How a charming trailer took Gun Nose's Kickstarter to 6x its goal
Also: Switch 1 & 2 SKU splits & lots of 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 doing a rare double-header newsletter before we hit the weekend, with some Kickstarter stats and some interesting Switch SKU data mixing things up. (Hopefully not so much that we overflow the Gmail max message length, haw haw.)
Before we start, we wanted to highlight this cute NoClip mini-doc about “the rise of Dance Dance Revolution across America and the various subcultures that exist across the modern DDR world.” It’s really just fans of the dancing arcade game talking about how they got (back?) into it, but it’s surprisingly wholesome.
[WANNA CHECK OUT GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]
Game discovery news: Roblox’s 2025 winners…
Let’s finish the week in style, then, with the following game platform & discovery news:
GDCo partner Creator Games tried to estimate 2025 revenue for the top Roblox games (above), suggesting that “between Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot over $1B in revenue was generated” for Roblox - and $240m to the studios involved. The kicker? “Both were [initially] developed in less than two weeks.” Fun times!
Windows Central had an exclusive interview with new Xbox boss Asha Sharma & CCO Matt Booty, and we’re definitely in ‘mission review’ stage, per Sharma: “Right now, I need to learn, candidly. About the 'why' of these [recent strategy] decisions, what we were optimizing for, and what the data says about the Xbox strategy today.”
Discord is kicking off an apology tour for its global age checking rollout, confirming a delay to H2 2026 to get it 100% in order, including better partner transparency after some Thiel/leak adjacency, and re-iterating: “over 90% of users will never need to verify their age to continue using Discord exactly as they do today.”
The BBC discusses AAA-adjacent games being priced cheaper, with Kepler’s Alexis Garavaryan saying of the $45-50 Clair Obscur: “We’ve seen a number of larger companies increase prices quite regularly. And we’ve kind of taken the opposite action… We try to think, ‘What do we think the price should be?’ And then we price it lower.”
Matthew Ball’s new report is also making headlines over its game biz growth math, as “Roblox alone accounted for 67% of all non-China growth [in 2025], as its share of total consumer spending… across PC, console, and mobile exceeded 4.5%.” (Reminder that 80% of Roblox’s DAU is on mobile, 17% on PC and only 3% on console.)
Is this hot advice or survivor bias re: your Steam page?: “If you’re waiting on a publisher to put your Steam page up, you’re donating leverage. I had a sales call this week where a studio told me: ‘We’ve held back the Steam page because the announcement is our biggest moment.’ But here’s the problem: momentum doesn’t wait for permission.”
The folks at Nodal.gg have fun consumer-first Steam game recommendation visualization they have for here’s ‘games like Noita’, for example. (It uses both tag/metadata overlap and owner/player overlap from public profiles to visualize.)
What happens if you make your game free on Steam for 4 days to help promote a follow-up? The folks who made Paragnosia tried that, and “more than 3 million free units were claimed, for 150K lifetime unique users”, with +6.5k wishlists in 4 days and 23k demo licenses to the new game, Paragnosia Museum.
The U.S. state of New York is suing Valve over loot boxes in Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2, saying that “in Counter-Strike 2, the loot box process ‘resembles a slot machine’ and this design is similar to what casino games ‘use to entice players to spend money in the hopes of winning something valuable’.”
There’s lots of neat GDC 2026-adjacent events, but we wanted to specially highlight this Ukrainian indie game showcase, with hands-on demos of 10 titles, borscht (mm!), and a charity auction benefiting Leleka Foundation, “a U.S.-based nonprofit delivering life-saving medical supplies to frontline medics in Ukraine.”
Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ monthly March games inc. PGA Tour 2K25, Monster Hunter Rise, Slime Rancher 2; Summer Game Fest confirms post-showcase events SGF Play Days (June 6th-8th) and Game Business Live (June 8th) in LA; Reboot Develop’s parent has been given a bankruptcy order - no bueno.
How a charming trailer took Gun Nose’s Kickstarter to 6x its goal
Funnily enough, we’d already seen the YouTube trailer for ‘action-mystery noir RPG’ Gun Nose, in which you’re a robot investigating crimes & fighting bosses, having a standout Kickstarter performance ($214k pledged on a $35k goal with 16 days to go!), before its creator Addy Valentine reached out to GDCo.
So it was great timing to talk with Addy about why this 3D pixel art game, abstractly inspired by titles like Super Mario 3D World and (the v.underdiscussed) Spectrobes, really took off on crowdfunding. For me, it points to two things: the rise of YouTube as a) the home of micro-scenes, and b) discovery mechanisms for indie games.
Firstly, the headline news: Addy’s YouTube channel was only getting about 60 views a day before his KS, despite some super-entertaining videos like his Berserk Boy anime trailer making-of, he said “the channel now has 1.3 million [views] in the last 10 days” - largely on the Kickstarter trailer (814k views) and trailer song (204k views).
Our view: as more and more folks watch YouTube like TV, with platform-generated playlist recommendations of high-interest videos, you can absolutely break out despite not having many channel subscribers. And that’s what Gun Nose has done, thanks to very stylish art direction & character design, and a standout theme song.
To give you an idea of how much the YouTube trailer powered interest, here’s Kickstarter’s ‘backer source’ screen for Gun Nose. 40% of all pledges are 100% trackable to YouTube, but we’d wager another 25% at least are due to seeing the trailer there:
By the time you’ve looked at the trailer, you’ll see why a certain demographic are going bananas for it:
Great character design: Addy cites “the old Disney principles of appeal. Simple characters, simple shapes, accentuated and exaggerated features.” There’s Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori vibes, but it’s also its own thing?
An amazing theme song: a ‘30s vamp composed & performed by Addy himself (!) and arranged by Scruffy, a (550k sub) music analysis & composition YouTuber who’s a great example of the YouTube ‘microscenes’ that quietly have great output.
A good mix of pixel art cut-scenes and actual target gameplay: there’s enough of an idea of the ‘real’ game in here that you won’t be skeptical. (Though it’s not an obvious ‘comp’ for existing hit genres, so execution may still be a questionmark.)
One key point from Addy on why the trailer works so well: “I think visual storytelling… can be enhanced with contrast… The first time we see Gun Nose is he’s limping, and bleeding out, but we’re listening to something that sounds like a relaxing jazz standard. I think that contrast makes nice drama.”
So, like we said, YouTube as a discovery mechanism here is a big deal. For example, now I watched the trailer, I got a playlist add for ENA: Dating Oblivion, an animated project from the creator of ENA: Dream BBQ (22,000 Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews.) If i click on that, I’ll get similar playlist recommendations, etc, etc…
The tricky thing about these type of YouTube ‘microscenes’ is that they are very difficult to define and identify, cos there’s so many of them. But YT-native art and animation - think The Amazing Digital Circus - is a phenom that fits in adjacent to anime & creepypasta in the ‘digital native’ watcher bucket. This is all part of that, too.
In as much as he fits in, Addy’s been making pixel art & games since he was a kid, and professionally since 2014, but mainly with contract gigs, with his “most reliable income from video production with a focus in special effects and motion graphics for marketing.” Which explains why his YouTube videos are hella fun, despite not being giant.
The point here is: the digital natives are out there in their millions on YouTube, and they had to learn to do everything - Addy says: “I’ve always worn multiple hats: main artist, programmer, and lead creator.” So, fine, feel free to stare at the Warner Bros sale process. But the real story for me is ‘the rise of everyone’. And Addy’s a fine example…
Switch 1 & 2: how are players split between SKUs?
While Nintendo’s Switch 2 has got off to a record start, with over 17 million sold since June 2025, the fact that 84% of Switch 2 owners had previously owned a Switch 1 has meant some questions about which audience demographics have upgraded already.
There’s also a lot of confusion - and different approaches - from devs, given Switch 2 devkits can be difficult to procure. And if you do, you can either do a) free/paid Switch 2 upgrades for your games, or b) a standalone Switch 2 SKU, which is more common & better for charts. Or c) both, actually. (Ugh.)
Additionally, some of the above processes appear to be slow/manual. And Nintendo prefers Switch 1-only releases for most indies, since the games are also Switch 2 compatible. It’s… complex. (And additionally unfortunate if you can’t Switch 2, because the default top sellers in the Switch 2 eShop are Switch 2 SKUs.)
But we had somebody ask us about Switch 1/2 SKU splits, and we have some sales data gathered from the US/UK eShop rankings! So let’s hit it. Firstly (above), the general ratios for third-party Switch games with both Switch 1 and 2 simul-release SKUs: roughly 50% average and median, an equal split.
Secondly, by tracking chart rankings and rough Western eShop-only sales, we can get an idea of which games overperform on Switch 2 when released at a similar time:
Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s ‘core’ users of games like JRPGs (Final Fantasy Tactics, Rune Factory) that we see with the highest Switch 2 SKU % sales. The higher Switch 1 % tiers are for bigger games like Pokemon Legends & Silksong, or casual titles. (Deltarune is a weird exception because it’s true crossbuy. We think?)
Finally, here’s some smaller titles with the splits we spotted, by tracking rankings of the two SKUs separately:
Again, these seem to differ quite a lot. But it makes sense that more casual titles like NBA 2K26 have a bigger Switch 1 percentage, and the hardcore upgraders have favored Switch 2 for titles like Lynked or Dragon Quest I & II. But there’s infinite nuance - some titles also have Switch 2 upgrades, some forbid them… what a mess!
But our main takeaway is: try to get a Switch 2 standalone SKU for the top-seller eShop charts! It’s not possible to chart on that key page without one. And some Switch 2 exclusives - like Cyberpunk 2077, our top third party S2 exclusive, alongside Split Fiction and Fast Fusion - have done well adjacent to the first party hits there.