Avowed, Pirate Yakuza debut big on Steam!
Also: a disappointing sales result discussed, and plenty-o links-o ahoy.
[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 time for GDCo to visit our end of week discovery newsletter (for everyone, with a bonus section), followed by our analysis of ‘the week in Steam releases’ (for Plus and Pro subscribers), in a week when two major Steam launches did decently.
Before then, it was Presidents’ Day in the U.S. this week. So it’d be remiss of us to not honor “The Ghost of Abrajam Lincoln, an actual character concept from the unproduced 1995 N64 horror-themed basketball game Monster Dunk.” (The Video Game History Foundation archived the full roster’s concept art, and it’s… wild, in a rad ‘90s teen way.)
Game discovery news: the State of Elden Ring….
Let’s conclude the week in style by sauntering through all of the below links, while looking like a million dollars:
According to the latest ‘trad media’ coverage charts from Footprints.gg (above), Obsidian’s Avowed topped interest for the week, followed by PlayStation’s State Of Play showcase and the increasingly hot Elden Ring Nightreign spinoff. And yes, Switch 2 interest is still lurking in mid-table…
The future of Meta’s main ‘game as a platform’ gets clearer with a new $50 million creator fund for Horizon Worlds, launching alongside “the early access release of our Meta Horizon Worlds desktop editor.” And remember that Horizon Worlds is playable on mobile and web, too - ‘VR only’ is being de-emphasized over time.
Here’s a fun & twisted story from Danny Day (of Desktop Dungeons fame): “In 2019, we built a joke game as part of a Rube Goldberg marketing campaign that would let indies turn the tables on key scammers. It got banned off Steam, exposed a $1.9M bug, confused the wrong scammers AND burned our marketing budget for zero gain.”
Also notable in Epic Games Store’s 2024 year-in-review: top games by ‘player spend and engagement’ has Fortnite & Rocket League joined by key MiHoYo games (Genshin Impact & Honkai Star Rail) and GTA V in the Platinum tier. Gold tier? EA Sports FC 24, Destiny 2, Alan Wake II, Fall Guys & Wuthering Waves.
Interesting to see Rockstar is talking to top Roblox & Fortnite UGC creators as part of its Grand Theft Auto 6 plans, “about the potential to create custom experiences inside the upcoming game.” But don’t get too excited: “conversations have remained relatively open-ended”, and we think its UGC will be a slow roll.
Circana just published Jan. 2025’s U.S. game hardware (& select software) results, with overall spending down 15% year on year to $4.5 billion, and game console spending down 45% to $205 million, not so bueno. Related not-goodness: “Console content spending dropped by 35% year-on-year.”
Reminder: the next Steam Next Fest kicks off on Monday, there’s an official trailer out there (via The Verge), and the press preview page for Next Fest currently has 2,548 demos on it. (So it’s going to be a busy demo showcase. We’ll have a round-up after it’s done, and here’s our data from October 2024’s.)
We haven’t looked at our Switch U.S. eShop charts (Plus/Pro subs) for new releases for a while. And checking back in: wow, Hello Kitty Adventure Island (at #5 and #27 for Deluxe Edition in all 14-day U.S. eShop downloads!) is crushing it. Also doing decently: Civilization VII (#64) and Tomb Raider IV-VI (#106).
Xbox’s siblings at Microsoft Research announced Muse, a “generative AI model that can generate a game environment based on visuals or players’ controller actions”, using Bleeding Edge gameplay data, and MS CEO Satya Nadella is hyped: “What I'm excited about is bringing a catalogue of games soon that we are going to train these models to generate and then start playing.”
After his 30-year PlayStation career, ex-exec Shuhei Yoshida is saying some interesting things re: the closure of PS’ Japan Studio: “Other than Gran Turismo, we had many great products but didn’t really have many triple-A-level successful products. That became more and more important as the big games became bigger – the indies filled the gap and the double-A market seems to have disappeared.” Middle of market issues!
Niko Partners put together a handy ‘2024 in game livestreaming in China’ breakdown, showing DouYu at 46% of viewership, Bilibili at 29% and Huya at 24%. It also revealed the top ‘unlicensed by the government’ games watched in China in 2024 - headed by PUBG, Apex Legends, and Escape from Tarkov.
Microlinks: Steam store page traffic referrers now specifically track BlueSky, after Jake Birkett asked; Gamescom Asia is merging with the Thailand Games Show & moving to Bangkok; launching on March 10th is AbleToPlay, a new ‘how accessible is this title for gamers with disabilities?’ guide website.
Why a high quality Steam game… didn’t get players
We’ve been chatting to GDCo newsletter subscriber Xander Seren recently about his ‘unforgiving parkour platformer’ Void Climber. It debuted on Steam about a week ago, but unfortunately has not done well - in fact, it’s sold just tens of units.
The title, created by veteran creative studio FuturePerfect as their first game, is notable because it’s graphically good-looking & evocative of some other climbing games that have sold well like Chained Together. But it failed to get discovery reach.
Xander is publishing a series of blog posts on why Void Climber didn’t get anywhere. And his first is out now and worth reading, because it shows that even a smart, data-driven approach to the market sometimes hits a brick wall. Specifically:
The Void Climber devs followed ‘best practices’: “We hired a marketing agency to help us figure out how to reach players. We started a Discord server where players could chat about the game. We made a demo and participated in Steam’s demo focused festival Steam Next Fest. We sent the demo to over 1000 YouTubers and Twitch streamers.”
They identified two subsets of the masocore-adjacent subgenre: there was ‘absurd’, which is “memetic, funny, and just straight up bizarre”, e.g. ALTF4, or ‘refined’, more of their target market: “more about a moody atmosphere and intriguing architecture.” (Example: Peaks Of Yore.)
Why didn’t it work? They think it fell between chairs: “Void Climber was too restrained to be a meme game and too vague to be a refined game. It wasn’t absurd enough to be instantly funny, and it wasn’t focused enough to pull players into a familiar but distinct fantasy. It sat somewhere in between, not committing to either direction.”
We liked Xander’s postmortem article because it’s self-reflective and doesn’t pull punches. But does it genuinely explain why his game didn’t sell? Somewhat: here’s two additional comments we’d make.
Firstly: a lot of the time, we just don’t know. A lot of devs of successful games can’t pinpoint why their game was a hit! And in today’s hyper-crowded market, there’s going to be a lot of ‘default discovery state is that nobody sees it, you can only lift discovery so high’. The default is - nobody cares. That’s hard to solve for.
Secondly: we agree that this Only Up!-ish subgenre mainly has hits that are bizarrely meme-driven in sometimes anti-craft ways. (Or pro ‘f*cking weird’ craft, if you think Get To Work is a work of art!) The subgenre also has an incredibly low barrier of entry for devs, and we’re not sure conventional game polish or fidelity matters.
In other words, this subgenre is much closer to the ‘weird hobbyist-driven content sludge’ barrier than a 4X game or a political strategy game. And that’s probably where a lot of conventional decisions and traditional approaches break down. So: it’s tough!
Avowed, Pirate Yakuza debut pretty big on Steam…
