in terms of depth of content.

• ‘Former Skyrim dev’ may attract casual wishlists from Bethesda fans: it’s quite possible ‘new RPG’ and ‘ex-Skyrim designer’ - and good art - is the kind of thing that will make more casual players take notice, but register a ‘softer’ wishlist. (A ‘remind me to check back on this’, effectively.)

• The final game is quirkier and more hunting-based than some expect: the initial trailer for the game was big on environments and less big on gameplay. And we note that even Splattercat’s video after playing the game starts out by saying: “This one's a little bit of a weirdie.”

So, as Splattercat explains, The Axis Unseen “imagines…if you took a game like Cabela’s.. or theHunter: Call of the Wild, and you set it inside of a strange post-apocalyptic monster ridden universe.” It’s a pretty original idea - but it may not be a super-mainstream one.

So far, so guess-y. But do we have any data to back this up? There’s not enough players of the game to easily sample it. But if we look at Steam wishlisters of The Axis Unseen and how much more likely they are to have played these games than the median Steam owner (‘affinity multiplier’), we get these top charts:

If you’re a company who wants access to these Affinity charts as part of our Steam Deep Dive offering, ping us.

So here’s possible evidence. There’s a lot of deep & complex open-world RPGs, headed by Outward & quickly followed by multiple Bethesda games, including Morrowind and Oblivion. (theHunter: Call Of The Wild only has a 2.1x ‘affinity multiplier’, btw.)

Essentially, to be flippant, we feel like a bunch of AAA game players 'bookmarked' the game, and then turned up on launch day - if they noticed the launch email - and were like 'oh yeah, sure, but not buying at $22.49'. The Axis Unseen still got its core fans - but it jettisoned a lot of people along the way.

So the biggest lesson we have, here: are there a class of people who like playing a certain game subgenre who are going to say: 'Oh yeah, I will spend $ on this game right now!' on launch day when it comes to your game? You need that! And Shapez 2 is our go-to for an example - albeit in a hot, underserved niche, automation games.

And the more you get away from 'expected' genres and maybe attract people who are a bit more idly wishlisting because it 'looks cool', and there’s a lack of easy Steam comps for the game you are making, the trickier that conversation can be.

October 2024’s most-watched streams, analyzed..

Finally, we’ve collab-ed with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which grabs data from basically all the major (non-China) game streaming platforms. It’s v.helpful for understanding PC/console games are being watched in real-time.

So, as per usual, here’s the full ‘Top 100’ for October (Google doc). You can see League Of Legends surging to the very top of the chart - +40% to 233 million hours watched - due to the ongoing Worlds 24 champs. And lots more ‘usual suspects’. But otherwise:

• Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 made the Top 10, even in a partial month: Activision’s signature game already had 10 million hours watched in Sept, thanks to Beta Access, and only fully launched on Oct. 25th. But it still made the Top 10, with 40.8 million hours watched.

• Black Myth: Wukong hit just 19% of its September numbers: the game is finite, and China’s not included streaming service-wise, so it’s not really a big surprise. Wukong’s drop to #77 - from 16.7m to 3.2m hours watched - was the largest in the Top 100, %-wise. (It’s still peaking at 90k CCU on Steam tho, which is great.)

• Silent Hill 2 & Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero led full October debuts: some impressive numbers here for the survival horror remake (#13, 27.6m hours watched) and the 3D anime fighter franchise continuation (#18, 21.5m hours watched), showing the importance of influencer streaming in their multi-platform successes.

Other ‘new’ entries? We spot the Switch-exclusive Super Mario Party Jamboree (#38), viral Steam hit Liar's Bar (an impressive #39), the Until Dawn remaster (#51), A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead* (#57), and the reconfigured (with console release!) New World: Aeternum (#58). (*Horror titles overperform with livestreamers, but that doesn’t mean they are smash sales hits: GDCo estimates A Quiet Place at ~100k units LTD so far - decent.)

One interesting new entry? Gunzilla’s Off The Grid (#63, 3.8m hours watched) a F2P PvPvE extraction shooter that is uses (optional) NFTs, so is solely on Epic Games Store on PC, as opposed to Steam, since Valve’s platform disallows blockchain games.

Finally, we’d be remiss to not highlight ‘automation game OG’ Factorio (#75) getting a 13x increase in its hours watched - from 222k to a whopping 3.26m hours. That’s thanks to the 8 year old game getting its first ever expansion, the $35 Space Age DLC, which players - and watchers - are lapping up.

[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.]