[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.]
Welcome to ‘the tail end of Gamescom week’, and yep, it’s busy for new game reveals: GameFile rounded up the high-profile Opening Night Live handily, and you should also peep Future Games Show’s line-up, the Xbox Games Showcase Pt. 1 and Pt.2, and more. (We’ll have more on this next week, for those obsessed with who did the best.)
And before we finish up with Gamescom, a million points to whoever designed the ARC Raiders show-floor booth for Embark - apparently you’re running around it like you’re inside the game? Sounds like more fun than staring at monitors, to us…
[HAVEN’T CHECKED PRO YET? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Onimusha’s demo goes big
So, let’s take a look at the latest game discovery & platform news, which appears to be the following:
GDCo Pro’s top Steam demos for unreleased games (above) is headed by an expanded demo for Capcom's much-anticipated Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, then continued hits Guildrun (#2) & Nomad Drive (#3). (Two massive Betas, for CoD: Modern Warfare 4 (115k CCU) and for Wardogs (106k CCU) also happened...)
Xbox things: the ‘physical disc to digital item’ program is here, testable by Xbox Insiders on Aug. 31st; Windows Central has some more details, inc. that most (tho not all) Xbox Series & Xbox One discs are compatible; Asha Sharma chatted to the BBC that Xbox needs to be "thinking about" affordability for its next console.
About that ‘Battle.net getting more third-party games’ rumor? Blizzard just announced a collab with CD Projekt to bring The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered to the PC platform, as well as “gain access to a Geralt-themed skin in Diablo IV” if you buy it on there. (It’s like the ‘Fortnite skins’ move on EGS…)
Steam has an archive of their latest Next Fest video Q&A, with Ria Hu saying re: common dev mistakes: “People rush so much to get everything in order for Next Fest that they don’t have or… take the time to step back and say, ‘Okay, what am I really presenting to customers?’” (Getting a third party to poke at your store page is key.)
We’re also publishing GDCo Twitch game chart analysis onto LinkedIn, and top games watched (released in last 6 months, 7 days to Aug 28th!) include Souls-like Mortal Shell II, fish&gun friendslopper How To Fish and basketball game NBA 2K27 as the only new games with >2m hours watched, last 7 days. (More within..)
Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ monthly games for September inc. Sniper Elite: Resistance, MLB The Show 26, and Wobbly Life; Google talks about its 15 years of AI research in games (inc. EVE Online newness); some rare data on micro-indies being ported to console ($15k console rev. for a racer, $3-4k for smaller games.)
Discord’s doing more in-depth collabs, inc. Play Quest+ with Battlefield 6, where “players who accept the Quest and link their Discord and EA accounts can complete a gameplay objective to unlock rewards”, while “progress is automatically updated in Discord as users play.” (Also: Bloons TD6 and Rust items buyable direct in Discord.)
Y’know how console manufacturers are getting U.S. tariff refunds but don’t intend to refund buyers? Well, buyers of Panic’s Playdate handheld are getting $ back, aided by all Playdates being bought D2C (easier refund tracking…) Refunding $12.36 “felt like the fair thing to do”, says Panic. (Much respect.)
Two mini-updates on previous stories: looks like EA pulled its digital data from Circana (after going private) at the same time Xbox did; and ‘shovelware-adjacent’ PlayStation publisher Ternox (of STONKS-9800 fame) had its publisher access restored, after Sony evidently decided it was on the right side of the line.
Aftermath has been speaking to some indies about Steam’s relatively opaque adult content eval pipeline: “For [Perfect Tides: Station To Station dev Meredeith] Gran, after she submitted her build full of the sex scenes, Steam took ‘probably about two weeks’ to get back to her, during which she was ‘sweating.’”
Microlinks, Pt. 2: talking of tariffs, the Trump admin is looking at new U.S. semi-conductor tariffs that could include game consoles; mobile D2C (App Store cut-avoiding) $ got big, with 20-50% off-platform for some firms; Fields Of Mistria players really want polyamory in the game, per a fun Discord server analysis.
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Hearth & Hamlet’s ~100k & the rise of the bite-sized clicker...
You may have noticed us covering more <$10 games, often by solo or tiny devs, on GDCo recently. Why? It’s mainly because were ‘following the players’, and a notably large percentage of these turn up in our top new games of the week on Steam by CCU.
One trend we’ve definitely noticed is the rise of the incremental genre which - to quote Wikipedia, is “a video game subgenre characterized by the incremental accumulation of in-game resources, and gradual, often exponential progression through repetitive actions or automation.” Two recent things made us look further at the space.
Firstly, HTMAG has some great mini-profiles on recent indie incremental hits in different genres, inc. on Sir, We Have An Orc Problem ($10, 4 month dev, 230k units est., incremental tower defense w/huge # of enemies) & on Bills Must Be Paid ($7, 7 month dev, 420k units est., incremental piggie bank-smashin’!)
And secondly, Polden’s Kirill Oreshkin singled out incremental games as a major new trend on Steam, saying: “I decided to research some incremental [PC] games I hadn’t played before…. Holy shit…You can’t stop playing. You’re hooked immediately.” (He calls them ‘hypercasual’, which is another possible name for this genre on PC…)
Anyhow, before we draw more conclusions, we have one particular game to analyze - Phorust Studios & Runic Forge’s Hearth & Hamlet ($8), “a medieval citybuilder clicker that blends resource management, in-depth upgrade trees and relaxing idle gameplay.” Aidan McGrath at Rune was kind enough to provide us current stats for the 9-day old game:
That’s pretty darn good for a title made by a solo dev from Australia, who works a dayjob as a teacher. We imagine it’ll gross >$2m in the medium term? Other key points around the game:
Aidan tells us that “the game actually started as a fun incremental for [the dev’s] class at school to play”, and its biggest inspirations are Cast N Chill (for vibes), Ropuka’s Idle Island, Microcivilization and Tower Wizard.
Median playtime of 7 hours 20 minutes is spectacular, given it’s so early in the game’s lifecycle & the game takes 8-12 hours to complete in total…
Regionally, the U.S. is 23% of the units, followed by China (14.5%), Germany (13%), Japan (6%), Korea (5%), the UK, Canada, and Taiwan (4%), and down from there. (Having a regional sub-publisher, Gamersky, probably helped in Asia..)
And there’s a wider point, as Aidan from Rune explained to us: “We’ve seen a shift towards incrementals that are more ‘active’ - where, rather than idling, players are actually playing the game.” This has been the revelation to me - that a lot of incremental games are highly distilled, strong game-loop ‘number go up’ takes on specific genres.
Hearth & Hamlet is an interesting case. If you look at the above screenshot, you might think you design the paths and place the buildings by hand. But as the dev explains: “The city layout is completely predetermined. Think of it as assembling a pre-designed diorama. This is intentional as it is designed as a more relaxing incremental approach.”
Rune’s McGrath agrees that this “led to some weird expectations.... a substantial portion of our negative reviews are specifically non-idle players, who wanted a stronger city-builder experience.” But we think the game picked up a lot of attention due to its looks & playability, and it’s hanging at 79% Positive Steam user reviews, which ain’t shabby.
Oh, and a bonus, since everyone loves annotated wishlist graphs? The game hit >200k Steam wishlists by launch, aided by a popular demo, and here’s the rundown, per Rune
So, some conclusions: the rise of the LitRPG as a book genre proves that today’s ‘media consumers’ love progression as a key part of their experience. And we think the promise of these incremental games - sub-$10 price, strong hook, a blessedly finite experience - are a big win for players plagued with a backlog of 50-hour long games.
Another key point is low(er) barriers to entry. I liked Kirill Oreshkin’s take on this: “You sit down to play, a… tutorial begins, and your brain goes: ‘Aaaaargh! Effort! Don’t want effort! Want to play! Don’t want to learn!’ Sometimes you’re simply out of energy and looking for rest in a game.” Maybe games like this are… what many players actually want?
This week on Steam: Zero Company, MGS do gud!
