How the iii initiative shakes up the 'streaming showcase' space
Also: a look at a VR survey, and 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.]
We’re still on Easter holiday time for quite a lot of you Europeans. But less so at GameDiscoverCo HQ. So let’s go ahead and send out a fresh newsletter on this fine Spring Monday. (*wipes chocolate egg detritus off face*)
Before we get started, we’re delighted to see that the Balatro-likes* (!) are appearing already. One of the first is Bingle Bangle, which uses roulette instead of poker for the underlying game mechanic - here’s a playthrough. (*Casino games x roguelites.)
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iii initiative shifts the 'streaming showcase' space
As teased last week, the Triple-I Initiative officially announced itself late last week, and here’s the PR for “a brand new showcase aiming to elevate the top independent creators in video games”, with “major announcements and reveals from studios in charge of Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon, Hyper Light Drifter, Vampire Survivors, and many, many more.”
What’s interesting about the streaming-only showcase, which is taking place pretty soon - April 10th at 10am PDT, 1pm EDT, 7pm CEST - is probably three-fold:
It’s collectively organized, without a high-profile company fronting it: tho other showcases have obvious gatekeepers, either to pay or to grant access for free, the Triple-I Initiative is billed as a ‘collaborative event’. It originated from Dead Cells ‘continuer’ Evil Empire, but has a bit of the OG United Artists feel about it.
It’s intentionally compact, cramming everything into 45 minutes: as Benjamin Laulan, Evil Empire’s COO, says in the announce: “No hosting segments, no advertisements, no sponsorships, no extra fluff, just games.” There will be 30+ games showcased in that time - not all new, of course.
It’s got a ‘we’re not fighting for space on an AAA showcase’ vibe: for the unaware, ‘iii’ is a semi-satirical subgenre defined as “being of AAA quality while still very much being an indie game”. Talking to EGS News, Thunder Lotus’ Rodrigue Duperron (Spiritfarer, 33 Immortals) says: “We’re just trying to grab people’s attention before we get swallowed by the tsunami of the big tentpole triple-A titles.”
Look, we think being in a high-profile showcase is pretty important nowadays. It’s not ‘be all end all’. But GameDiscoverCo has tracked titles in Xbox’s summer showcase that got tens of thousands of extra Steam wishlists pretty much as default, for example.
We ran a detailed story on the best showcases to be in last year, and below is our incredibly subjective list. We suspect the Triple I Initiative will fit in somewhere between Silver+ and Gold, depending on its Year 1 reach:
Platinum Tier: The Game Awards
Gold+ Tier: major ‘former E3’-timed platform showcases (Xbox/Bethesda, PlayStation), Summer Game Fest
Gold Tier: Nintendo Direct, State Of Play (Sony) direct, Xbox Developer_Direct, Gamescom Opening Night Live, PC Gaming Show (the E3 one)
Silver+ Tier: Future Games Show (E3 one), Day Of The Devs, The MIX (E3 one), PC Gaming Show (the other ones), Nintendo Indie World Showcase, ID@Xbox showcase.
Silver Tier: The MIX (the other ones), Wholesome Direct, Future Games Show (the other ones).
Next, GameDiscoverCo had a chance to talk to the Triple I Initiative organizers, and we had three burning questions. Here’s what we asked, and how they replied:
Why preannounce the length of the showcase? Per Evil Empire's marketing director Bérenger Dupré: "We wanted to respect the viewer's time and as it's the first edition of The Triple-i Initiative, we tried to be as transparent as possible, setting the right expectations ahead of time... We've sprinkled enough surprises across the show to make sure anybody staying until the end doesn't leave disappointed.”
Why choose April for the timing of the announce? Dupré said they'd been working on the showcase "on and off" since last June, but overall, "we figured the post-GDC & pre-Summer of Games window offered a great opportunity for us and other developers that wanted or had to go live with their announcements within that window, and didn't see many other showcasing opportunities to participate in."
How are the costs split for the showcase? "The entire showcase is produced under a 'not-for-profit' angle, meaning we're not making any money off of it… [we’re] taking the full production costs and splitting them between all participants based on their trailer runtime - including us, Evil Empire paying a fair share to participate in the showcase."
Finally here’s the full list of ‘studios and friends’ associated with this first showcase, per the PR - and yes, some publishers are involved: “A44, Assemble Entertainment, Awaceb, Blobfish Games, ColePowered Games, Digital Sun Games, Drop Bear Bytes, Evil Empire, Fireshine Games, Focus Entertainment, Fumi Games, Gamera Games, Gearbox Software / Publishing, Gentlymad Studios, Ghost Ship Publishing, Heart Machine, Hooded Horse, Humble Games, Ishtar Games, Kepler Interactive, Mega Crit, Northplay, Passtech Games, Pathea Games, PlaySide Studios / Publishing, PM Studios, poncle, Quite OK Games, Realm Archive, Red Hook Studios, Stunlock Studios, The Arcade Crew, The Gentlebros, Thorium, Thunder Lotus, tinyBuild, TRIBAND, Youthcat Studio.”
The one complaint we’ve seen from devs about this? They thought a ‘Triple-I Initiative’, which was heavily teased, should be so much more than a one-off yearly streaming showcase, given the state of the biz. (Anything is possible, if you believe?)
The state of VR games in 2024: new research…
Some my remember that we recently (December!) hosted a survey from Cassia Curran of the Curran Games Agency. (It was about VR ‘star ratings to sales’ multipliers on the Meta Quest store. We’ve featured ‘state of VR’ analyses before using similar data.)
Well, Cassia, who specializes in representing VR games as an agent, has now put out her full, paid ‘2024 XR software/games market report’ co-authored by Arshea Bimal, looking at the Quest store - as well as PSVR 2, App Lab & a brief look at Vision Pro.
The authors are letting us run select highlights from the report. The first one, per the survey: “For titles released in 2021 and earlier [on the Quest store], approximately 1 in every 108 players left a star rating; For titles released in 2022, ~1 in every 101 players left a star rating; For titles released in 2023, ~1 in every 71 players left a star rating.”
The obvious asterisk on this is that casual titles can have way higher multipliers. We know that Among Us VR had ~1 in 300 players leave a rating by the time it hit 1 million sold on Quest, for example. (Escape Simulator has a similarly outsized ‘reviews to sales’ ratio on Steam.)
Still, if we take the median & apply it to the GameDiscoverCo Plus ‘# of star ratings’ charts we do for recent Quest releases, seems that many new games struggle to break 25-50k units sold. (Increased choice is obviously a big part of that: see above yearly data on new games available in the ‘main’ store, outside of Quest’s App Lab.)
Cassia’s report backs this up, suggesting that no third-party titles launched in 2023 broke $10 million gross revenue on Quest. The closest was Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, followed by Breachers and Dungeons Of Eternity - in the $7m down to $3m range.
But evergreens like Golf+ and Blade & Sorcery: Nomad just keep selling, having both grossed towards $100m on Quest alone. So yes: we’re seeing a maturing store, with incumbents continuing to receive a lion’s share of the $. Lots more detail in the report.
The game platform & discovery news round-up…
It’s a little quieter coming out of the long holiday weekend. But we surprised ourselves with the amount of interesting discovery news out there. So let’s get to it:
Some ‘wow, it was good a while back’ quotes from big indies at GDC? Darkest Dungeon’s Chris Bourassa: “The Gold Rush is over…. Certainly we got our Epic [deal] at the right time.” Slay The Spire’s Casey Yano: “I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under… and they're like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled.”
Xbox hardware news per The Verge: “Microsoft appears to be readying a white version of its Xbox Series X console without a disc drive. Exputer has published a series of leaked images of the white Xbox Series X, showing that it’s a disc-less system with the same design on the exterior as the existing black Xbox Series X.”
Given how much revenue is driven by existing games, why isn’t there more analysis of GaaS updates & community response to them? Ethan Gach is now doing just this as part of his ‘Dead Game’ newsletters - check the ‘Live Service Interrupted’ section discussing Suicide Squad, Destiny 2 & Helldivers 2.
Mopping up GDC links: veteran Rich Vogel’s thoughts on GDC are worth reading: “funding is still very tight… games as service titles are moving away from [F2P] and towards a premium pricing model with seasonal content updates.” And Chris Zukowski has write-ups of relevant Jenny Windom & Thomas Reisenegger talks.
For the heavily rumored upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro, Sony has privately revealed what it needs to see from devs to get the ‘PS5 Pro enhanced’* label: “A PS5 Pro-exclusive graphics mode that will combine: PSSR to upscale resolution to 4K; A constant 60FPS; Add or increase ray tracing effects.” (*Or whatever it’s finally called.)
Here’s an interesting interview with Niantic about Pokemon Go, in which the devs note that a Feb. 2024 tour event “was by many metrics our most successful week ever”, underlining that web store revenue - non-trackable by most third party metrics - is on the rise: “When we see third-party reports on Pokémon Go [revenue] decreasing, I can say, very clearly, that they are wrong.”
According to UploadVR: “Quest mixed reality apps can disable the annoying safety boundary, but only a handful of whitelisted developers can ship this on the Quest Store and App Lab.” Approved games so far include Espire 2: Stealth Operatives, which previously got a lot of 1-star reviews for having the boundary still in place!
As Matthew Ball notes, “The New York Times is now a gaming company on the basis of customer time spent”, at least according to Yipit data (above) for mobile, showing more time spent in the NYT games app than the NYT news app. (Not surprised.)
Cut off economically, Russia is looking at making its own game console, with the Kremlin’s recently approved industrial orders including the idea of: “organizing the production of [TV-connected] and portable game consoles… as well as the creation of an operating system and a cloud system for delivering games and programs to users.”
Two more good GDC talk write-ups, both on mobile: Supercell explains Brawl Stars’ big comeback, from an all-time low to 8.8x revenue, and how King defines a ‘good’ Candy Crush Saga level – and constantly prunes the bad ones. (We just got GDC Vault access, so we’ll see what else we can dig out from talk videos?)
Finally, you probably spotted it already, but we’ve profiled TABS creator Landfall before on GameDiscoverCo, and they regularly do an April 1st ‘funny but also real’ game drop. This year’s is Content Warning, a twisted Lethal Company ‘fast follow’ that looks genuinely well put-together, and is free today. Wonder how huge it’s gonna get?
[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, devs, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]