How Steam's personal calendar is supercharging pre-launch discovery...
People are getting excited about the focused discovery. Also: lots of platform news & this week's Steam releases.
[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.]
We’re back, and we’re still keeping an eye on the top Steam Next Fest demos - official charts are here, full rundown on Tuesday. But our eyes were drawn by fascinating fallout from Steam’s home page redesign. So that’s the lead story for today…
Before we start, exciting news for ‘f the online casino’ fans: the sole remaining Sigma Derby mechanical horse-racing game (which we have a soft spot for, tho it has terrible odds) - was just paraded through downtown Las Vegas - accompanied by Shetland ponies and mini jockeys - to its new location, the Golden Gate Hotel & Casino.
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: GTA VI pre-order panic…
Here’s some notable platform & discovery news for the rest of the week, and it’s hoppin’:
Our buddies at ICO’s Footprints.gg put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and there’s a lot of post-Summer Game Fest coverage in there: Gears Of War E-Day (release date, Xbox exclusivity), Fable (more hype, delay to Feb. 2027), Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (remake announce), & Resident Evil: Veronica again.
Grand Theft Auto VI alert: we don’t cover individual games, but GTA is practically a platform, and turns out pre-orders start on June 26th “on digital storefronts and at other select retailers.” (Don’t forget it’s initially shipping on Nov. 19th only on PS5 & Xbox Series, and big hardware demand spikes are expected.)
Further confirmation of PlayStation’s shift in exclusivity arrived via a translated quote from SIE CEO Hideaki Nishino, suggesting that “for single-player games developed in-house”, PS5 exclusivity will be more likely, but for live-service titles, “we continue to view releases on both PS5 and PC as the standard.”
Epic’s State Of Unreal keynote had a lot of tactical elements, inc. Unreal Engine 5.8’s release, an MCP AI integration for Unreal, and a more formal announce on the ‘road to’ Unreal Engine 6, which is “unifying the two major streams of Unreal Engine development - UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite - into a single product.”
A spicy take on Unreal’s moves? Thanks, M.G. Siegler: “Sweeney is clearly terrified that [Roblox is] eating Fortnite and making the case that it's taking the whole industry with it. So he's calling on everyone else to link arms and fight for an ‘open’ ecosystem… only tangentially stated is his hope/belief that Epic will power all of this via their Unreal Engine and/or – more ideally – banding together with Fortnite directly.”
Steam things: Valve added a more detailed timeline for Steam Controller orders, and tho it might change, “the current estimation for orders placed today forward indicate a 2027 date for shipping”, since demand’s so hot; the SteamOS 3.8 update inc. “initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware” is officially debuted.
Microlink, Pt.1: the latest Xbox Game Pass additions include EA Sports FC 26, RV There Yet? & Winds of Arcana: Ruination; the iOS App Store is adding bundles of app subscriptions from different companies soon; smaller Roblox devs are having issues with being spearphished & their entire games being stolen.
Simon Pulman has a good take comparing Xbox’s rationalizations to post-COVID TV streamer changes: “Subscription model temporarily divorces content from traditional performance metrics and measurement”, as “initial overspending… to hit critical mass of subscribers” kicks in, ‘til “eventually leadership… looks at performance numbers versus cost, starts asking serious questions about spend and creative choices.”
The New York Times (who dat?) kindly quoted me a couple of times for this piece on ‘repetitive labor small-biz games’ like TCG Card Shop Simulator, Retro Rewind and Tiny Bookshop. As I said: “It’s all the fun of a gradually expanding business without the worries of going bankrupt in real life.”
Legislation tings: the European Commission will ‘engage with the industry’ (rather than legislate) around the ‘keep online game servers live’ petition; the ESA has an editorial in a CA newspaper suggesting a similar proposed California act is bad: “Every dollar spent on outdated systems is a dollar not spent on building a new one.”
Denis Krasikov is having fun with Steam player analysis, and the result is a series of personas - from ‘F2P strategists’ to ‘Wishlist Watchers’ and beyond - and a breakdown of which personas own and wishlist specific games. (It’s a bit slop-py, but it’s fun sloppy! F-loppy?)
Microlinks, Pt. 2: better late than never, the Switch 1 eShop now runs radically faster thanks to an architecture change; how the split in Roblox genres breaks down; jailed FTX crypto mastermind Sam Bankman-Fried reveals he’s ‘maining’ prison tablet Android games in prison, mainly roguelike Shattered Pixel Dungeon.
How Steam’s personal calendar is blowing up…
We already did a write-up of Steam’s new homepage re-design, in which we noted that “the new Personal Calendar section is great, both the homepage excerpt & clicking through, to show games you wishlisted or could want, sorted by the last/next 30 days.” But more and more devs have been talking about the impressive wishlist effects of this section.
It’s true, if you read the Personal Calendar write-up, that games you wishlist appear in this section. But most recommends are for brand new games, based on “people with similar playtime profiles to you… [and] the games those players have been adding to their wishlist.” So it’s playtime-based rather than ownership-based, and ‘retrained’ daily.
The results have been some startling near-release wishlist increases for games. Briefly listing some on-the-record examples:
Recent launch Solarpunk revealed that, pre-release, “since the Steam website update, our wishlists exploded: 14,000 wishlists in one day; 22,000 wishlists the next day; 35,000 wishlists yesterday.”
The dev of NSFW title Vampire Syndicate said that it had: “65k wishlists before the Steam change… Getting 2,000-3,000+ wishlist adds for the past few days”, ahead of an upcoming June 25th launch.
Even smaller titles are getting decent wishlist shifts, with a horror game dev “with ~1,000 wishlists doubled them in just 2 days.” The title is question - Karjala - is out on the 23rd. So it was within the ‘30 days before release’ limit for the extended calendar.
Now obviously, some of this was novelty - a brand new tool/launch for players to check! But there’s long-term ramifications too, because, as this Reddit post notes: “The [new] calendar is on the main page by default. People used to need to click on Popular Upcoming to see your game. Now… there it is right away, with barely any scrolling.”
GameDiscoverCo also has access to another title launching in this timeframe, and can - at least abstractly - detail what it saw:
The game was adding 300-500 wishlists per day before the new homepage launch.
It surged to 5-6,000 wishlists per day directly after the Steam homepage redesign (it was already <30 days from release), before returning to a more ‘normal’ 3-4k.
When it made it into the actual front page inclusion (‘games out this week’) it went to 10,000 wishlists per day (!)
This game had 2,200 Steam followers and 65k Steam wishlists at the end of May, and recently had 4,100 followers and 163k wishlists. So the incremental from the Calendar (and launch run-up!) is 1,900 extra followers, but 100k extra wishlists.
These are extremely non-trivial numbers, but we’d expect similar for many releases in the future. So as a first takeaway: if you have decent wishlists, expect a big run-up in the 30 days before launch, due to the Personal Calendar. (And additional post-launch visibility, esp. via the full calendar.)
Of course, we’d also expect many of these wishlists to be drive-by/casual ones and less likely to convert on Day 1. (This is fine, cos you’ve banked them for later discount promos, etc. But a >50x ‘extra’ follower to wishlist ratio - partly driven by an easy one-click wishlist mechanism on the front page - implies as much.)
We’re also wondering if this will permanently alter median wishlist ‘conversion’ calculations, which we have at ‘Week 1 sales = median of 0.11x wishlist balance at launch’, with hilariously large vacillations. (Valve sez: don’t pay massive attention to wishlist conversions as a metric at all. And we get the cut of their jib there.)
Anyhow, metrics-related fretting aside, this is a very positive step. It’s boosting visibility for unreleased (& just-released) games on Steam’s home page in an intelligent new way. And with easy ‘mouseover for video/capsule description’ tech, it’s never been quicker for a player to get an impression of your game and WL/buy.
On tactics: we’d be surprised if the Personal Calendar is game-able. (Besides maybe playtime-heavy games like roguelites doing better than average, if the algo is playtime-based?) Overall, our current Personal Calendar mixes up small titles (Junkster, which topped out at 17 CCU) and some bigger ones (City Car Driving 2.0, 1,670 CCU) nicely.
Hilariously, the GameDiscoverCo Plus/Pro Discord already started discussing meta-strategy for this change, such as ‘is it better to release earlier or later in the week, if the front page Calendar widget shows Monday to Friday?’ Leading to this priceless exchange:
Following the general scheme of ‘UGC/crowdsourcing is hot right now’, Lucas has helpfully pre-written our conclusion: this is a nice new discovery booster, but “the calendar will not save you if your game lacks public interest”, and most boosts will be commensurate with your pre-boost interest. (Caveat emptwishlistor!)
This week on Steam: Zenless, Elliot, Application…
