House Flipper 2: how the sequel 'cleaned up' in the charts

Also: streaming hits for December, and 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.]

We’re back around, folks, for the second GameDiscoverCo newsletter of the week. We’ll continue to bring you best practices & wins from the world of ‘you’ve launched your PC/console video game, and some people paid attention to it - well done!’

And while we focus on ‘what to do’, we now have an idea of ‘what not to do’, thanks to a TikTok-er who’s intentionally making ‘the worst game ever’, including “Unskippable dialogue, an auto-scrolling escort mission, and a dog that explodes into ants when you pet it.”

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House Flipper 2: a sequel that delivered - how?

Did Empyrean, Frozen District & PlayWay’s first-person house renovation sequel House Flipper 2 do well on its December 14th Steam debut? It did, and at a $40 USD price point, too - with PlayWay CEO Krzysztof Kostowski spilling the beans on its metrics after 72 hours.

As ‘KrisWawa’ notes, House Flipper 2 had sold 131,000 units in just the first 3 days, with a refund rate of only 4%, starting from a strong position - 850,000 wishlists at release. (And 890,000 WL balance at 72 hours, after 87k ‘direct wishlist conversions’.)

Ever transparent, Kostowski also revealed that dev costs for the game were ~$2 million, with paid ad spend of ~$330,000. With $2.6 million net revenue, this means the game was profitable after 3 days, with console versions planned for Q1 2024.

GameDiscoverCo itself estimates the game as the #2 release of December by LTD gross revenue (just over $9 million, with about $5.3 million net after Steam cut, VAT, refunds), behind only Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader ($12.6 million gross.) Impressive.

So that’s the numbers. (And we all love numbers.) But how did the devs & publisher pull this one off? Sequels aren’t always that easy in 2023, with Wargroove 2 (~11k Steam units, vs. 100s of k for the original) just one of a few ‘scuffing it’ last year.

We had a chance to chat to Kuba 'Pajda' Pacura of Frozen District, since he hangs out in our Plus member Discord. And here’s some of the conclusions we came to:

• The underlying House Flipper concept is both viral and under-supplied: PlayWay has flooded the market with ‘first person simulation games’ of variable quality, but great ‘hook’ - see Chris Z’s research about this recently. This ‘cleaning up and renovating’ gameplay loop is one that people will keep playing, and House Flipper did it very well. So there’s an existing fanbase to move on to the sequel.

• A triumphant Next Fest appearance hinted at demand for the game: we covered this back in June, but House Flipper 2’s Next Fest demo was very close to (or at !) the top of most-played when it came to unique players or CCU (2,800 CCU for a demo is great.) So it both helped increase interest, and also showed the interest.

• The OG House Flipper was well-supported for crosspromo: the first House Flipper has had multiple expansions & has tens of thousands of DAU on Steam. And besides Steam page cross-promotion, Kuba noted that an in-game banner in House Flipper gave them “a couple of thousand [HF2] wishlists” daily, multiple times.

Other tactical reasons for great wishlists? A House Flipper franchise sale on Steam, larger discounts on the first game, and more. Here’s an annotated Steam wishlist:

So, yep, ‘well-made sequel to popular game does well’ is not necessarily news, we know. (The game is having a few (resolvable) issues with crashes and complaints over insufficient content.) But overall, it has a community that a) still exists and b) actively wants more of the game - which is why certain sequels like this seem to perform.

What is interesting, then? We found two other things. Firstly, the price ($40 in the U.S.) was - we thought - aggressive, but it 100% worked. We asked Frozen District’s Pacura and he noted: “We wanted to charge more than for HF1 (25$) because HF1 was released in 2018 with a much lower budget and a smaller team.”

The team settled on $40 because the game was high quality, “the replayability of House Flipper is huge, and adding the Sandbox Mode helped it even more”, and the community is “aware” that the first House Flipper got lots of free content & features, and HF2 will get similar. So yep, our gut on pricing (we thought more like $30-$35?) was wrong.

Secondly, Pacura stressed the importance of adjusting regional pricing for some countries: “We lowered the [Steam suggested] price in Poland. Steam suggests 185 PLN ($47), and we went for 99 PLN ($22.50), which is 56% of the suggested USD Steam price. This helped us boost sales in Poland to be 5% of total sales - Top 5 [in countries], just behind the UK.” (Steam last adjusted Polish prices when USD was stronger against the currency.)

Secondly, the team’s manually chosen price of 182¥ ($25) in China “was too [expensive] for Chinese players”, so the House Flipper 2 team changed it down to 136¥ ($19) just after Steam Winter Sale ended, and sales in China started picking up. (You can see House Flipper 2’s current prices vs. Steam’s suggested prices here on SteamDB.)

And that’s all the wisdom we have on House Flipper 2! It looks to have a good ‘long tail’ ahead of it, given the lack of competing games, and interest from its core fanbase. And its debut is definitely how all of us wish sequel launches would go…

December 2023’s most-streamed games? These!

December 2023’s most-streamed games, in millions of hours watched.

Once again, we’re teaming with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which grabs data from lots of game streaming platforms: “Twitch, YouTube Live Gaming, Facebook Live, AfreecaTV, Kick, Steam, NaverTV, Trovo, Rooter, Nonolive, Openrec, Loco, Mildom, DLive, VK, KakaoTV, Garena LIVE, Booyah.”

The Stream Hatchet folks wrote about the Top 20 most-streamed games of Dec. 2023, but again gave us a much bigger list of the Top 100 games (Google Drive doc), which we’ve annotated - lots of interesting month-on-month comparisons here.

Rounding up what we think are the most interesting trends here:

• Grand Theft Auto V got even bigger in December: firstly, GTA Online’s twice-yearly update spawned ‘The Chop Shop’ expansion, which lets you run “an illicit salvage yard business” (!) This, plus doubtless some residual hype from the GTA VI announce, took hours watched from 127m in Nov. to a massive 207m (#1) in Dec.

• The Finals was already ‘hot’ - but did better at official release: looks like Embark’s destruction-heavy shooter is one of the only new F2P hits of 2023. It’s averaging about 75k CCU (concurrents) on Steam right now, we estimate it at 475k DAU across PlayStation & Xbox, and it hit 14.5m hours watched (#26) in Dec. 2023 after its ‘surprise’ debut, up 6.1x from Nov’s beta coverage.

• Call of Duty: Warzone, Rust & Path Of Exile all spiked due to new content: the first season of Call Of Duty: Warzone for Modern Warfare III debuted in December, sending Warzone ‘hours watched’ up 3.8x to 49.6 million (#8). Elsewhere, Rust’s 10th anniversary celebrations helped boost it up 3.5x to 32.6 million hours (#12), and Path Of Exile’s Affliction expansion 8.1x-ed its to 23.4m hours (#19).

• Top debuts for the month include a rare non-Steam PC game: Escape From Tarkov: Arena, a standalone game which brings arena matches to the PvPvE extraction shooter standout, had 9.8m hours watched (#35) in beta. Other new games? The Day Before (#41, RIP!), House Flipper 2 (#51), Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora (#54), and a beta of open-world survival game Once Human (#60). Oh, and Ready Or Not surged to #45 on its 1.0 release, and God of War Ragnarök had a massive 12.3x boost to #69 for its Valhalla free roguelike DLC.

Finally, you might not even be paying attention to Moonton’s mobile MOBA Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (similar to League of Legends - heck, Riot unsuccessfully sued them twice.) But this game continues to be huge in Asia, and the M5 World Championships (woo, eSports!) led to a 2.7x boost to 65 million hours watched (#4).

Overall, we dig this Stream Hatchet data because it gives you a really clear view on the most popular GaaS (games as a service) titles that players enjoy watching - and how new expansions affect popularity. This is quite tricky to see elsewhere…

The game discovery & platform news round-up…

Game sub services used by UK gamers, according to this OFCOM report.

So let’s finish off this week’s newsletters - except for the Plus-exclusive Friday one, of course - with a look around the news stories that popped up since Monday. We’ve got:

• Steam has updated its policy on AI content, with approval for pre-generated AI content in games if “you promise Valve that your game will not include illegal or infringing content”, and the need to “tell Steam what kind of guardrails… to ensure it's not generating illegal content” if it’s ‘live AI’. Also: the Steam store page discloses a game’s use of AI, & there’s ‘illegal AI content’ Steam user reporting. (Good?)

• Ayaneo’s neat-looking Next Lite handheld PC will come pre-installed with SteamOS (which is free to license/use for them, btw), one of the first commercial devices that isn’t the Steam Deck to do so. (Why? Because Microsoft is incentivizing hardware makers to ship handheld PCs with Windows, we suspect.)

• Apple has been talking up gaming on the Mac again, with Apple’s Leland Martin telling Inverse that due to unified chipsets between iPhone, iPad and Mac: “Once a game is designed for one platform, it’s a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We’re seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village.” (Though it’s still unclear if there are games that will be designed to be cross-hardware popular.)

• Like game studios, platform companies are having a messy time with layoffs - game engine/ad monetization firm Unity is laying off 1,800 (25% of the company) in a “company reset”, and Twitch is cutting 500 (35% of staff), amid reports it has never been profitable. And it’s unclear if/when things will improve…

• Xbox has a ‘Developer Direct’ livestream coming up on January 18th which showcases a variety of first-party titles (MachineGames’ Indiana Jones title, Obsidian’s Avowed, Ninja Theory’s Hellblade II), directly followed by a The Elder Scrolls Online 2024 roadmap reveal. (Clever livestream synergy here.)

• Following up Monday’s ‘size of Steam market size’ newsletter, listing nearly 80k released Steam games, somebody in our Discord asked - how many unreleased Steam games are there with live store pages? And we have that answer in our Plus back-end - we see 19,980 of them (!) (Though some are clearly never releasing.)

• As part of a Sony corporate presentation ahead of CES which showed off the Sony/Honda Afeela electric car being piloted with a PS5 controller (just a ‘tech showcase’, regulators!), the company also confirmed 123 million monthly actives on PlayStation Network in December, up from closer to 110 million in Q3 2023.

• We got official UK game charts for 2023, huh? Firstly, EA Sports FC was the top-selling game of the year, followed by Hogwarts Legacy, with PS5 sales up 55.2% YoY, but Switch down 16.7% at #2 overall, and Xbox Series S and X narrowly behind with a 14.2% sales drop. Oh, and Hogwarts Legacy was the UK’s top-selling physical game of 2023. (It’s sold 22 million worldwide, dontcha know?)

• A couple of interesting surveys we’ve been hoarding since last year: UK regulator OFCOM’s ‘Online Nations’ report for 2023 (with 7 pages about games, including game subscription adoption, above!), and Pew Research’s look at teens, social media & technology (“Roughly nine-in-ten teens say they use YouTube.”)

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ higher-tier Game Catalog for January includes Resident Evil 2, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Hardspace: Shipbreaker & more; the most-played Steam Deck games for December are headed by Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077; the most-played Switch games in Europe in 2023 start out with Fortnite, Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, Minecraft, and Mario Kart 8.

Finally, please don’t send us random press releases. But whoever provided info on this collab between U.S. chain restaurant TGI Fridays (which reminds us of Office Space’s ‘pieces of flair’ conversation) & 10 million MAU (!) restaurant management sim Cooking Fever, it was just bizarre enough for us to feature. So… congratulations?

[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.]