How Heroes Of Hammerwatch II hit 300k sold, fast!
Also: the most-watched games on February & a bonanza 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.]
Jeepers creepers, GameDiscoverCo is back. And we’re looking forward to snaring that pesky ghost that’s scaring all the kids at the abandoned carnival… in addition to our work telling you about the latest PC and console game discovery trends, of course.
Before we start, we’ve previous referenced weird masocore ‘person is a vehicle’ game Get To Work, which is way cleverer than it looks. Well, its creators just got a million-view YouTube video (in 3 days!) deconstructing the game’s speedrunners. V.watchable!
[FYI FYI FYI: beef up your GameDiscoverCo access by subbing to GDCo Plus, inc. more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord, basic data & lots more. And companies, get even more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 50+ have.]
News: Clair Obscur, Schedule I trend on Steam…
Let’s kick off here with a look at some of the most important game discovery & platforms news since late last week:
We took a look at the trending unreleased Steam games (by 7-day follower increase, above!, discovering Mecha Break (#1) coming back down to earth, but still topping the charts. But surging turn-based & real-time RPG Clair Obscur (#2) dropped embargo on press/influencer previews last week - to good effect.
Elsewhere, first-person drug dealer sim (!) Schedule 1 (#3) has much influencer play on its demo, and in new entries, Bitcraft Online (#5) is an ambitious-looking 'true single-world MMO', and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 & 4 (#11) brings back the classic skateboarding game, again.
Windows Central is reporting that “Microsoft's first full foray into PC gaming handhelds begins with a partner device set to launch later this year”, suggesting “working with a PC gaming OEM (think ASUS, Lenovo, MSI, Razer, etc.) on an Xbox-branded gaming handheld” with an Xbox guide button & “Xbox design sensibilities.”
Here’s some interesting extra analysis on Twitch streamers and Next Fest games. Of the Top 100 most-watched Twitch creators, only 5 streamed NF titles. And the Top 5 NF games by hours watched were Mecha Break (1.49m hours), RoadCraft (340k hrs), Fellowship (340k), Gothic 1 Remake (235k), & Solarpunk (179k).
Keeping up with new video game Kickstarter trends via ICO’s newsletter, three mid-sized campaigns launched this week: Mongolian horse-riding adventure Windstorm ($169k so far), Lovecraftian sequel The Sinking City 2 ($335k), and ‘tiny person’ 3D adventure Elusive ($167k). (Campaigns of this size are semi-rare.)
‘Gorilla Tag, but Lethal Company-ed’ VR F2P hit Animal Company just hit 1 million MAUs on Quest, is apparently profitable, and “took the number one spot as Quest’s top-earning title this week”, outperforming the $100m-grossing Gorilla Tag. Smart.
In more ‘logon spaghetti’ news, Forza Horizon 5 on PlayStation 5 requires an Xbox account, even though “Forza Horizon 5 for PS5 does not carry over save files from Xbox or PC.” To be fair: “Microsoft [noted] that this is the same behavior between the Xbox and Steam versions of the game, where game files are separate and not synchronized.”
Metacritic put out its 2024 game publisher rankings, using only critic reviews, with Sega at #1, “buoyed by the massive critical acclaim for the JRPG Metaphor: ReFantazio”, and the Top 5 rounded out by Capcom, Aksys Games, Sony, and Focus Entertainment.
Interesting to note that Split Fiction isn't included in EA's Play subscription at launch, not even the more expensive EA Play Pro tier. (To be fair, EA’s subscription only ever promised launch access to "select new games". But perhaps Xbox’s ‘everything’s included’ approach has created expectations.)
Here’s a smattering of new Switch 2 hardware info, via the U.S. FCC’s radio tests: “The Switch 2 will have NFC and Wi-Fi 6… plus, the new second USB-C port can be used for charging.” However: “It’s unclear from these tests whether the Nintendo Switch 2 has faster charging speed or more power when docked.”
Oh, and GameDiscoverCo just took delivery of Phaidon’s art book Made By Mschf, documenting the art-pranksters of Big Red Boot & ‘satan shoes’ fame. It’s notable to us because it has a section on banned Steam game Tax Heaven 3000, which was a dating game also “designed to prepare 2022 US federal income tax returns”. (We’re sold.)
OUR SPONSOR: A simple way to track game marketing opportunities
The Metaroot Opportunity Bot alerts you to Steam event submissions, funding opportunities, and content creators looking for games. Get instant notifications and deadline reminders. Last year alone, we covered 250+ opportunities to help developers maximize their chances to get discovered.
Customize alerts, tagged roles, and even the bot’s appearance. Never miss a chance to showcase your game. Set it up on your personal Discord and stay ahead with our event tracking.
Get 80% off your first month with the code 917B9. Don’t miss valuable marketing and funding opportunities! Sign up now on Patreon or just search for Metaroot Opportunity Bot and claim your trial.
Heroes Of Hammerwatch II: how it hit 300k fast…
We’ve been keeping an eye on co-op top-down 3D roguelike ARPG Heroes Of Hammerwatch II ever since its impressive Steam debut on January 14th. Why? It maxed out at a hefty 21,000 CCU, and it’s #6 by LTD units sold for Jan. 2025 debuts.
So we were delighted when we were intro-ed to its devs at Scandinavian studio Crackshell. When we talked to co-founder Jochum ‘Hipshot’ Skoglund, he presented a fascinating portrait of the studio’s history leading up to the ‘last gasp’ debut of this game.
Before we get there, here’s the Steam back-end overview for Heroes Of Hammerwatch II up to late Feb, about 6 weeks after launch, at which point it had sold 302,000 units:
Revenue-wise, $4m USD (before the 30% Steam platform cut!) is a great start for HoH II. But we’d presume that its lifetime revenue - depending on what the devs do with it - is likely to be ~3x this figure or more, just due to ‘long tail’ sales and discounts.
The game only has English language translations right now. So it’s def. leaving $ on the table there. It’s particularly popular in the United States, with 49% of units from there. That’s followed by Canada and Germany (7% each), the UK and Australia (4% each), and the Russian Federation (3%).
The game’s a palpable hit! And we want to draw your attention to the median playtime of 10 hours and 13 minutes. That’s a high number, and speaks to the depth and replayability of the game. Here’s GameDiscoverCo Pro’s estimates on LTD hours:
To understand what the game is, we recommend this ‘impressions video’ by a YouTuber, who explains it’s a “roguelite hack and slash action RPG with great character and class progression, and a rewarding permanent progression system”, as you fight through randomly generated dungeons, building your character and a persistent settlement.
It’s part of the long-running Hammerwatch franchise, which have been low-profile hits for >a decade now. They include 2013’s Steam co-op ARPG hit Hammerwatch, the OG Heroes Of Hammerwatch from 2018, and interestingly, 2023’s Hammerwatch II, which was not a big hit, got Mixed reviews, and led to company downsizing.
What happened there? Well, Hammerwatch II is much closer to an actual CRPG in places, with complex story and systems, the original aim of the dev. Jochum says “we made the game we were supposed to make from the start” when they shipped HW II.
But he also concedes: “Heroes of Hammerwatch is just using a more attractive formula [that’s accessible] for more players.” You even see this comment in a Steam player review for HWII: “Regarding the negative reviews, I’d say these players don’t enjoy a long-term RPG journey - they just want a hack-and-slash experience like in rogue-like games.”
So Heroes Of Hammerwatch II (above) was developed as Crackshell wound down operations: “The team was around 9 people, but was gradually decreased to become only one developer the last few months up until release.” Jochum tells us: “We said we'll make one last game. After 12-13 years, it felt like a good time to take a break.”
And it turns out their ‘last game before a break’ will end up being the biggest of their history by revenue. (But Crackshell’s previous games were larger than you might think. GDCo estimates the original Heroes Of Hammerwatch at ~850,000 units, a serious ‘sleeper hit’.)
Anyhow, to understand the (big!) niche that HoH II is hitting, here’s GameDiscoverCo Pro’s tag cloud for ‘similar games by enhanced player overlap’. Some strong trends at play:
Looking around specific games making up this list, we see hit comparisons like Necesse & Ravenswatch (the closest, feature-wise?), Barony (first-person), Tiny Rogues (single-player), and Halls Of Torment & Death Must Die (Vampire Survivors-likes) - all with big roguelite elements, strong overlap and sales in the hundreds of thousands.
And how about marketing this ‘coup de grace’ for Crackshell? Jochum says: “To be honest, we didn't do ANY marketing at all, not even Twitter. No one except for some core fans knew about the game until the demo.” Talk about low conventional profile!
But heck, if you have a great sequel to an anticipated dungeon crawler, and you put it in Next Fest, people notice - with a Splattercat video, and a #52 ranking by follower increase during the event - out of 2,700+ games.
And look at the shape of Heroes Of Hammerwatch II’s launch wishlist (blue) and sales from wishlists (green) spikes - it’s a chunkier ‘long tail’ - particularly in the 7-10 days after launch - due to intense interest:
Basically, two things happened:
There’s a lot of ‘word of mouth’ spread for these co-op titles: since people love playing with their friends, you get a ton of ‘hey, come check this out?’ virality.
The game went medium/big with influencers: if you look on YouTube, folks like Woolie who didn’t even play that much of the first game really got into it.
Of course, underlying it all is HoH 2 being genuinely a great game, with lots of depth. One notable YouTube comment on that Woolie video: “I unironically like this game more than [Path Of Exile 2] - the game respects my wallet and is absolutely worth my time. I’ve gotten basically every class except ranger to lvl 20. It’s so much fun to play every single class.”
Finally, you might be thinking about Crackshell’s staff who were let go, ahead of the release of the game, as the company wound down. Jochum did tell us: “All previous staff who worked on the game knowing the studio will be winding down got rewarded for their staying onboard for the release.” And we really appreciate that, since sharing good fortune is the way this story should end…
Game discovery news: Feb. topped by big trio…
Finally, we again have data from livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet, in the form of Feb. 2025’s Top 100 games in terms of total hours watched via big (non-China!) streaming platforms like Twitch & friends.
We find these charts particularly helpful for contextualizing how new games are doing vs. the ‘evergreens’ that take up a lot of the attention! So - here’s the full ‘Top 100’ for Feb. 2025 (Google doc), annotated by GDCo. Our conclusions:
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was the big new hit in February: StreamHatchet has a blog post contextualizing it, but 47.5 million hours watched in Feb. was enough to get it to #9. (The only other newish game in the Top 10 was Marvel Rivals at #10, which had a 51% month on month drop, but 45.8m hours watched.)
GaaS titles Rainbow Six Siege & Rust surged in popularity: Rainbow Six Siege went up 140% to 27.2m hours (#12) following the launch of a new event & Year 10 reveals. And Rust was up 103% to 26.8m hours watched (#14) due to its Primitive game mode, featuring “four siege weapons, a new bow, shields” and more.
New entries in the Top 50 included MonHun, Avowed and Civ: not quite to the scale of Kingdom Come, but Monster Hunter Wilds launched on the last day of the month to 21.4m hours (#20) - and Avowed (#41, 6.6m hours) and Civilization VII (#42, 6.2m hours) also had respectable debuts.
Otherwise, we were surprised to see dinosaur survival game The Isle - which released back in 2015 - increasing interest by 18x to #48 (5.7m hours). But its Steam CCU chart reveals it’s been adding concurrent players for the last decade (!) It’s a slooow burner…
And late January release The Headliners - the latest in a series of Lethal Company-ish co-op ‘humor & horror’ games - jumped up to #65 and 3.4m hours watched, a breakout success. (Any predictions for how high R.E.P.O. is going to be in March’s charts?)
[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.]