How this solo-dev parkour game sold >70k in a few weeks!

Also: lots of surveys & and tonnes more.

[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 GameDiscoverCo newsletter #4,305,202 (we kid, we kid!), the latest in a seemingly endless sequence of missives designed to wrestle the world of PC & console video games into submission. (Possibly with some kind of leglock.)

Today, we’re digging into a game that we haven’t seen a bunch of people talk about, but was nonetheless one of the best-performing new games on Steam - made by a solo dev with just a year’s game dev experience. (Can you tell? Heck, no!) Let’s examine…

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How Rooftops & Alleys hit solo-dev gold on Steam

We love to scour newly released standout games and then poke them robustly with a stick to ask - what’s all this, then? (Possibly using the accent of a Victorian London policeman, yes.) Which is how we found Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game.

This $16 Steam PC game was released on May 21st, and is in our ‘Top 20 most-reviewed on Steam in Week 1’ chart for all May 2024 releases, with >1,000 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews in the first 7 days - and more than 2,400 now. (The single player-only game topped out at about 1,400 concurrents so far on Steam.)

So we reached out to R&A’s dev, Michel Losch, who is based in Berlin, Germany, and made the game solo - using Unreal Engine 5 - in around 12 months. Losch is also a drum & bass musician under the name Millbrook, but tells me: “Game dev is now my full-time job.”

And there’s an obvious reason for that - Rooftops & Alleys sold 70,000 units on Steam in its first month, according to Losch, and is going from strength to strength, with close to 30,000 members discussing and modding the game in its Discord server.

So yes, here’s another micro-indie success story. But here’s what we think is particularly fascinating about it:

• For some reason, nobody had made a (competent!) ‘vanilla’ parkour game: Steam even has a ‘parkour’ tag. But the most famous games in it - like Ghostrunner - use it only as one gameplay element. Losch think some of these titles “ultimately take the focus away from the movement itself”, and he wanted to make a game without excessive grinding for progression, but with lots of fun tricks. (Job done!)

• The look of the game - and animation - are awesome for a solo title: Losch, who has previous experience in 3D art and graphic design - uses AI-assisted keyframe animation tool Cascadeur and Unreal Engine 5 in tandem. And like Bodycam, an even bigger ‘UE5 + tiny team’ hit, it shows how engines let you do a lot with a little.

• Real-life parkour is massive on social media, so why wouldn’t a game be? Losch’s first video showing the game has almost 400k YouTube views, and the game’s TikTok account has ~1m likes across all of its videos to date. Just like mountain biking hit Descenders, games based on action sports are under-represented, compared to the amount of real-life ‘sport’ social media coverage.

It also helps that Losch is handy with video skills, putting together very professional showcase videos hyping the game on YouTube and short-form media formats:

One advantage of making a game based on an already-popular real life trend? Natural SEO wins! We see the game in multiple places on the front page of Google’s results for ‘parkour game’, for example - and it’s going to be a long-term interest driver.

Who’s playing? We looked at GDCo data on player overlap, and games more than 10x as likely to be owned by Rooftops & Alleys players than the median included BattleBit Remastered, Drunken Wrestlers 2, and Boneworks. (Lovers of loose, fun physics-y titles, basically.)

As for the future of the game, which is currently a Skater XL-ish freeform experience, Losch notes: “I do plan to add some sort of progression, so players have a more rewarding gameplay experience in the long run. But that will never take the focus away from the movement itself.” (Players are also obsessed with asking about adding online co-op multiplayer modes. But it doesn’t look to be in the current roadmap.)

So what’s even the takeaway here? Definitely that this new breed of ‘Unreal Engine 5 + nice-looking animations or effects’ micro-indies are punching way above their weight, resource-wise. And it’s legit to make a game that is ‘purely’ sandbox-y and fun, as long as the ‘game feel’ (via physics and animations) feels smooth. Which it does!

Player surveys: global interest, China specificity..

Next, we actually have not one, but two player surveys to excerpt, hurray. Sidebar: we love player surveys because they’re a) the actual voices of people who game, and b) not often released publicly, because they’re not cheap to put together.

Firstly, the crew at Newzoo have a big new ‘how consumers engage with games’ report which surveyed 73,000 people on how they game. There’s a great snapshot (above) of how games are increasingly ubiquitous - playing and viewing-wise - for the young.

Highest interest things from the survey that we particularly noted:

• Older gamers prefer the ‘puzzle’ uber-genre, and younger ‘adventure’: 50% of Baby Boomers are in the ‘I played puzzle games’ boat, with nothing else getting >25%. Whereas 54% of Gen Alpha have played ‘adventure*’ games in the last 6 months. (*Adventure meaning ‘you move an avatar and do things’, we presume.)

• Open-world games get high rankings from Gen Z players: specifically, 68% of those players said they were motivated by ‘a vast open world or universe to explore’ - though storytelling and even PvP ranked fairly high with them.

• Gen Z’s top game franchises? You may have heard of them: the top eight in order (thx GameDev Reports!) are Minecraft, Call Of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite, EA FC/FIFA, Candy Crush Saga, Roblox, and Mario. (There’s some obvious overlap with most-played by DAU/MAU here.)

There’s also an interesting data point - not surprising for people who follow spend in F2P games on PC/console - that 22% of all console players are considered ‘high spenders’ (>$25 a month on average), vs. 15% on PC. There’s more in the full report.

There’s also a new report from Niko Partners on the Chinese market which is pretty interesting. We’re actually just going to quote the lead paragraphs from the announce verbatim:

• PC gaming is seeing the largest increase in individual spending this year, with 62% of PC game spenders [in China] saying they spent more this year than they did last year. Further, 19% claim they spent at least 30% more than they did last year.

• Steam maintained its position as the #1 PC game distribution platform in China, with gamers primarily accessing its international version without a VPN. Nearly 80% of PC gamers that play premium games use Steam.

• The Mini Game segment has emerged as a major growth area within mobile gaming with approximately 650 million gamers playing them. According to Niko Partners’ survey, two-thirds of mobile gamers are playing mini games daily or several times a week.

There’s more information on this Niko survey over here. And it’s nice to see somebody surveying the China market on PC games specifically - given trends we’re seeing on Steam.

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

We’re not calling you out, Supermarket Shriek or, uhh, The Clash.

Here’s a funny follow-up (above) to Wednesday’s Steam ‘Simulator’ analysis. As we said on X: “Supermarket Simulator hasn't launched on PS4 or PS5 yet? Don't worry, a bunch of random studios* have you covered.” (*Using AI art thumbnails, yuck.) Clones a-go-go?

Anyhow, let’s get on with lots of game platform & discovery links, shall we? Avast:

• Another Steam ‘users online’ milestone? Seems like it, with GDCo’s Alejandro noting the all-time high went “from 36,354,393 to 36,928,521 concurrent users” on the giant PC platform. (The CCU milestone ‘high score’ went from 35.3m to 36.3m back in March, btw.)

• The folks at Mod.io have launched their Marketplace white-label UGC service, which “allows studios and publishers to add a premium UGC store to their game, where content creators and modders can sell content to players.” We’re super interested to see who takes them up on this, and how their communities respond.

• A follow-up on the ‘top Steam tags for unreleased games’ post last week: we were asked why super-specific tags like MOBA were high up the ‘average’ rank. Two reasons: the few there are like Smite 2 have much Hype. Also, our view includes lower-ranked tags. (Makes more sense with tags like Farming Sim - you can have ‘a bit of farming’ in a game, vs. MOBA, which is often considered ‘a genre, or not’.)

• Layer Licensing has launched a regularly updated IP collab tracker for video games, and we really think it’ll be handy. (Tricky to keep up on which games are turning Post Malone into a pro wrestler, or making Power Rangers fight dinosaurs otherwise.)

• Compared to console, publishing a game on Steam is ‘low friction’. But it’s high friction (!) compared to Itch.io, hence this Twitter thread from Adrienne Bazir telling Itch creators to pub on Steam too: “i have sold 300 times more [In Stars And Time] copies on steam than itch... i love itch so much. but i also love money.”

• Steam Summer Sale news: if your wishlist counts on Steam are looking slow, it’s cos of the Summer Sale affecting reporting speed; we’ve heard mixed comments on the new ‘90% off’ Deep Discounts box for Summer Sale. (It’s great for older games with lots of DLC upsell, but is another ‘mega discounts rule all!’ move.)

• A new WaPo piece on Netflix and games ($) notes: “Netflix wants to be a haven for smaller developers who are experienced in mobile games but want to work beyond the demands of that market.” There’s also chatter re: The Dragon Prince: Xadia, from the same folks making the popular Netflix show. (Wot, real transmedia?)

• How much is the ‘pile of shame’ of all unplayed Steam games, $-wise? Ars Technica looks at a PCGamesN estimate of $19 billion (!), suggesting that the original figure may be quite guesstimate-y. It is, but it’s fun. (Our extra data point: “On average, 32.7% of the games in people’s Steam library are unplayed. The median player… actually has 51.5% of his Steam library unplayed.”)

• The newest Xbox Game Pass titles? They include Annapurna’s neat first-person puzzle-platform runner Neon White - given an Xbox version just for Game Pass, as well as Flock and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2. Oh, and the v.cool The Case of the Golden Idol. Which is nice.

• Microlinks: People Make Games has a talk on why unionizing helps correct a power imbalance in game dev; Amazon’s made a ‘virtual ‘80s retail store’ for you to browse & buy games (!); the Sustainable Games Alliance is a new org “to help the games industry take concrete action on decarbonization and other key sustainability issues.”

Finally, alerted by a Tweet from Derek Yu, it’s the wonderful Summer Games Done Quick speedrunning charity showcase right now, and we really enjoyed this ‘unlocking every journal entry’ Spelunky run from Hectique. (It’s ‘cheeky clever’ in places.)

Two additional points: first, Derek’s ‘how I made Spelunky’ eBook is available to download for Plus subscribers. Second: the archived SGDQ runs on YouTube have some real gems, such as this fun speedrun of new alt.platformer Pepper Grinder.

[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.]