How Shapez 2 surged to 250k copies sold in <a month!
Also: the PS5 Pro looms into view, and lots more 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.]
Good gracious, it’s a whole other week here at GameDiscoverCo. And we’re kicking things off with a giant data-filled post-launch look at Shapez 2 - which, frankly, we thought was going to do well on Steam Early Access, but not quite this well.
And before we get started (thanks to Mod.io for sponsoring the newsletter, btw!), we’re fascinated by the latest ‘bring Doom to a weird platform’ hack, this time via a volumetric voxel display. Almost looks like Dejarik, aka Star Wars Holochess, right?
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How Shapez 2 surged to 250k sold in <a month!
GameDiscoverco has been following the shape-sorting ‘automation game’ franchise Shapez since we did a newsletter on the first game in the series back in 2021. Frankly, we think the core ‘factory automation’ genre - which has a Steam tag and standout titles like Factorio and Satisfactory - is fascinating and probably undersupplied.
So when we saw that the game’s sequel, Shapez 2, launched into EA on Steam incredibly strong on August 15th - it peaked at 18,800 Steam players, and it’s one of the Top 5 new August releases on Steam by units sold, according to our GDCo Plus data - we reached back out to the game’s creator Tobias Springer. How, and why?
Let’s start with the top-line numbers. Shapez 2 has sold >260,000 units on Steam as of late last week (at a $20-$25 USD price point in the West), with a very high median playtime - given it’s only been 3 weeks or so - of over 7 hours. Its refund rate of 7.7% is also low-ish for an Early Access game, which can often approach 15-20% refunds.
And this is the very start of a process of promotion, expansion and discounts that’ll take the game’s #s way higher. Our recent survey on the matter says that revenue at the end of Year 3 could be about 5.5x the Week 1 revenue total. (And units will be much higher than 5.5x.) So Shapez 2 is clearly a million-seller over time…
So, how did it happen? We definitely feel like the creation of this hit was particularly well planned and organized, and wanted to point out some standout elements:
The game was playable incredibly early into development: it’s easier for a) sequels and b) mechanically-led games. But a handful of months into dev, Shapez 2 “shared the prototypes in [our] Discord” - and later Tobias “started a Patreon where we would share all the builds and get feedback.” There’s so much early iteration here!
The Shapez 2 dev team were incredibly community-responsive: Tobias adds - “We invested a lot of time in testing & communication with the community to ensure the game is liked by them. We started to involve them on the Discord from Day 1, and we did >100 surveys on basically everything - we even let them choose the art style.”
Playtesting was taken even further, later in the game’s production: Tobias notes that later on in dev: “we ran 25 [formal] playtests with >400 participants and 600 hours of playtesting. You’ll find so many issues and potential improvements.” Shapez 2 used Go Testify as a tool here - including in-game video from players - and had tests every two weeks, focusing on player onboarding & game mechanics education.
Partly because the Shapez 2 team had an existing - and excited - community, interest took off from the initial announce of the sequel’s existence in August 2022. The game made it to 330,000 Steam wishlists by launch, with the above cadence.
Quick impressions of what worked: giving away Shapez as a Epic Games Store ‘free title’ provided a decent spike, but it was the Shapez 2 demo release in January 2024, ahead of a Top 15 Next Fest appearance by peak CCU (1,340) which further helped.
Tobias adds that “the Steam Puzzle Fest worked very nicely - we were in #1 spot for almost the whole Fest” - more affirmation for unreleased games and themed Fests! He notes: “A lot of the spikes… are simply either devlogs or sales of Shapez 1… you can really see how the first game pushed the second game.” (Cross-promo of sequels is getting trickier, tho…)
As for what the Shapez 2 team didn’t see much upside from, pre-launch, we’d point to the following things Tobias highlighted:
Paid marketing: “We didn’t invest significantly in paid ads, only towards the launch. Instead, we relied on organic coverage and sent out keys to influencers that we thought would fit.”
A ‘trad media/press’-led approach: “Some were hesitant to pick it up, but then quickly followed up as they saw the success”, but overall: “We never saw a big impact from the press. I think it’s almost dead.” YouTubers led a lot of the extra virality of Shapez 2.
At launch, Shapez 2 debuted at $25, with a 20% launch discount, and an optional $10 ‘Supporter Edition’ with relatively modest extras: “two unique rollercoaster inspired track pieces for your space railways, plus 40 minutes of additional music and the full soundtrack.”
And because of the community’s enthusiasm for the game - even now it’s at 98% Overwhelmingly Positive user reviews - there were a lot of Supporter Editions sold:
As Tobias notes: “What worked really well for us is a slightly lower price - we wanted to go with $29.99 first, but went with $24.99 in the end - with a good launch discount, and then having a more expensive option for players that want to support us.” This is a clever way to increase yield at launch, without pricing people out, right?
The game’s regional sales #s were pretty much as we might have expected for this subgenre - heavy in the U.S., China, and Germany. China underperformed a bit vs. expectations, though. (Price sensitivity at launch may be why - and select Chinese Steam key resellers did very well for Shapez 2 when pricing more aggressively.)
All of these positive reactions on launch led to a really impressive ‘long tail’. (The game was still selling ~10,000 copies a day, 10 days after launch!) Here’s Tobias’ extended - very interesting - comments on positivity towards Shapez 2:
“I think it was somewhat of an upwards spiral - some players even started commenting below the (few) negative reviews and giving away clown awards to them. And some left positive reviews but with negative contents. It felt like nobody wanted to ‘lower’ the positive review score, maybe because we’re a small studio, or due to how we communicated with players.
I think also the ‘overdeliver’ approach (we did treat it as the 1.0 release internally) i.e. releasing with almost no bugs, good performance and a fleshed-out & playtested tutorial and UI/UX seemed like a welcome change for an Early Access game that positively surprised vs. player expectations.
I think nowadays it’s better to cut on game length but ensure the game is a great (and unique) experience, even if that means it's shorter. Players really don’t seem to have the tolerance for mediocre UI/UX, missing tutorials and bugs anymore, as the market is very saturated, even for EA.”
Finally, when we were DM-ing with Tobias in July, we told him we “would be surprised if you did less than 2k CCU” at launch, and 3k concurrents - ~60,000 Week 1 sales - seemed quite possible. Here’s Tobias’ estimates from the day before Shapez 2’s launch:
The actual results? At least six times as much as we expected from a CCU perspective, and beyond ‘Unexpectedly good’ in the above table. So we’re in a ‘nobody knows nothing’ scenario on game launch. But when you set up yourself for success, as Shapez 2 did in multiple ways (inc. game quality!), you shouldn’t be surprised if you overperform.
There was so much more we wanted to go into - for example regional pricing (Tobias notes “some regions, esp. Poland really have outdated [Steam] price recommendations”) and Linux (Shapez 2 did a dedicated version because the OG had one, but prob wouldn’t do it again, due to tech support issues.) But we’re out of time & space. Onward…
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The game platform & discovery news round-up…
And let’s finish things off with a flourish, here, thanks to a whole bunch of game platform and discovery news, including… this:
Late-breaking news: Mark Cerny’s technical presentation on the PS5 (above) was not, in fact, relaxing ASMR (maybe it was, indirectly?), but the official announce of the PlayStation Pro for a Nov. 7th release date, with an upgraded GPU and ray tracing, but a hefty price tag ($699.99 USD, €799.99 EUR.) Here’s a hands-on.
Lots of ‘hot takes’ on the PS5 Pro abound: Matthew Ball says that “Pro products are supposed to generate positive margin dollars by selling to price insensitive super users”, and Chris Dring notes that when GTA 6 launches, “Sony will (probably) be able to say that the game looks and runs best on PS5 Pro.” (It’s a high-end, opt-in product.)
Roblox’s developer conference had a lot of news: “new opportunities for creators to earn, including commerce, which enables creators to sell their physical merchandise within experiences… a higher developer revenue share for paid access experiences; and a Creator Affiliate Program that rewards creators for bringing new users to the platform.”
A little tidbit re: Steam bundle visibility we’re not sure everyone knows: on your game page, it will ‘automatically’ show the 3 currently highest-revenue bundles (your game bundled with DLC, or bundled with other games.) That’s true even if you’ve made many more bundles than that - and some publishers have, haha.
Want to understand the universe of YouTube channel sizing by subs? This fascinating infographic shows that, across 63 million+ tracked YT channels (!), if you made it to 10k subs, you’re in the top 4.9% channels, if 50k subs the top 1.55%, and 500k subs the top 0.2%. 0.2%? Still 128,000+ channels! (YouTube is biiig.)
HowToMarketAGame catches up with the dev of Terminus: Zombie Survivors, which had a super slow Steam Early Access launch in 2021, but just hit 2,200 CCU at 1.0, years later. (Comeback story!) HTMAG’s conclusion: “the lack of marketing… the fact it was Korean-only, and that the game was never discounted meant that the low sales at EA launch were not indicative of the quality of the game.”
Here’s an alleged ‘leak’ for 2024 year-to-date July console sales in select European countries: PlayStation 5 has sold 1.5 million units (-23% year on year), Nintendo Switch 780k units (-32%), and the Xbox Series consoles just 210k units (-38%). (Xbox has never been very big in Europe outside of the UK, but ouch, etc.)
The latest Steam PC hardware survey has Chinese language users at 35.03%, with English at ‘only’ 31.17%. This is almost certainly because of Black Myth: Wukong’s popularity blow-up, tho it was close before: “Chinese briefly took the top spot from English in February 2024, but the difference was a mere 0.7%.”
‘Games as platforms’ increasing release cadence: Minecraft is releasing multiple smaller content updates throughout the year, instead of one massive one (makes sense!), and Destiny 2 is also releasing two medium-sized ‘expansions’ a year instead of one giant one. (And four ‘major updates’ instead of three ‘episodes’.)
Remap caught up with Circana’s Mat Piscatella for a PC/console trend Q&A, highlight some big ‘pushes’ to come: “The mass market consumer needs a push to spend more on gaming... EA Sports College Football 25 did exactly this… Grand Theft Auto VI and a Switch successor are likely to do the same, but to an even bigger extent.”
Wowzers, Ichiro Lambe’s Totally Human Media has created virtual influencers to showcase under-exposed games: “At the heart of the show is a custom-built system that mashes APIs, AI language models, and video production tools to create high-quality content at scale.” (This is bananas-cool tech - but we do wonder how it gets reach.)
Finally, Counter-Strike’s de_dust and de_dust 2 are incredibly iconic game levels. And now we have a mini-doc about them, as Noclip: “reveals the remarkable tale of how a teenage hobbyist (Dave Johnston) accidentally made… Counter-Strike's most iconic maps.”
[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.]