How does Steam's 'New & Trending' chart work?

Also: some great Station To Station metrics & 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. Welcome to our first ‘summer holiday’ special edition!]

It’s the middle of the week already, and time for some more GameDiscoverCo goodness. We’re starting this one out on focusing on a key launch milestone for many Steam games - did you make it to ‘New & Trending’, and how does that work, anyhow?

Oh yep, and congrats to Gunfire & Gearbox’s post-apocalyptic co-op shooter Remnant II for hitting 1 million units sold in just four days, including pre-orders. (We did say it was “going to be massive” in our Plus-exclusive trends newsletter before it even came out - not that we’re Nostradamus-es or Hiphopopotamus-es or anything.)

[PSA: our GameDiscoverCo Plus paid subscription includes our Friday ‘exclusive’ newsletter on specific PC/console game trends, exclusive Discord access, our Steam ‘Hype’ & post-release game performance chart back-end, multiple eBooks & more. Sign up to support us!]

Steam’s ‘New & Trending’ - how does it even work?

We’ve had a couple of client chats recently where the subject of Steam’s ‘New & Trending’ box on the front page of Steam’s website/app came up. It’s the first tab when you scroll down, and features ten games at a time (and 10-20 unique titles each week?)

Firstly, it’s super cool that Valve does this. It gives valuable extra exposure to great new games in an algorithmic way, as opposed to the ‘manual-only’ new game featuring of many console platforms. (The ‘Featured & Recommended’ box on the Steam page is also partly algorithmic, btw - though also can be editorial.)

Anyhow, we realized that we haven’t seen much writing out there about how Steam’s ‘New & Trending’ section actually works. So here’s what we think we know about it, semi-verified by the pubs & devs in our Plus Discord (ping us if we missed anything):

• ‘New & Trending’ is a flag (yes or no?) for all Steam 1.0 games: a small minority (about 5-10%?) of releases every week will be awarded this flag. And you cannot be in New & Trending as an Early Access launch - your game is eligible only at 1.0 release on Steam.

• The ‘New & Trending’ flag is (generally!) decided shortly after release and is country-specific: each of Steam’s 20+ country/language regions (UK, USA, China, etc) has its own New & Trending chart. And if your game reaches a threshold of interest, it’ll pop up there very quickly (first few minutes*) after release.

• The ‘N&T’ chart is chronological by release date of game: this is an important point. You will start at the top of the chart and gradually drift down it, as newer games get the ‘New & Trending’ flag. (You cannot be ‘more’ New & Trending than another game! The same is true - in reverse - for the ‘Popular Upcoming’ chart.)

*[Exception: if you launch in the middle of the night, local time, it might take a few hours for enough people to wake up and buy/grab the game to get it New & Trending. Makes sense. And some smaller games could occasionally arrive much later if they happen to hit a specific threshold - looks like an interest check happens every now and again.]

So if you do get on this list as a bigger game, you’re often there for ‘as long as it takes for ten more games to hit New & Trending’. (But we’ve seen a game disappear from N&T a few hours after launch, and others have noted that if a small/medium-sized title has its reviews turned Mixed, it may disappear from the list, too.)

It’s also important to note that all apps (F2P, ‘free Prologue’, and paid apps) can make it to this list. So this means that the metrics for getting on the chart can’t be ‘revenue’, at least not for those titles.

You’re probably now waiting for us to reveal the exact criteria to get on New & Trending. Well… we don’t know! (Valve does, probably?) So: it’s likely that number of CCU/players in-game is one part, though it’s possible there are different criteria for different types of game. But: it works - I don’t see any popular games not in this list!

Our summary would be, simply: “you get on New & Trending by having some kind of good initial metrics (page traffic or wishlists or downloads or CCU) in the first few minutes after launch, sampled in real-time..” It’s as simple as that.

In this case, you don’t have to do anything to ‘game’ New & Trending - you just need a 1.0 release that is reasonably popular. And the threshold isn’t even that high - I see Settlemoon just made it with ‘only’ 100 CCU, for example. So that game will likely sell single-digit thousands of copies, Week 1. And that’s great extra exposure for the title.

Station to Station - how did it hit 120k WL so fast?

Obviously, GameDiscoverCo gets pitches nowadays from publishers whose games (released or unreleased!) are doing well. And perhaps the cynical among you are - ‘well, they just rolled 20 on their D20 and are now showing off about it, right?’

To which I’d say two things: firstly, if they come bearing transparent data, we’ll always have something to learn. And secondly, there’s almost always skills involved in picking the right game for today’s market - and marketing tactics. (It’s not a lottery!)

Anyhow, this brings us to Galaxy Grove & Prismatika’s Station To Station, a “minimalist & relaxing game about building railway connections”, which has done very well indeed in its Steam pre-release campaign - 120,000 wishlists in just two months, with over 70,000 unique demo players (and 23k hours played) in June’s Steam Next Fest.

Prismatika’s Jakub Racinowski sent us a very useful breakdown of the marketing phases for the game and the wishlist effects:

Drilling in to some more details, let’s try to work out why this one has been so well received:

• Firstly, it’s the cozy-gorgeous voxel visuals, dummy: watch the above Station to Station announce trailer, and you’ll get it. Jakub references the “fusion of attractive voxel-art landscapes and meticulously crafted train designs”, and the game, which had an exclusive IGN announce collab, hit >1,000 daily wishlists straight away.

• A quick follow-up gameplay trailer showed a little depth: the game is intended to be cozy/minimal, sure, but the first trailer is more about aesthetics than gameplay. So this Future Games Show ‘gameplay reveal’ trailer, now at 2 million views (!) due to paid impressions, helped build out specifics.

• The publisher did a great job of ‘timing’ Steam Next Fest: As Jakub says: “We launched a demo 11 days before the event, which proved to be optimally timed.” The demo was launched in time for Wholesome Direct & Future Games Show at ‘not-E3’, but put them in front-page 'Popular Upcoming' & 'Daily Active Demo Players' chart positions for Next Fest launch on June 19th - great extra visibility.

If you look at YouTubers playing the demo, such as this one from Orbital Potato, you’ll see that Station to Station is - maybe - more of a PC-centric resource management game than you would think, if you just saw the ‘cozy’ announce.

This is why it’s great that the Prismatika team immediately followed up with a gameplay trailer and the full demo. A lot of the people wishlisting the game have played it - or watched a streamer play it - and really dig it for its gameplay. (Again: games do well because they are in the right genre/visuals style but also good.)

Trains and voxels? It’s looking like a good combo! Thanks to Prismatika for sharing the info with us. And to end, here’s a more detailed Steam wishlist breakdown by peak:

The game discovery news round-up..

What’s ‘the media’ interested in right now? This stuff, per Footprints.gg.

Let’s polish off the free newsletters for this week with a look at some other game platform and discovery news, shall we? It goes a little something like this:

• Circana’s June 2023 U.S. game hardware and (a lot of) software numbers are out, at $4.7B, up 9% YoY, and PS5 is hot to trot: “Consumer spending on PlayStation hardware reached its highest June total since 2008, while unit sales were the highest achieved since June 2010.” Mat Piscatella’s quick hits include: “Big new premium games drove the market… HW helped a bit by new portable PC gaming hardware.”

• Talking of those new Steam Deck-a-likes portable PCs, according to WindowsCentral, following on from devices like the ASUS ROG Ally: “Lenovo is working on a handheld gaming PC dubbed 'Legion Go,' and it will sport Windows 11 for maximum PC gaming compatibility.” No indication on release timing yet.

• According to Eurogamer: “The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival - the The Last of Us rip-off that turned up on the Nintendo eShop last month - has been removed from sale [and] trailers for the game have been taken down, due to a copyright claim made by Sony.” Not exactly surprising, but there you go…

• There’s a new Steam data analysis site (yep, another!) called Steamdata.ninja out there. And one neat thing is how it uses AI and the text of Steam reviews to auto-create a list of ‘positives/negatives’ for each game - see Stardew Valley, for example. (We looked around - it seems to do it fairly accurately for most games!)

• We don’t talk about gambling-adjacent nascent Twitch competitor Kick that much. But it does have a video game category - currently headed by CoD: Warzone and Rocket League - and has top streamers by hours being tracked by Streamscharts.

• Meta VR stuff: the Meta Connect dev event is happening virtually on September 27th and 28th; Roblox already has >1 million downloads on Quest, which is presumably about 5% of the installed base; Meta is introducing “new anti-piracy measures for Quest devs; Meta’s Reality Labs division lost ‘just’ $3.74 billion for Q2.

• The latest ‘most played games on Steam Deck’ are here for July 2023, with Dave The Diver impressively heading the tally this month, followed by Elden Ring, Stardew Valley, Brotato and GTA V. (Also interesting to see Vampire Survivors-like Halls Of Torment, which went viral in mid-July, in the mix…)

• Xbox stuff: the next set of Xbox Game Pass additions round up some excellent already-released titles like A Short Hike, Limbo and Everspace 2, alongside Broforce Forever (the OG game & a big new update); Discord is “stoked* to announce” the ability to Stream to Discord is coming to Xbox soon! (*NOTE: ‘stoked’ is a Chris Charla-originated announce flavor text, please pay him royalties, thx.)

• For anyone looking to get up and running on visionOS for Apple’s Vision Pro AR/VR headset, looks like you can apply for one-day developer labs in Cupertino, London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo, and there’s also somewhere you can apply for a Vision Pro dev kit.

• Esoteric microlinks: the ADL were able to find usernames “in five categories of hate [speech] across five popular online multiplayer games”, boo; here’s the Top 50 most popular YouTube/YouTube Shorts channels ending July 23rd, for a good snapshot of the biggest influencers; in more positive news, the new Hello Kitty game for Apple Arcade “uses kindness (and Apple’s money) to avoid exploiting players.”

Finally, if you don’t know Rare’s extremely offkilter Nintendo 64 game Conker’s Bad Fur Day (basically - what happens if British schoolboy humor infiltrates a Nintendo-adjacent platformer), you will be very confused indeed by this new licensed statue:

[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.]