Game Discovery Now is now the GameDiscoverCo newsletter!
Which is my new company, not so coincidentally.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
So, exciting changes are afoot! As you perhaps saw on social media, I’m leaving my job with Game Developers Conference (where I’ve been working for over 15 years, wow, co-running GDC itself, Gamasutra & the Independent Games Festival) to move on to new things.
And here’s what’s happening next - I’ve founded GameDiscoverCo, a new company in the space. This is a culmination of the path that led me to set up the Game Discoverability Day at GDC, start this newsletter, and now found this company.
Here’s the two-paragraph rundown on the official website:
“GameDiscoverCo is a new agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your premium PC or console game? We run the GameDiscoverCo newsletter and research service and provide other key services to developers and publishers.
We were founded by Simon Carless, former Independent Games Summit Festival chairperson and GDC Indie Games Summit co-founder, who is also an advisor to and the original investor in successful indie publisher No More Robots (Descenders, Yes, Your Grace, Hypnospace Outlaw.)”
Now I’m doing my own thing, wanted to call out what I’m most excited about going forward:
A more robust (with paid elements) newsletter!
I’m looking at building out the GameDiscoverCo newsletter to have more great content. The free round-ups & articles will continue or even expand, and stay free to all (hurray!)
In addition, I’m going to introduce a new paid newsletter subscription sometime in the next few weeks. This will have many extra features, including a data-led ‘labs’ approach to better metrics for game discoverability, larger ‘platform overview’ articles, and other exclusives (like paid subscriber AMAs, and one-on-one time slots with me.)
I’m delighted to say that Lars Doucet (ex-Valve contractor, currently of the excellent GameDataCrunch, which you should support) is coding the ‘labs’-style mini-dashboards which will use both raw data and custom insight, and which I’ll be doing written analysis around. Paid subscribers will also get access to the actual interactive data as we build out these very useful dashboards.
Anyhow, if you want to thank me in general for the newsletter and get all this extra goodness(tm), upgrade to the paid sub tier when it launches - I’ll tell you all about it then. It won’t be $10 a month, but it won’t be stupid crazy expensive either. More soon!
Can I help your company in other ways?
You’re largely here for the wonderful game platform/discovery data and news, so I’m not going to bore you to death. But myself (and some folks I’m working with!) would now be very happy to help in areas like:
Business/discoverability strategy - are you set up for success?
Competitive or portfolio analysis - are your games in the right place for the market?
Larger research/analysis in the space - is there a big discovery/platform problem you’re trying to solve that we can help with?
In any case, thank you for reading! I have at least one other notable project in the works (more soon), and I’m really looking forward to working full-time in and around this space, while continuing to bring you great content.
Take care,
Simon @ GameDiscoverCo
PS - Thanks to Bachelor Soft for the adorable B&W Macintosh art direction for the new co!