How Another Crab's Treasure goofed its way to 250k sales in <a month!
Also: a look at PlayStation's results, and a ton 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.]
Welcome to the middle of an extra-packed week, crew. What with a whole bunch of financial results hitting, and a larger amount than normal of indie hits, we’re having a whale of a time* over here. (*Pre-emptive aquatic joke for main newsletter story?)
Oh, and before we get started, thanks to today’s newsletter sponsor VaultN, which just landed seed funding for its game key distribution & upcoming PC giftcard businesses.
[Sign up now: yes, you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to a super-detailed Steam data cache for unreleased & released games, weekly PC/console sales research, Discord access, eight detailed game discovery eBooks & lots more.]
Another Crab’s Treasure: a giant (enemy crab?) hit
So you may have spotted that Aggro Crab’s game Another Crab’s Treasure - developed and self-published by a relatively compact team of 11-ish people - just launched back on April 25th for USD $30, and it’s been going places.
You may have seen some of the buzz for this unorthodox title. It’s already got almost 5,000 Overwhelmingly Positive user reviews on Steam, at 95% positivity. And it also launched into Xbox Game Pass and on PlayStation and Switch simultaneously.
So we went and chatted to Nick Kaman, co-founder of Aggro Crab - which previously put out “satirical dungeon crawler about exploring the cursed ruins of failed tech startups” (!) Going Under. And he revealed 250,000 copies of Another Crab’s Treasure sold already - ~60% of which are on Steam, 20% on PlayStation 5, and 20% on Switch*.
(*We didn’t get Xbox Game Pass download numbers. But GameDiscoverCo’s own estimates have the game approaching a million copies played already - significantly above average.)
So what, exactly, is this game? The above IGN video review has a great ‘explainer’: "It's wonderfully ironic that the biggest breath of fresh air the Souls-like genre has received in years comes from an adventure that takes place entirely underwater. Where most dodge-rolling action games are drab, bloody and Edgelord-ian, Another Crab's Treasure is bursting with bright colors, cartoonish sea creatures and silly humor.” It’s almost Spongebob-ian!
With those kind of sales just in the first month, the game is likely to approach 1 million copies sold over time, a standout. Here’s what we learned from Nick about it:
Undercutting the seriousness of other Souls-likes is the big, correct move: Nick says that “The goofy Souls-like angle is definitely one of our main hooks. It's kinda crazy that nobody else has done it… It's been great seeing people totally Get The Point. They understand that this is goofy Souls, it's "baby's first Souls" and they love that about it.”
That’s not enough, though - you need meat on the game’s bones: Kaman adds - “For a game to succeed, it needs more than one selling point. The unique underwater world is a [start]. Then the dark themes hidden beneath the goofiness is what gets people to stick with the game.… you need to overwhelm the player with selling points.”
Signature crab deaths going viral (!) have helped the game’s buzz: Nick explains: “In the opening area we put a late-game enemy as a boss, a la Tree Sentinel [in Elden Ring], who basically carries around a guillotine. If he grabs you, there's a super gruesome animation. We obviously knew this would be funny, but as soon as the game came out, that execution move was THE defining clip people saw of the game… perfect for encapsulating the idea of ‘this silly crab game is more intense than it looks.’“
Back to the ‘selling points’ angle: with voice-acting, mini-games, and complex combat mechanics, this is a deep, fully-featured 3D Souls-like, given team size. And when you see video reviews like this, raving about the “shockingly emotional character arc”, you know execution was nailed. (Besides a few camera issues & glitches.)
It’s also interesting, given what we said in the last newsletter about PlayStation & Xbox ‘AAA-like game’ sales hooks being different to Switch ‘cozy Nintendo-y’ hooks, that ACT manages to do both at the same time. It’s a rare cross-over win.
But yes, ‘good game is good and sells well’ is a relatively unhelpful takeaway. So let’s go back to Nick to talk about the team’s puckish attitude to standing out on social media - and we highly recommend checking out their TikTok, which is on fire right now:
“We've taken the approach that in order to be truly independent as a studio, we need to have our own platform. Every game we work on is a risk, and we at least need to ensure our games have a chance to break through the noise and get SOME type of attention. You just can't rely on platform-holders, press and influencers to champion us, and by cultivating our own following we make it more enticing for external parties to also give us coverage.
So, our solution to that has been investing our time and resources very heavily into social media -- where shitposting is a team effort led by our awesome community manager Paige. It helps that our team is a bunch of chronically online zoomers. I definitely think it helped give us that boost.
We're mostly known for our Twitter, but then we have this entirely different audience on TikTok. TikToks dont convert [as well] to wishlists - you kinda have to trust your gut that its reaching eyeballs there and they'll come back around at launch. [If] you have some kind of initial spark of interest, it mostly comes down to the game being good enough to follow through on that hype.”
Finally, we asked about the most surprising element of Another Crab’s Treasure’s launch. Nick nominated the creative TikToks “of people rapping over [the guillotine enemy’s] boss music. You just can't predict these things!” - though you can encourage them. (Apparently, the music is ‘straight out of Step Up 3’, lol?)
To end up, we loved Nick’s attitude to this: “Parts of the game we didn't give a second thought ended up being super memorable. You can't engineer virality, but you CAN put heart into the game, to give it as many opportunities for it as possible.” Exactly.
Automate Your Distribution Processes with Our Sponsor: VaultN.com
VaultN is one, single platform designed to manage all aspects of third-party distribution for publishers. This includes distribution of game keys, keyless activations, product codes, catalog management, and automation of pricing and promotions. Managing inventory and activation control has never been easier!
With a rapidly growing network of partners as Bethesda, Fanatical, Thunderful, and Gamesplanet, VaultN is also facilitating the distribution of GOG Keyless activations for participating publishers and will support a PC Giftcard solution in collaboration with epay soon to create complimentary sales.
Connect with VaultN today to explore how our platform can help you manage third-party distribution and boost your revenues.
PlayStation’s new CEOs, results show evolution..
We’re not going to go long on this, but a lot happened in PlayStation-land this week, so we need to cover it! Firstly, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s new joint CEOs are Hideaki Nishino (Platform Business Group), and Hermen Hulst (Studio Business Group.)
This seems like a smart move, with both Sony veterans reporting in to Sony group president Hiroki Totoki. (The only thing to watch is the ‘platform’ folks being too rigid with things like PSN implementation, which might affect the ‘studio’ side.)
And Sony’s results also hit. And we recommend checking out Derek Strickland’s graph-filled Twitter thread for a multi-year perspective, but here’s what we spotted:
PC games - led by Helldivers 2 - are on the rise for PlayStation: there’s $347 million Q4 revenue in ‘Other Software’, thanks to Helldivers 2 hitting 12 million copies sold total - a big chunk of that on PC. That segment is now 5% of total PlayStation revenue, and Sony’s mid-term planning calls out PC specifically.
PlayStation 5 hardware sales are hanging in there, but planned to dip: the company sold 20.8 million PS5s in FY2023, only 200,000 off the goal. Next: “Sony expects 18M units for PS5 in Fiscal 2024, down from just under 21M this past year & below PS4's 19M [in the same period]. Implies we've already seen the peak.”
PlayStation Network MAU’s at 118 million, up 10 million YoY: though it’s down 5 million from the holiday period, monthly active users of PSN seems to be a major way that Sony intends to measure adoption & success in the future. (Which partly explains the current ‘PC users being onboarded to PSN’ friction.)
Going forward, the forecast for the SIE division for the next year is fairly modest - with net sales down 1.5% and operating incoming up 6.8%. (So there’s no first-party Grand Theft Auto VI equivalents in the hopper in the next 12 months.)
But the post-Jim Ryan reset, moving from ‘guaranteed multi-platform GaaS hits’ with new games, to ‘spread Sony games onto other platforms like PC’, seems to be producing a more stable future. (If ‘PSN on PC’ doesn’t become a poorly rolled-out liability, and hardware sales don’t decline too rapidly….)
The game discovery & platform news, probed…
Finishing things off here, we have a host of information to impart - starting with a ‘fun’ Steam chart about player churn that probably needs some extra thinking about:
According to some new data-crunching, “the average monthly player churn for new Steam games in 2023 [is] 1.6 times [higher] compared to 2019”, if you analyze “the top [buy to play] games by the number of active players in the first month of release from 2019 to 2023 (excluding purely online games or GaaS).” Anyone wanna doublecheck?
Sony’s PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for May 2024 includes ‘free to subscriber’ titles like Red Dead Redemption 2, Deceive Inc. & Crime Boss: Rockay City, and - interestingly - The Sims 4 City Living DLC, normally $40, which requires The Sims 4 to play.
Here’s a must-read official Steam blog post around ‘your burning Steam questions answered’, which also includes Kaci Aitchison Boyle’s charming newbie-centric talk video - originally given at GDC - in a newly filmed format, as well as that Steam visibility video you’ve all already watched - right?
There’s a new U.S. player survey around discoverability which has some neat top-line findings: “YouTube (64%), TikTok (36%), Instagram (35%), and Facebook (34%) are the top platforms for game discovery… 29% more 18–24-year-olds use TikTok to discover gaming information vs 34–44-year-olds (58% vs 29%).”
Occasionally, Epic Games Store does a ‘free game’ giveaway that’s actually a bunch of DLC for a F2P title, and Firestone Online Idle RPG seems very happy about theirs: “In less than a week, we managed to get more than 100K users coming from Tier 1 countries, and doubling up our CCUs from 5k to more than 11k.”
For Nintendo, the Mario Kart 8 ‘attach rate’ (# of new Switches sold vs. # of copies of MK8 sold) is rarely <30%, and in the latest quarter it reached 71%, wow: “total [MK8] sales are now over 61.97m units and counting. Together with the Wii U version, the title now exceeds 70.43m units worldwide.”
UK and Europe’s hardware trend ouchies? In the UK so far in 2024, “Xbox Series console sales are down [YoY] just under 25%, PS5 sales are down just over 25%, and Switch sales are down 38%.” And in April alone in Europe, “hardware sales down 47% [YoY]” - due to PS5 shortages easing in 2023 & Mario movie slash Zelda bundles.
An interesting Steam automation-related note: following on from a more automated Steam Daily Deal system, many top-$ games just got an invite to be a featured game in the Steam Summer Sale via a similar interactive form. (We don’t know if games were hand-picked or algorithmically picked - or both - btw!)
One surprise standout on the top Netflix iOS/Android game downloads so far is the beguiling Storyteller, with 13 million downloads. (Though we see a _lot_ of 1 star reviews from people who didn’t realize you need a Netflix account to play.) Other top games: GTA San Andreas, Spongebob: Get Cooking, Bloons TD 6.
In continued ‘governments get mad at game platforms’ news: “The Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKIK) has initiated an investigation into the possibility of anti-competitive practices on digital distribution platforms Steam & PlayStation Network.” The press release mentions “exclusion of competing platforms, advanced exploitation of game developers and publishers, and higher prices for players.”
Those rascals at Xbox Game Pass are back again, with impressive ‘Wave 2’ releases for May including first-party standout Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, plus Immortals of Aveum, Lords of the Fallen - and most interestingly, Chinese ‘horror puzzle game’ Firework, which launches on PC only to expand regional interest.
An update by Hanna from Landfall (TABS, Content Warning) about their TikTok escapades claims “our TikTok is in its flop era”, since they’ve only (!) added 4 million likes, year on year. The info-packed thread talks about content fatigue and new approaches, like this amazing ‘live patch notes’ announce for Content Warning.
Finally, we’ve been obsessed for a decade-plus about finding a prank call that Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker (formerly a game cartoonist and journalist) made to the storied Edge Magazine. And it turns out Time Extension just wrote about it.
To explain: “Posing as a concerned parent, Brooker asks for an explanation as to why [his own cartoon] advert had been printed in the magazine which shows a dog's head being blown off. In case you weren't aware, Brooker was involved with the high street swap shop CeX at the time and created their… print advertisements.”
So if you’d like to enjoy a youthful Brooker complaining about his own cartoon, then discovering that Edge ‘only’ has a circulation of 30,000 copies and proclaiming it’s “practically a parish magazine… do you deliver it by hand, on a bike?” - enjoy:
[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.]