How 'Do No Harm' grossed ~$500k in Month 1 on Steam!
Also: key GDC talks now up for free, our new sponsorship, and 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.]
A fresh week, and here’s fresh game discovery news-related meat to flay for your ‘information BBQ’ purposes, here at GDCo. (We’re proud to be your local purveyor of sustainably sourced, grass-fed Steam back-end stats since 2020, or your money back.)
Before we start, we love that Paul Rudd updated his 1991 U.S. Super Nintendo TV commercial with a brand new one - in the same outfit and haircut - promoting the imminent Switch 2 launch. Whatever’s next - rebooting Pitfall and getting Jack Black to promote it in a pith hat? (He did the pith hat thing in Jumanji already, I guess…)
[IF YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW: signing up to GameDiscoverCo Plus gets more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord access, data & lots more. And companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 55+ have.]
GameDiscoverCo x paid media: a Baller move, or?
Reveal: GameDiscoverCo has made its first ever paid partnership. But we didn’t dive into CPM-based social media ads. Rather, we’re a proud sponsor of the Oakland Ballers, a minor league baseball team based out here in Northern California.
But why? Most of the fans who see our outfield sign or co-sponsored ballgame won’t be signing up for GameDiscoverCo Pro, right? Sure - but let’s do our traditional bullet-point breakdown:
The Ballers have a compelling story & social media to learn from: they were birthed from the major-league Oakland As leaving the city, and are trying some great PR stunts - ‘rescuing’ old A’s elephant mascots, getting Green Day’s Billie Joe & local rapper Too $hort to join the ownership group, & lots more.
We’ve got a ‘hook’ that works with our regular community: most of you don’t live here. But the B’s mascot Scrappy The Rally Possum - inspired by the Oakland A’s on-field interloper in 2014 - is perfect ‘game jam’ fodder. (More on this shortly!)
You’ve got to support your local communities: we know that many industries are global. But where you work and live, physically, still matters. That’s why we co-run a local game dev meetup and now support the Ballers. Please do similar for where you hang?
Anyhow, you won’t be hearing from us weekly on the Ballers’ playoff prospects, since that’s officially ‘not what you signed up for’, heh. But stay tuned for more info on that contest we’re hinting about - with some prizes you might dig. And.. go Ballers!
Discovery news: Rematch’s free Beta volleys it in..
Continuing with a whole buncha game discovery & platform news - and fine, also some ‘trending games’ content too - here’s what we’ve got:
Checking GameDiscoverCo's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 7-day new follower velocity from April 14th to 21st, PvP soccer game Rematch (#1) - from the Sifu devs - has gone really big, thanks to a free Beta that peaked at 134k CCU on Steam (!) It's paid - not F2P - on launch, but it's sure got a lot of hype.
Besides Bungie's Marathon (#2) & just-releasing RPG Clair Obscur (#3), Hell Express (#4) is a newly revealed isometric co-op shooter where you “shuttle cargo between the living world and Limbo." Shades of Death Stranding in here too, right? And the XCOM-y Star Wars Zero Company (#5) also has some decent buzz.
We’re lucky in ‘digital games’ that we don’t have the immediate tariff issues of physical board game publishers. For them? Stonemaier Games (Wingspan) are suing the U.S. president, noting: “For [us] alone (a US based company in which all 8 employees are US citizens)… [we’ve got] upcoming tariff payments of nearly $1.5 million.”
Another ‘Microsoft Game Dev x GDC 2025’ talk that’s worth checking is the one on ‘the Xbox Experience on PC’, i.e. the Xbox PC app. There’s a lot of platform details, and one particular graph showing Xbox PC app MAU growth since 2022 (no Y axis, obviously!) which shows a decent MAU boost in the last 6 months as the ‘Xbox Everywhere’ campaign kicks in. (It still may be relatively modest, tho.)
AppMagic’s Andrei Zubov notes that he thinks Balatro is the best ‘premium mobile’ launch since Minecraft. The mobile game estimation service has it at $15.3m on iOS/Android since Sept. 2024, compared to other recent launches like Loop Hero ($700k since April 2024) or Dredge ($450k since Feb.) Impressive…
‘Influencer program’ firm Lurkit has an interesting update on creator ‘terms of service’, showing how it’s battling bad actors. It’s banning creators for ‘repeated key spamming’ requests, ‘botting followers or views’, ‘embedding’ streams in websites where nobody’s watching, & ‘paid raid services’ on Twitch. (Good for ‘em.)
Ryan Rigney took a comment of mine on the game industry ‘deprofessionalizing’ (a charged word!) and ran with it in his latest newsletter: “Old games are killing new games… the world’s biggest games studios now struggle with distribution… indies (at least some) are thriving…. each of these trends ultimately drives career professionals from the traditional, professionalized side of the games industry.”
The latest StreamElements & Rainmaker.gg data trend analysis for Twitch reveals that in March, daily hours watched dipped vs. Jan & Feb - from 57m to 54m. Elsewhere, Marvel Rivals is still near the Top 10 watched games, even as Monster Hunter Wilds hit Top 10 in March but is already “not in the top 20” in April so far.
Former Manticore (Core) exec Dan Fessler has a smart thought on a new set of ‘Roblox-killer’ UGC AI solutions’ : “Creators almost always follow where the players are, not the other way around. Most UGC success stories revolve around a host game experience that was already successful.” Yes, hit game first, then UGC…
The creator of Garbanzo Quest has a new YouTube video, slightly hyperbolically called ‘I Made One Of The Best Indie Games Of 2024 And Nobody Noticed’, revealing 700 sales in Week 1 on Steam (and 2,700 copies LTD.) Worth watching & considering how tricky it is to add reach for HQ titles with marginal ‘hook’.
Hit extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov - one of the great hold-outs from Steam on PC - has announced that “[version] 1.0 is coming in 2025, and that a Steam version is coming after that release.” Oh, and spinoff PvPvE shooter Escape from Tarkov: Arena will arrive on Steam before the 1.0 version of Tarkov.
Microlinks: Roblox is launching regional pricing, ft. auto-determined “optimal local prices” for in-game items; Xbox made it possible to buy games & DLC, join Game Pass from the Xbox app on mobile; retro game console maker Anbernic suspends US shipments due to tariffs.
How ‘Do No Harm’ grossed ~$500k in Month 1…
Sometimes we sneak up on developers & hit them over the head until they give us transparent data from their popular Steam games. But in the case of Do Not Harm dev Darts Games, we didn’t have to, because they made a giant Reddit post about it.
The Azerbaijan-based creators of the ‘Lovecraftian doctor simulator’ are actually part of our GDCo Plus Discord. And we were delighted to see their post-release numbers after their game’s March 6th, 2025 Steam release, as follows:
Steam wishlists at launch: 105,000 (after a strong demo, Next Fest and trailers)
Day 1 on Steam: 7.5K units / ~$82K gross
Week 1 on Steam: 26K units / ~$280K gross
Month 1 on Steam: 44K units / ~$480K gross
While we don’t know the continued trajectory, it’s likely the game will get towards $1 million gross on Steam in Year 1. That’s not bad for a title that was one of three internally developed as part of a one-year dev push from the 13-person team.
The full post from Darts’ Novruz Javadov has a lot more on what happened during development, but here’s what we found the most fascinating:
The ‘intentionally descoped’ game concepts led to a lot of focus: short dev time meant, for the team “hard scope limitations - e.g., the entire game had to take place in a single environment.” The two were ‘A Papers, Please-style spooky doctor sim’ and ‘An FTL-like steampunk mecha game’, and the former won out.
The game launched - arguably - a bit early, for budget reasons: the devs admit - “With hype at its peak and funds running low, we released on March 6, just 1 hour after finishing the final build.” And if you look at the Mostly Positive reviews, it’s clear more polishing and alpha testing of the full game would help gameplay honing.
Good understanding of hook and antecedents: people love occult-y alchemy simulators - see Potion Craft - and also that Papers, Please style ‘checkboxes for people coming to visit you’ gameplay (see also Contraband Police.) And so, honestly, the game hook - and visuals - are ‘on point’.
We’ve been talking to people about being too ‘clever’ with game design mashups, and Do No Harm is a great example of a game hook that is both visually & thematically clear! (Look at the above screenshot - do you understand what to do? Yes!)
So it’s tricky. We don’t want to stop y’all being creative, but there’s all kinds of fascinating game design decisions you can make that a) are interesting and playable but b) are way more difficult to communicate to the player who hasn’t bought yet. This is the idea of ‘game discovery legibility’, which is important and underdiscussed.
There’s a lot more interesting elements in the full postmortem, including the following advice and views from the team:
Don’t wait around for a publisher: the team reckons - “Unless you're an established name or have an amazing or highly addictive near-finished vertical slice, publishers will likely pass. Meanwhile, a live Steam page can help generate community interest and improve your bargaining power.”
Doing a pre-Next Fest demo helped perfect Next Fest: “Having the demo early paid off. It generated word of mouth and allowed us to polish.. Next Fest then took the demo results to the next level. We cracked the top 50 demos with a median playtime of 52 minutes despite having only 7 days worth of content (each day being 6 minutes long).”
And that’s what we see for this title - perhaps not a multi-million seller, but a popular title - GDCo has it in the Top 25 for Steam debuts for March 2025 by units sold - and a key success for a team that wanted to ship a debut game in style.
Takeaways from GDC 25’s top free-to-watch talks!
Many of you may keep up with useful Game Developers Conference talks via its free YouTube channel, which I actually started and kept scheduled with neat lectures during my time at GDC. (There’s some real out-there talks in the mix, folks.)
But the GDC Vault - which has the full GDC talk line-up available to conference pass holders - also puts out a whole heap of talks for free, many of which don’t make it to YouTube swiftly (or at all!) And there’s 220 new free talks from GDC 2025 up there, as of a few days ago.
So let’s pick some top game discovery-centric talks and takeaways, as follows:
Wout van Halderen’s talk on marketing Balatro might seem redundant - ‘surely that game markets itself?’ But things like the invite-only Jimbo’s Invitational tournament before release really were effective marketing on top of a killer hook.
ICO’s Thomas Bidaux has a talk on video games & crowdfunding, grabbing best practices from successful campaigns, which definitely includes a slide with ‘don’t announce your stretch goals’ on it (lol!), but also has nice takeaways from the Kickstarters for Trash Goblin, Broken Sword Reforged, and more.
The Independent Games Summit has a lot of good free content - Derek Lieu & Dana Trebella on the importance of showcases & festivals in your marketing, with Walt Destler talking in the second half of that time slot about the “free during development” choice he made for Cosmoteer, and how it paid off.
Also at IGS (which, disclaimer, I co-founded ‘way back when’, but don’t work on any more?) There’s Billy Basso on the creation of tiny-footprint hit Animal Well, the Caves Of Qud & Dwarf Fortress folks talking about ‘what even is 1.0?’, and the ever-popular Indie Soapbox, which is a bunch of microtalks from indies.
Jason Della Rocca’s Funding Futures series included a panel on “the logical and self-justification for self-pubishing”, with Landfall, popagenda, Innersloth & Ghost Ship Games folks. (Some interesting chat re: the rise of ‘publishing service providers’.) Also notable: a publishing panel w/Hooded Horse, Digital Bandidos & Pocketpair.
Finally, my tiki bar compatriot Chris Zukowski (HowToMarketAGame) did a killer talk on ‘marketing your game under the new Steam rules’, full of crunchy info on demos unlocking visibility, playtesting and iterating the right way. Folks, he’s a good presenter AND he knows what he’s talking about - the duofecta!
There’s also a few platform talks that are worth checking - Discord’s overview of their platform for game devs, how Epic Online Services works for Easy Anti-Cheat, Chris Charla on the history of Xbox (with Leo Olebe on the future!), and Chris Pruett on Meta’s XR pivots and the changing VR market. Oh, and for out-there goodness, GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Showcase is always worth perusing, right?
So sure, the vibes were a little weird at GDC this year. But please take some time to watch some of these talks. Why? These people spent a lot of time making something considered and helpful. And a lot of their time, it’s not even for commercial gain, it’s for ‘helping’. And you’ve gotta love people who help. Toodles…
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm 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 real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]
Go Ballers! I’ll keep an eye out for your sign at the games!